I must write a book called My Truth with Explosions! Or, perhaps, Fred Hoyle’s Muse!
It is Diwali Time… and time for a confession or two- may be a series of those. These also explain how we, the kids of a long gone by era, bloomed as engineers these days!
1
He was six years old, and keen to graduate as an engineer at that ripe old age. He was in class 2, rather prematurely, but topping school! He had heard about James Watt’s invention, and knew these were part of his father’s profession, and he was occasionally travelling in railway saloon cars, sometimes attached next to a steam engine. His father was then a Joint Director in Rail Bhawan, New Delhi, but he never took his child to his office, so mean of him! Anyway, most of his toys were railway trains, precious… but he wanted to know what made actual steam engines work. He liked the tracks and a MECCANO #000 set, but beyond that, not much! So he decided on his experiments with the Truth, once in a while.
It was Diwali, 1956!
The small boy in knickers with big eyes and a tousled head held the toy with a wistful look. He had “taken” his Dad’s screwdriver and pliers- he really knew how to play with those. Sometime ago, he had broken his three year old brother’s arm with a hammer… story censored!
The house was busy. The father was busy providing the finishing touches to a paper hot air balloon in the first floor drawing room. Seeing his opportunity, the boy slipped upstairs to the second floor roof top, and opened the railway engine, a year old beauty- he had no use for it. He picked up a piece of coconut peel from the open box containing coal, and placed it daintily into the engine. And then he struck a match, borrowed from the kitchen, and lit the coir. It caught- a smoky fire was exactly what was needed. The boy rolled the three and a half (one wheel lost) wheeled steam engine on the floor, when he heard his named being called by his father. Promising himself that he would return soon to play, he left the engine… in the coal box! But then he was made to eat his evening snacks- milk and biscuits and bananas!
Twenty minutes later, the neighbors called, the roof top had a blaze going!
Though pleading innocence, it was rather hard for the boy to explain how the toy engine, with remnants of coir was found in the coal box… and why was he upstairs sometimes back…
No, I won’t tell you what happened next!
2
This time the boy was almost eight, and going to a school 500 yards away from home. He still topped his class- and his father was the boss of the railway district in Samastipur, a sleepy little town. The boy still wanted to be an engineer, and had decided he would major in electrical engineering, after his mother’s cousin, who had just graduated and was talking of valves and positive and negative and coils and… of course the thing worked on electricity from the plug point.
Coils? Plug?
Fine! He picked up the nice looking table lamp from the drawing room. With scissors borrowed from a drawer below his Mom’s Singer, he cut the lead and stripped these… now for the coil? Cut the kitchen door wire-mesh! Coil it, and the two ends of the plug and lead, tie it to the ends of the former wire-mesh component.
What is there? Marconi plugged in his invention, and turned on the juice!
Fred Hoyle was absent when this big bang took place… alas, there was darkness in the District Traffic Superintendent’s bungalow in Railway Colony, Samastipur!
And a very discouraged scientist, nay, engineer, sulked- he hated people who did not experiment with truth, nor admired his spirit of experimentation.
3
Hg(CNO)2, Mercury fulminate is now banned as a common man’s explosive, but it was freely available in the 60’s. I remember peeling off toy pistol caps and collecting the brownish delight in a, holy s**t, empty match box! Our car mechanic, Abdul Aziz, had opened an electric pump and had left a six inch shaft of about one-fourth of an inch in diameter, for me to admire… and I had a matching iron cylinder, two inches in diameter and height, but it had a cylindrical hole, closed at one end… and I was wondering what was the best use for it… what else? Take off the powder from some match heads and stuff it into the hole and ram it with the rod? Nyah, it had no effect…
Being a 17 year old Junior college student of science, offers a great advantage- it is that the imagination really works, with vague help from PK Datta’s Chemistry book! I had fulminate, also used for the “atom bombs”, also banned, and I could see the fireworks. So I rammed the mix of match head powder along with the fulminate, and then placed the shaft in the hole. It was a perfect fit.
I always admire Thor’s hammer, for I was soaked to my ears in Norse mythology. I remembered Loki and Logi, and Friga and blah! Did you say Ragnarök?
Odin hammered the hammer on the shaft’s head… blam!
The shaft pinged off the roof, the hammer departed from my hand rather wickedly, and both landed safe inches away from me- I was horizontal on the ground… the room was echoing.
Fred Hoyle may have learnt his Big Bang theory about this time! I was temporarily deaf for thirty seconds- I realized it was prolonged because of my dad twisting my ears.
There was a patch of plaster lying next to the hammer!
4
After the Bangladesh war, many friends and seniors took away small and big mementoes- actually trash, from Bangladesh. I carried away with me a copy of the Holy Kur’aan in Arabic lying wrapped in a green cloth by the road side, and a belt of 200 Pakistani machine gun bullets. Perhaps some Pakistani soldier had found religion was a burden while escaping advancing soldiers!
In December, 1971, after the War was over, I did not want to keep the bullets. In an idle afternoon, I stripped away the bullets and collected the cordite and kept it in a tin. I threw away the brass (imagine!) and the lead.
My young batman, all of 19 years to my 23, was very perplexed about the cordite I carried with me. He wanted it to burn it for heating water for my bath! I was worried and did not want an accident. To guide him, I, then a 2/Lt, told him to create a long fuse near the intended place of fire. He made the fuse, of cordite, what else- laying it like a trail of sugar to entice the ants! As he was about to light the match, I noticed that the tail of the fuse-trail of cordite, just 4 feet long… 8 milliseconds, time wise, were it solid, was almost at the place where he wanted to use cordite as a fuel, a mini dump of about 400 gm of it!
Before I could say Jack Nicholson, he lit the tail, about 4 feet in length!
The fire was brief, smokeless and almost invisible. The reaction time is rather small- cordite burns in excess of 520 feet per second when compact, though the loose powder does not. I was the more surprised at the new man standing by the fire that never was… the features were however very familiar. I guessed that my man Friday had undergone a rapid depilatory experience. He had lost all facial hair, eyebrows and eye lids included, though not his sight or wits, for he had none to lose! He had perhaps rejoiced in the pyrotechnical methodology adopted but was still grinning in a dazed stupor!
Also in attendance, two yards away was the Doctor, a young captain, totally without exposure to war and war like stores. He grinned and then developed an unexplainable paroxysm of laughter! We poured water on the Doctor!
When I went home in March 1972, I left the Kur’aan in my father’s custody, and four years after his death- the Holy Book finally found repose with a Muslim family in 2007! It had a special place in my heart!
I bought an immersion type water heater.
5
Much later, I had learnt the theory of the Devil in a DRDO establishment! I know the devil that Mercury Fulminate can be… the rest? I won’t tell you!
I did become an engineer…
Oh, did I tell you how I fixed a glass window in Jan 1973 during a snowfall, after a stone flew off my hands and broke the Major’s window? Another day!
Wish You a Happy Diwali…
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