Untitled (Susan Harris

doubly wonderful - if anything could do that - was that Armstrong shared my birth week (if he had shared my birthday I think I might have died of ecstasy). And the scheduled day of descent onto the surface of the moon was my father’s birthday.

The final miracle happened at night. On July 20, at 8.10 pm UTC, or thereabouts, Neil Armstrong landed on another world and spoke his now blunted words for the first time: ‘This is one small step for man but a giant leap for mankind’. A world away, a dozen or so of us boys were gathered around an enormous radio in a military Common Room, breaking every school rule, listening: the broadcast from the Sea of Tranquility, to Houston, to Sri Lanka (then Ceylon), to Bombay, to Poona. We could not understand a word through all that radio crackle, of course, and it was almost 3.00 in the morning of the 21st by then, but we knew what was happening, and we did hear human sounds amid the static, and the sheer lunatic wonder of it left us sleepless until the next night.

Why am I writing all this down? Because it happened 40 years ago to the day, almost to the hour, and I still haven’t forgotten the sensation that crept across my scalp and into my gut at that godless, divine hour when I heard the radio bring the moon down to us provincial children. A whole generation of memories has been forgotten, but not this. Nothing (except perhaps bits of Shakespeare absorbed during some of my more alert moods, gazing at the Himalayas from atop a peak within the range, and some moments of musical rapture) has managed to rival the splendour of that feeling. My 11th Birthday (the number had by now become talismanic) was one of my happiest ones. This year Armstrong (on August 5th) and my father turn 79.

- Arjun Mahey, Department of English

Author’s note: The article was completed at 1.00 pm on the 21st of July, 2009