Around the middle of November the Pacific Northwest descends under a blanket of gloom. With its early evenings and dark gray cloud cover, it looks like the days are merely waiting to be over. Oishani stood next to the window in her home office and looked at the constant drizzle swaying the dark green treetops in front of a heavily overcast sky. Her eyes were tired of looking at the computer screen for hours, and her mind needed a break. She was jostled from her reverie at the loud buzzing of her phone. It was her elder sister calling.
“Hello Minnie!” Oishani said in a tired voice.
“Working again without breaks? Didn’t I tell you you need to give your eyes something to look at 20 feet away every 20 minutes?” came the crisp voice of Oindri, who, being a doctor, felt it was totally her duty to keep her family’s health and well-being in the best shape.
“You are wrong this time, I was taking a break, looking at the fir trees outside the window.” Oishani heard a little exhale. In her mind’s eyes Oindri could visualise the trees her sister mentioned. Now settled at the other side of the country because of work, she spent many years in this room with her sister and her mother doing finger painting and reading the first books. It was a home office at that time too, but more of their mom’s library and art studio.
“Are you all packed up for the upcoming trip?” Oishani asked. Their parents are already in Calcutta now for the last couple weeks and right before Thanksgiving Oindri and Oishani will join them there. “Yes I am, but I am just wondering how hot it will be there. Every time we went in November, for the first few weeks we just dripped sweat all day!” Both the sisters laughed. They never understood the fascination that their parents, first generation immigrants from India, had for their hometown. To these girls Calcutta was just a crowded, noisy, and stinky city, but to their parents it was home! “Are you done with the network connection Mummy told you to work on?” Oindri asked. She was the lone doctor in a family of engineers, so she naturally understood a lot of software terminology and functions. “No…” Oishani breathed out. “I don’t know why Baba came up with this idea. I understand they want to challenge me to grow, but I have no idea how to get all the information of the different banks in one place, and in one generic way…it is as if I have two ends of a bridge and I am thinking how to join them, but all I can see is raging waters!”
A few more hours passed, Oishani only had yogurt for dinner, and she was concentrating once more on the data sent from the banks and the data sent from the money sender, figuring out how to make a generic payload irrespective of where in the world you are located when she realised it was midnight and she was up for more than a full day. She got up and looked at the scribbles on her whiteboard. Some of it in her mom’s handwriting, explaining the problem, and the rest, her ideas that she drew. Oishani wanted a cup of coffee to help her think better. Downstairs she went, the family dog was sleeping on a couch, the two tabbies were in her parent’s bedroom, probably curled up on the pillows. As she was coming up the stairs, not thinking, because that path she can totally walk blindfolded, she suddenly felt a little strange. A sliver of amber light was shining from the door she left ajar, but that wasn’t her white reading light. She hurried and opened the door of the office and stood there like a statue.
What she saw gave her goosebumps… it wasn’t her home office, the same room has been converted into a nineteenth century style British library. Wait! Oishani knew what library it was. Wasn’t it the same one that stood as a bookend in her mom’s bookshelves? The tiny diorama she remembered from years back, that her mom made painstakingly with tiny tweezers, which she and Oindri were told to be very careful with? And who were those people that she saw? She had no idea! There were three men all wearing old style European clothes, one elderly man smoking a pipe, he sounded British. The other two people were Bengali. They were discussing a large blueprint that was spread out on a large table in the middle of the room. Low powered lamps with beautiful glass shades were there on the table. Oishani stood with her mouth agape.. What on earth was possibly happening there?
