[Draft] Go dot, Beckett!
“Godot had died in the War disappointing Beckett eternally,” Soham shared with his student softly. “But the waiting did not; Europe is still waiting!”
Soham saw the headline by accident, half-buried between a browser tab and a cold cup of tea. Keanu Reeves Returns to Beckett: “The Unexpected Sweetness of Bill and Ted’s “Waiting for Godot”. Soham shared the piece with his students. “Read it,” he said, passing the link between classes like contraband. “Read Beckett too, of course, but read this. The way we talk about waiting says everything about what we think time is for.”
They came back the next morning with caffeinated eyes and a dozen questions. In their language “existentialism” had become a sloppy umbrella over thunderstorms of anxiety, memes about dread, and music they insisted he wouldn’t like but he always did. Three students hovered near the whiteboard; one had drawn a dot at the center of a huge circle with ‘Existence Precedes Essence’ written at the top.
“Sir,” said Raghav, pointing at the dot, “but why did he not put the word Bindu in the title?”
The room broke into quick laughter and then lightning-quiet. Soham had spent thirty years teaching mathematics, twenty teaching probability, and ten trying to make large numbers intimate by helping students grow appreciation for absurdities of good writing. He had learned how sometimes the right silence was the better proof. He let the question float, like an unclaimed balloon at a farewell party.
“Just imagine calling the play Gobindu!” he said finally, fake-grave, and the air cracked again.
“Yes, Sir,” Raghav persisted, undeterred. “I do. It sounds as if Beckett is talking about Govind—the name of Krishna.”
Soham rubbed his temples. “Great. You’ve started to think. And you’re not wrong to look for resonances. Some believe Beckett chose ‘Godot’ for its ambiguity, its sound—like a door that can’t decide if it’s closing or opening. It holds a joke within it, a near-miss, a God with a stubbed toe.” He paused. “I would not be surprised if he wanted people to exercise some control over their lives, at least between their ears, at least in the naming. After that war, control had shrunk. The confidence was shaken. He gave us a tiny nation called Waiting. Pointless life. What was the point or the dot after all about?”
On the back bench, Meera raised her hand. “But Sir, wasn’t he reading Schopenhauer? And Schopenhauer was intoxicated by the Upanishads. Even Goethe, you always remind us, flirted with them. If they could be mesmerized, Beckett could not have been endowed with any lower intelligence.”
“Mesmerized,” Soham echoed, liking the word for its old-fashioned sorcery. “Yes. Schopenhauer kept the Upanishads by his bed, called them solace in life and death. The West is full of quiet borrowings that grew into public monuments.”
Now Tushar—tall, polite, the kind who moved chairs after class without being asked—spoke. “But Sir. How did you learn about Beckett? You are a mathematician. How did he come into your life?”
It felt as if someone had pressed a finger into clay that had hardened years ago. Soham looked down at his shoes—the old brown ones his daughter teased him about—and felt a door open he hadn’t planned to show these kids.
“Walk with me,” he said abruptly. “Ten minutes.”
He took Tushar and Meera and Raghav out into the wide quad. Morning had lifted like a thoughtful curtain. They passed the gulmohars, the canteen where oil was already negotiating with flame, the noticeboard where every attempt at revolution looked like neat A4 paper under a pushpin. Walking was Soham’s medicine. Something about the rhythm turned language into water, memory into reeds.
“In State College, Pennsylvania,” he began, “there was a community library. I arrived there at twenty-two with a suitcase full of clothes and a head full of numbers. English came to me like rain on parched land: almost anything felt edible. I went shelf by shelf, not because of any discipline but because hunger is sometimes mechanical. Beckett arrived in a thin paperback with a cracked spine. I don’t remember if it was Tara or Gomati who first mentioned him to me. Or maybe it was an essay by Naipaul, who I had started to call, Nai, the Barber for India.”
They stopped under a neem whose leaves were a choir of whispers. The students were used to Soham’s strangeness; it always led somewhere.
“We waited for so much then,” Soham said. “I waited for winter to stop hurting my bones. For letters to arrive with stamps like small square sunsets. For my tongue to find words that didn’t humiliate it. And later, I waited for Tara.”
“Who’s Tara?” Meera asked, gently.
“A Houdini,” he said, and there was a tone in his voice that made them leave the rest of the walk to silence.
In class the following week, Soham called his new lecture “Godot and the Bindu.” He introduced it as if whoever loved circles would love paradox more. On the board he drew a dot, then a circle around it, then another, then another, until the chalk had become a fog.
