When I met Stephen Hawking

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Mary spoke about a brother who was studying in England and wanted to go to Oxford... but I remained ignorant as to who that brother was, till I read Stephen Hawking’s biography in 1998.

PARVEEN TALHA

Mary Hawking was in class with me in Lucknow Loreto. Her sister Phillipa was a year junior. We studied together till 1959.

Though we chatted a lot and played around, I had no idea about her family. School children never bothered about parents, though she talked about her father being a scientist and that he worked in the Central Drug Research Institute (CDRI).

Mary also spoke about a brother who was studying in England and wanted to go to Oxford. So I knew that Mary had an elder brother, but I remained ignorant as to who that brother was, till I read Stephen Hawking’s biography in 1998.

By then he had already written his ‘A Brief History of Time’ which had sold 10 million copies. He had risen to amazing heights as early as 1974 when he was elected Fellow of the Royal Society, though he received its highest honour the COPLEY MEDAL in 2006.

By 1979, he had already become the 17th recipient of the Lucasian Chair of Natural Philosophy, some 310 years after Sir Isaac Newton.

I had read a lot about him by then and was obviously taken up by him as anyone would be. But I was desperate to meet him much before I discovered that he was my school friend’s brother.

His extraordinary achievements despite being tied to a motorised wheelchair with no motion in his limbs, no speech, living in the shadow of death, appeared supernatural to me. I couldn’t imagine a young man diagnosed with a fatal motor neurone disease, whom doctors expected to live at the most for two more years, saying, ‘my goal is simple, I want to have complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all’. He focused his attention on some of the most fundamental questions about the physical nature of the Universe.

I did get an opportunity to meet him in Delhi on a cold foggy morning when he came to India for the first time after reaching the heights of a giant, in 1999. He answered my questions mostly by writing on the screen attached to his chair.

I got to know from him that Mary was a doctor in USA and Phillipa was in England. He said his father Frank Hawking was working in tropical diseases in Lucknow even in the early 1950s, in the CDRI.

The people with him, who were apparently paramedics, told me that he looked very happy to meet me.

But despite that, my Lucknow upbringing prevented me to ask him for a photograph with him. The days of selfies were yet to come. Though he was going for a ‘photo opp’, I couldn’t ask him to let me pose with him! I felt too small too to make such a suggestion.