Remembering Abhijit

I took special notice when I learned that Abhijit Mahato, a graduate student at Duke University, was murdered in late January. I graduated from Duke last year, and though I didn't know Abhijit during my time there, his death made an impression in the way that these stories do when the landscape of your life touches someone else's.

I could gather only a few accounts of his life, but they were enough to make me wish I had known him. He seems to have been one of those rare individuals whose face was fixed with a permanent smile. He was a lover of poetry and literature, and was well-read in both-no mean feat for someone who had spent the bulk of his young adulthood immersed in the engineering sciences. His friends described him as generous, humble and soft-spoken, with a self-effacing sense of humor; the introduction of his Duke Web page featured this conclusion: "This is indeed a very lame introduction. But what else can I say about myself, except that I am the son of my parents, brother of my sister and brother-in-law of her husband."

He was only in the second year of his Ph.D. program, but was already blossoming into a first-rate scholar of computational mechanics; his research stretched beyond the boundaries of the academy, with real applications for industry. In each of the accounts I read, he came across as the type of person who got along with just about everyone, a fact that contributed to my sense that this tragedy was a particularly cruel brand of injustice.

The more I thought about Abhijit's time at Duke, the more I concluded that our tenures at the University probably had something in common: our years there were deeply shaped by what we had left behind. In Abhijit's case, it was India, his native soil; in my case, it was a Midwestern house that my parents had struggled to convert into an Indian home. The result was a subtle estrangement from both the new home and the old one. In my experience, and perhaps also in Abhijit's, this distance frequently morphed into an acute awareness: the memories evoked by songs at the annual Indian culture show; or the addition of rice and daal to the menu of the campus eatery; the small but consequential reminders of a life we did not share with our faculty members and classmates. And there was the new world we entered, one of research and mentors and possibility; one which our parents had little knowledge of and which we couldn't fully explain to them.

But then I realized I was giving myself too much credit, and giving Abhijit too little. The truth is that his experience more accurately resembled my father's: both completed degrees in Kanpur, and both left India in their late 20s to pursue careers elsewhere. This meant Abhijit's move to Duke was marked by the same newness and excitement that filled my own first days there, but also that these feelings were probably mixed with a greater measure of worry over what was to come and guilt at what was left behind.

What I've learned from my father's story is that anyone who struggles to educate and establish themselves abroad needs something that's best understood as spiritual resilience. The first steps away from home are tough, but the real challenges are day-to-day. Friends, family and money are all in short supply. Ordinary things-street signs, channels on television, aisles in a grocery store-have a fuzzy unfamiliarity. And even when these things come into greater focus, there is the nagging sense that your efficiency apartment isn't home; that home is contained in the mementos you manage to bring along and the moments you spend with anyone who looks like you. Abhijit's life at Duke required more courage than my own, but I felt a kinship with him knowing that he and my father had shared the same lonely struggle.

I imagine it was this fellow feeling-the ability to see snapshots of our lives within Abhijit's-which contributed to the powerful response to his death among international students in the United States and commentators in India. Some publicly questioned the wisdom of sending students to the United States. Close to 5,000 people signed a petition demanding protection for South Asian students in America. The chief minister of the state of Jharkand suggested that there was a "deep conspiracy" behind the murder. This is, of course, an understandable response; Abhijit's death came closely on the heels of the murder of two Indian graduate students at Louisiana State University. It's also a natural one: conspiracy is a soothing balm in the wake of sudden loss. It's our way of ascribing order to chaos, of renewing our faith that violence so unthinkable and senseless and random can't possibly exist.

In time, we accept that there was no plot at work, and we're left with a kind of helpless pain and rage. A tragedy like this is felt particularly hard in a university community. A university grieves not only the direct memory of what was, but also the unfinished portrait of what might have been. That Abhijit-someone of such uncommon character and promise, who already had patents to his name, who was sure to have an outsized impact on his field, who had traveled all this way-that his life would be so tragically cut short is almost more than we can bear. But then we remind ourselves that the campus' collective sorrow is a small fraction of what his family must be feeling. We remember that they are mourning Abhijit the son, Abhijit the brother, Abhijit the uncle. And we pause to consider that perhaps this volume of grief, shared across two continents, is a convincing argument against leaving one's home to pursue further study.