“In Sanskrit, bindu is the point, the seed of creation,” he said. “Not just a dot—an origin that holds infinite expansion inside itself. The Upanishads often work like that. They carry a whole universe in a syllable, a syllable in a breath, a breath in the silence between breaths.” He paced, his hands drawing parentheses in the air. “Now consider Beckett’s stage: two men, a tree, a dirt road, and the daily labor of waiting. The world shrunk to a bindu: point without coordinates. But where does the expansion go? Into talk. Into jokes. Into memory rehearsed until it becomes choreography. Into that strange hope: that he will come.”
“Godot,” someone said.
“Yes, Godot. Or a pun on Dieu or God or Gogo or goat or Godo. But listen: what if the most honest name was not his but their practice? Waiting. What if it is not Godot that matters, but the ritual around the absence? That, too, is an ancient Indian craft. We have entire literatures on the practice of waiting: the farmer for rain, the lover for dawn, Gopis for their Krishna, the pilgrim for vision, the widow for nothing at all. We call it tapas sometimes—heat generated by restraint.”
“Are you saying Beckett borrowed from the Upanishads?” Raghav asked.
“I’m saying he dipped his fingers in a deep well whose water traveled farther than any of us remember,” Soham replied. “In the Upanishadic world, neti, neti—not this, not that—was a method for naming absence until it unveiled presence. Beckett’s clowns perform neti, neti in the language of tramps. They test the edges of nothing, each time confirming that the center holds an emptiness that is strangely survivable.”
He looked at the dot on the board. The chalk-snow of circles fell around it. He had learned long ago that too much cleverness dissolved the heart of an idea like acid. So he put the chalk down and turned to story.
“When I first met Tara,” he said, “she was reading from the Kena Upanishad in a whisper only cats and cowards could hear. We were both pretenders. She pretended to tolerate my proofs, and I pretended to understand Vedic Sanskrit without a dictionary at my elbow. She told me that the thing that cannot be seen by the eye, but by which the eye sees—that is Brahman. I told her that if you put a fair coin on the table and toss it a thousand times, the bias you begin to suspect is sometimes your heart wanting a pattern in the rain. We had long walks. We had small fights. We had a kitchen that made more tea than food. I waited for her to say she would stay. She waited for me to say I wanted her to.”
Meera leaned forward, chin on palm. The room had gone soft, as if everyone were listening from under a blanket.
“One day,” Soham went on, “she disappeared. No fight. No note. The Houdini trick of love. She left the green top that they had brought from India and the teapot and a card from a museum in Philadelphia where we’d once argued about a Duchamp urinal. The landlord joked I had been robbed of everything except the silence. The police took a report. Friends took sides. I kept the green wooden top in a worn blue box. And I began to wait.”
“For her?” Tushar asked.
“For what waiting does to a man,” Soham said, smiling like a rain that wasn’t sure yet. “Beckett gave me a grammar for time. Vladimir and Estragon only stay alive because of their waiting. Their waiting recognizes them each day, the way temple bells recognize morning.”
He paused. “Godot had died in the War disappointing Beckett eternally,” he said softly. “But the waiting did not; Europe is still waiting!”
The campus aged around Soham as gently as a leaf browns on a windowsill. The jacket sizes of deans changed. New cafeterias sprouted where old puddles had once argued with monsoon. Soham taught less, read more, walked even more. Sometimes he carried the blue box in his bag. It felt silly, and then it felt like religion, and then it felt like how the body smuggles memory into the present with the modesty of lint.
On a late afternoon, he sat with a book he pretended to read while students took selfies in the golden smog. He watched the doubles of people on their phone screens and remembered the doubles in Beckett’s plays: pairs who needed each other to test the reality of the day. A crow caught a crumb, hopped twice, and flew to a branch that seemed relieved to be chosen. Soham closed his eyes.
He found himself in State College again, in the hushed, climate-controlled air. It had the careful odor of pages and a thousand soft thumbs. Tara’s laugh—always slightly ahead of the joke—passed by like scent. He could never remember the first thing she had said to him, only the second: “Do you always read the book that is nearest to your right hand?” She had laughed at his confusion. “Then let me put this one under your hand,” she had said, and slid a paperback there as if moving a chess piece: Hemingway’s Old Man.
“The old man thinks about the boy and how he started to miss him when the big fish started to drag him away from the shore,” she said. “That is the purest mathematics: functions of memory.”
“And of regret,” Soham had replied, suspicious of all things that might be taken away.
Back on the present bench, he realized he had been holding his breath; when he let it out he felt the age in his chest. A student strolled by humming a tune that sounded like his youth if someone else had sung it. He opened his eyes to find Meera standing there.
“Sir,” she said, almost apologetic, “do you have time for a question?”
“I always do,” he lied.
“It’s about our paper,” she said, sitting down without invitation and thus with the only invitation that mattered. “I want to write about cultural credit—who we owe when we write. My friend says everything comes from everything and nothing matters about credit. I don’t agree. But I don’t know how to say it without sounding like a school principal.”
