⚒️ Some Things Never Change

by Joel Glover

As one of only eleven scholars funded by the Secular Society of Expectation on the Cape Town campus, Hema was expected to attend all the seminars the Chief Astronomer organised.

When she thought about it, Hema pictured herself as existing in the centre of three diverging points. 

The first gravitational pull was social and financial: the need to perform academically and socially, to deliver against the high price of her fully funded education. 

The second was social: the need to show the thoroughly secular society she lived in that the Secular Society, of which she was a part, was not a deranged, end-times cult. Of course, as with many social groups it contained its lunatic fringe. She actually had a paper published in the social sciences journal of her hometown Latter Agra University, using network theory and high-end calculus to observe the inevitability of the existence of swivel-eyed believers in any sufficiently large group. She published it under a pseudonym. One Aryan Iman declared a fatwa against the author, assuming it was a critique of Shia.

The third force tugging on her was as old as time itself: she was nineteen. Her youth in Latter Agra as a mathematical prodigy, the ‘boy’ who could do no wrong, had limited her ability to explore and experiment. During the evenings, she wanted to set her modelling aside and rush out to drink beer, or smoke peppermint shisha with the tall Afrikaaner girls with their Dutch accents and blonde hair, or to have a Xhosa girl paint her face with white dots and wrap her in a red blanket.

Social pressure always won out. She could not afford to go back to Latter Agra, not when she finally found herself here.

And if that meant spending more time with her books, more time sipping thin canteen coffee and making polite noises, so be it.

“Latest technological advances in orbital radar tracking offer us the real hope of modelling His exact position in the wheel of the galaxy, potentially allowing us to race out to meet him.”

Hema nodded, as politely as she could. She met this type before, a scientist who subsumed all social and religious impulses into a messianic belief in the supranatural prowess of Valerian St. John. If the genius could be found, returned, and restored to health, then all the ills of the world would be vanquished.

Left unexplored by such fanatics was the impossibility of a cure for old age, and the sad fact that the constrictor grip exerted by the companies he established before he set aside his terrestrial endeavours had been entirely predictable. She had written a paper on that too, but opted not to submit it for peer review. There was not an academic publisher in the world who would dare to criticise Cavendish’s role in the economy.  Someone once said it was difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his lack of understanding. Hema was unconvinced by this argument, but willing to accept that getting a man to state something publicly which would disrupt the flow of salary was an uphill battle. She was not such a hypocrite that she’d complain about it though.

“What field are you studying?” The drab, cable knit cardigan women over a button-down shirt and old school tie confirmed before he approached her that he would be unburdened with self-doubt, and it had taken him an entire cup of coffee’s worth of monologue to ask her this simple question.

“Dynamic orbital modelling.”

He cited her papers twice during his monologue. Incorrectly. 

“Here? Do you know Professor Sharif? Perhaps he teaches some of your lectures.”

The arrival of the Chief Astronomer saved her from the social awkwardness of observing a person's sexism to their face.

“Piers, I see you have met Miss Sharif! The brightest star in our firmament, no, don’t blush my dear, you are and you should know it.”

“Charmed,” the boy managed to stutter at her. 

“May I borrow her? Of course I can, of course I can.”

The Chief Astronomer had a particularly English manner to him. She recognised it from her own school days; a peculiarly effete and absent affect which did little to mask the shrewd looks an intelligent person would spot emerging like a cat’s claws from their sheaths.

“You must forgive young Piers, my dear. His father is a delightful man—a big supporter of the cause. Piers will do perfectly adequate work in time.” The Chief Astronomer’s ear hair was so long it almost brushed her hijab as he muttered to her. “Now, I have someone here  you really must meet.” 

He parted the crowd easily, moving with an assurance Hema never possessed. 

These were all his guests, this was his space, and he knew it very well.

“Now, where, oh yes, of course, here we are.”

There was a knot of students, or at least Hema presumed they were students, drinking sparkling wine from cheap plastic flutes. They had the varied dress of international students—and the youth—and at least one had the wealth because Hema recognised, despite herself, a pair of very new Big Baller Brand trainers on the feet of one of the men.

“I said I would find her, and find her I have,” announced the Chief Astronomer. “Miss Shariff, I would like to introduce you to Dominique El-Abd, who I am delighted to be welcoming to campus. Dominique, sweet thing, this is Hema Sharif. I’m just sure you’ll become fast friends!”

She was wearing heels. Stiletto used to mean knife, Hema had read, and these were like a blade into her chest. Towering above them was a long legged, dark skinned woman with eyes the colour of lightly roasted coffee beans and a full lipped smile. 

“I am sure we will.”

Hema remembered to take a breath.

“I am sure we will too.”