She probably had made a noise, because they looked at her. The senior Bengali man beckoned Oishani to join them. Their body language was of high concentration but without any anxiety. They seemed relaxed but very engaged in the deep discussion, like they were enjoying it as that was something that challenged and piqued their intelligence. Oishani walked over as if in a trance. They all turned towards her as if they were expecting her in the meeting. Now the other Bengali man asked her, “Kittie, do you know who we are?” She merely shook her head. The figure faced her and said with a smile, “I am your great-great grandfather, Sarat Chandra Ghosh.” Oishani almost dropped on the chair. She definitely knew about him, someone whom her mom referred to as Appa-Dadu and her grandfather told her stories about the interesting character. “He was the first engineer in our family, a civil engineer” Oishani’s mom would say, “and then you are the fifth generation engineer.” But to have him sit in front of him was something she found impossible to comprehend. Appa-Dadu introduced the other two as well. One was his mentor and leader Sir Rajen Mukherjee, an engineer, a visionary, and an entrepreneur of nineteenth century Bengal who led Martin Burn Ltd.. The third person was Mr. McGlashan, chief engineer of Calcutta Port Trust. They both smiled and nodded at Oishani. Oishani, still frozen, could only utter a brief “hi” that they didn’t even consider an appropriate greeting. They didn’t mind though, they were trying to figure out a solution. “Look at this,” Sir Rajen pointed to a part of the blue print with a strange looking pencil which was red on one end and blue on the other, “see how the bridge needs to anchor down on bedrock, but the bedrock is under a lot of silt of the Ganges.”
“The Ganges?” Oishani swallowed. “Is this the plan for a bridge?”
“Yes Kittie”, Appa Dadu said. “Do you know which bridge? It will be called the New Howrah Bridge spanning the river Ganges between Calcutta and Howrah.” Bewilderment gave way to awe and the engineer in Oishani overcame the unearthly situation. She looked at the plan, she could see parallels drawn with her own problems there. The bedrock they needed, didn’t she need strong foundations too? The free flowing mighty river Ganges that they were talking about, wasn’t that the impediment she faced in trying to connect the developed world with the developing countries? The load, the traffic, the testing necessary could all well suit her software needs as they did in the early twentieth century steel cantilever. “See this anchor arm and this cantilever arm, they are strong enough to hold the suspended span”, said Mr.McGlashan. Oishani nodded in agreement, “in my case…” she showed the architecture diagram on her laptop, “look at this API call I am making as the sender and this JSON response that I am getting when the call is successful, it is like having a connection over the Calcutta end and the Howrah end.” Now the three older engineers nodded. The next few hours were a frenzy of discussions, they discussed the structural challenges they faced while designing the iconic bridge that now connected two halves of Oishani’s identity. There were markings of pencil on thick rough paper, as were squeaks of Oishani’s dry erase markers on the whiteboard. There were elevations drawn, and there were API calls marked with arrows going to and from databases. Load testing was a hot topic, how much traffic was anticipated, how much did Sir Rajen plan for, did Oishani think of scalability over the future years? Encouraged by their presence, Oishani returned to her problem with renewed vigor. The apparitions did not provide direct answers but reminded her of the importance of viewing problems from new perspectives. Inspired, she began to deconstruct the issue at hand, breaking it down into smaller, manageable components, much like how a bridge is constructed one beam at a time.
As the night waned, a solution dawned. Oishani ran the final piece of the python program and got a satisfactory result. “I will need to test this once more before I can tell my parents that this worked”, she said. “Test at least three times”, Sir Rajen reminded her. As the first ray of golden sunlight streamed into the room, Mr. McGlashan looked at his pocket watch and gave the others a nod. They had to leave. Before leaving, Appa Dadu patted Oishani on her head and said, “remember I am always watching you all. Tell your sister as well, I know what she is up to!” Oishani bent down and touched his feet in the Bengali tradition of asking for blessings, she touched Sir Rajen’s feet too, and shook hands warmly with Mr. McGlashan. “I had forgotten the richness of my own culture, but now you all reminded me that this engineering marvel you made would be enough for me to feel proud as a Bengali.” The figures vanished and Oishani saw herself sitting at her own desk in her familiar surroundings. Her dog came and scratched on the door, waiting to be let out to the backyard, she heard the meows of her tabbies wanting to be fed.
“You definitely have cracked this,” Oishani’s dad said proudly as he looked at her solution. On the video call she could see her mom looking at the solution over his shoulders. “Yes” she said with a smile too, “we are so proud of you. We are excited for you to come here soon, so that we can all celebrate together.” Oishani met her sister at Dubai and they took the flight to Calcutta from there. As the plane was descending, Oishani saw the Howrah Bridge and let out a sigh.. It meant thanks, and it also meant pride in her city and her ancestors!
DoubleSpeak 