Soham laughed. “The world loves principals when they are dead philosophers. Not when they are living women.”
She smiled, the kind of smile that understood insults were small boats in a big river. “So—did Beckett owe the Upanishads? Is ‘Godot’ a bindu stolen without a footnote?”
The old quarrel warmed his elbows. “In law, there is plagiarism,” he said. “In culture, there is osmosis. Early Europeans met the Upanishads like shipwrecked men discovering a garden: stunned, in love, and suspicious they did not deserve it. They ate. They didn’t always write thank-you notes. Do we blame the garden? Or teach better manners to the shipwrecked? I don’t know. But I know this: when waiting becomes your heritage, you recognize your own rituals in strange theaters. You notice the rhythm of neti, neti in a clown’s hat.”
Meera looked as if he had given her a small country. “Thank you,” she said. Then: “Do you still wait for Tara?”
“Yes,” he said. Then: “No.” Then: “I wait differently.” He tapped the blue box carrying a small green top. “This top still dances the way it used to when Tara would spin it on the table when we both would try to write something profound”
After she left, he opened the box. The green top felt alive, ready to dance in late sunlight. He spinned the top and let it dance around him, as a joke against sorrow. It kept dancing for a long time. There was nothing to stop it. He imagined the sound it would make if it fell. He closed the box and stood.
In the final month of the semester, Soham announced a performance. It made the department nervous—mathematicians are not expected to make theater—but they trusted him the way old towns trust a carpenter’s hand.
He called the piece “Waiting for Tara.” He booked a spare black-box space, a tree branch hung against a painted sky, two stools, a rope that could have been a belt. He didn’t pretend originality; he wanted homage to confess ancestry.
When the audience arrived—students with scribble-ready notebooks, colleagues with well-meaning caution, a former dean with a cough—Soham stood on stage alone. He didn’t wear a bowler hat. He wore his brown shoes and the green top in his hand repeatedly trying to make it dance on his palm.
He spoke without the overhead of elegance. “I will not pretend to be Beckett,” he said. “I will be a man waiting. All waiting is provincial: it belongs to a time zone, a body, a pair of lungs.” He gestured at the tree. “This is our tree. This is our road. This is our rope that will never do what we fear it will. And this is our name: Tara. She will not arrive, because sometimes that is how the world keeps love alive: by making it travel at the speed of longing.”
He sat. He stood. He took off his shoes. He put them on. He told a joke about a mathematician who mistakes a pigeon for a theorem because both fly in certain conditions. He told a memory about State College—about the day the snow thrilled them into silence—and another about Delhi—about the night that thunder rehearsed despair and then lost interest. He called for Tara the way people call for trains that don’t stop, with impatience that is kin to prayer. He turned to the audience and said, “If she arrives, I will know. The room will suddenly be a room in which my body was meant.” And the audience breathed the way one does when no one wants to be the straw that breaks a hollow.
After forty minutes, he stood and looked at the tree a very long time. He touched the rope as if it were an old friend’s shoulder. Then he bowed.
Outside the theater, a freshmen couple argued about whether the play had been too short or too long, which meant it had worked. People came up to touch his arm and say the kind of small thank-yous that keep stubborn men from becoming statues. Meera’s eyes were wet; she didn’t let them fall. Tushar stood with his hands in his pockets, standing guard over a silence.
Later, in the emptied space, Soham sat on one of the stools and felt the green top on his wrist rotate a little like a planet. He looked at the tree. He remembered a different tree—one under which he and Tara had debated the ethics of ghosts. “If you don’t believe in a personal God,” she had laughed, “you must at least believe in personal ghosts.” He had said he believed in personal patterns. “That is more frightening,” she replied, suddenly grave.
He did not cry. Tears were not his language. Instead he took the top and spinned it fast, it jumped away from his palm and kept spinning on the floor.
“Godot died with Beckett,” he said aloud to no one, to everyone. “But Tara never dies. She moves at the speed of waiting, which is slower than grief and faster than forgetting.”
He put the green top in the blue box.
In the weeks that followed, he wrote and rewrote his lecture notes on credit and osmosis. He replaced a word here, a phrase there, the way a landlord replaces switches one apartment at a time over a decade. The students handed in papers that were braver than precise, which is the beginning of a good life. One of them—Raghav—turned in a title that made him laugh out loud: Gobindu and the Ethics of Attention.
He wrote comments in the margins: Promise, More grounding here, A lovely sentence, Do you mean neti or shunya? Don’t mix metaphors—choose your poison. He wrote often and carefully the most important line he knew how to give any student: I see you thinking.
On a Sunday, he sat down to write a note to Tara. He had not done this in years. He kept it short: I taught a play to children you would not like and discovered you in the second act. I no longer wait for you to arrive the way people wait at railway platforms. I wait for you the way wells wait: by being empty and full at once. He did not mail it. He folded it inside the blue box like a receipt for the future.
Age sharpened his awareness of weather. He felt winter as a thought before it became a wind. He began to enjoy the company of birds more than that of committees. He found, curiously, that Beckett’s sentences had grown funnier with the years, as if he had finally learned how to hear the under-chuckle. He read the Upanishads not as answers but as the questions of someone who had learned to sit longer than he had.
Sometimes, walking alone, he caught himself addressing an absent auditor. “You see,” he would say, “the trick is not to conclude too quickly that everything is empty. The bindu looks small, but that’s our eyes doing the measuring. Inside, it is a scandal of plenitude. You can sit with it. You can wait inside it. You can even love inside it.”
He would say this and then chuckle, embarrassed by his own sermon. The neem trees didn’t mind. The crows had heard worse.
Towards the end of the year, Meera visited him in his office with a copy of Godot. She had dog-eared it into a porcupine. She set it down like a gift and a dare.
“I saw another production,” she said, “by a college in the city. The boys on stage looked hungry, but not in the way we expect. They looked hungry for someone to name their hunger. I think that’s what you did with your piece. You named it.”
Soham smiled. “Hungry men with theater tickets. This is how civilization proceeds.”
“Sir,” she asked, “will you ever write about Tara? Not as Beckett’s echo, but as Tara?”
He considered. The world did not owe his story anything. Neither did he owe the world something so tender it might melt on the page.
“I think I already have,” he said. “But perhaps I have hidden her in parables so carefully even I cannot extract her.”
Meera grinned. “Like a magician who forgets where he put the rabbit.”
“Houdini,” he murmured.
“Houdini,” she echoed. “Sir… when you said Godot died with Beckett on stage, I felt relieved and sad. Relieved because we could stop parsing the name. Sad because it felt like a funeral for a contract we didn’t sign.”
He nodded. “We inherit contracts we never signed. We also tear them up and write our own. My new contract says: wait without fetishizing arrival. Wait as a verb, not a superstition.”
She closed her book. “I like that.”
After she left, he opened the window and let in the noise of a campus that would forget him kindly. He felt the day approach its evening like a promise kept.
He thought again of the bindu, seed-point of worlds. When he was younger, he had sought its expansion—circle after circle, proof piled over proof. Now he was content to sit with the dot itself. He had once thought Tara was the arriving circle that would define his interior. Now he understood she had been the point that taught him how to draw at all.
He whispered—because it felt right to whisper to the dot—“I wait for you without asking you to come.”
It was, he understood, both math and prayer.
Sometimes, in dreams, he found himself at that Philadelphia museum where the quarrel about the urinal had turned into a quarrel about the right to astonishment. He saw Tara across the room, her hair pinned up the way storms pin up their skirts before they run. He began walking, but each step took a year. He was an old man and a young fool and an infant ache. Finally, he reached her and said the only sentence that made consistent sense: “You were real.”
She would smile the old off-center smile. “So are you.”
He woke from such dreams not lonely but accompanied, as if someone had left a note under his door. He would make tea and hold the hot cup like a theory that had learned to be gentle.
When the Reeves piece resurfaced in a late-night rabbit hole—an algorithm playing archaeologist—he clicked it again. He looked at the bowler hat. He looked at the American homework. He looked at his own reflection in the laptop screen, a man whose face had become a collage of all the patience he had practiced.
He wanted to write a comment under the article—he almost never did—so he typed in a box he knew would not send it anywhere: Godot died with Beckett. What remains is how each of us manages the grammar of waiting. Mine is ancient. Mine is a borrowed well. Mine holds the echo of a woman who left and never left. I do not forgive Beckett his forgetfulness of the old sources, but I do thank him for leaving such a clear map for beginners.
He didn’t post it. He folded it into memory the way he had folded the letter into the blue box.
On his desk a student’s paper lay open, titled Gobindu and the Ethics of Attention. He reached for his pen. He wrote in the margin: You have made a dot sing.
Outside, somewhere he did not need to know, evening arrived on time. The theater of the sky grew modest. The tree outside—this campus, that campus, any campus—held its breath. And a man named Soham waited, as one does not for trains or miracles, but the way a point waits to become the center of a circle—by refusing neither emptiness nor expansion.
It was not a cure. It was a practice.
And the practice was enough.
The Gopis were all fine waiting for their Krishna on the other side of the river as long as they felt full in their longing. Beckett probably wouldn’t have understood their refusal to cross the Yamuna.
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Disclaimer: AI tools were used in curating this content, with human oversight to ensure rigor and contextual relevance.