Serious Men (27 page)

In the first week of November, Arvind Acharya’s mammoth balloon had flown over Hyderabad carrying four samplers to capture air. Three of the samplers were sent to labs in Boston and Cardiff. The last sampler had arrived at the Institute in a Toyota Innova. Oparna’s team of research hands and the two American scientists, old friends of Acharya, had since studied the sampler. They were completely cut off from the rest of the Institute, and there had been no word from them until this morning. They had walked silently down the third-floor corridor, and without waiting for Ayyan’s rituals of passage, they had gone inside Acharya’s room. It would be recounted later, several times, that when Acharya heard the news he shut his eyes, and did not open them for so long that the visitors left without a word, smiling.

It was now confirmed. There were beings that were falling from the sky. Acharya had become the first man to discover aliens. And the theory that all life on Earth first arrived as microscopic living organisms from space had found support. The line between what was alien and what was terrestrial was now forever blurred. When Acharya came out of his trance, he summoned the Press Officer, a portly hectic man who frequently wiped his forehead with a kerchief.

Ayyan Mani heard the entire dictation on his spy-phone.

‘We have been living with aliens,’ Acharya told the Press Officer, who first thought he was being scolded. ‘It is probable that all these years,’ Acharya had then said happily, ‘aliens used aliens to make curd.’

Five minutes later, Ayyan had seen the Press Officer almost run out. He returned with a printed release, headed (in large capital letters), ‘EXTRATERRESTRIAL LIFE FOUND’. Acharya reprimanded him for the hysteria of the huge fonts, but the rest of the release was approved.

It was around two in the afternoon when Ayyan began to get calls from the exceptional faculty of the Institute asking for more information. Phones began to ring in almost every room, especially the sanctified third floor where the senior scientists worked. The news began to travel. Old men pressed the phone receivers to their hairy ears and raised their eyebrows in incorruptible fascination as they heard from their peers what Acharya had discovered. The younger scientists fired questions at their informers to crosscheck their disbelief. Then the many doors on the long finite corridors of the Institute opened. Scientists walked from their nooks to the office of Arvind Acharya. They went without invitation because it was a tradition here that an appointment need not be sought to congratulate a scientist.

They went to Acharya not in friendship, not in the secret mourning of someone’s good fortune, not even with the foresight of sycophancy. They went as scientists. They wanted to celebrate a moment in time — a rare moment in time – when man was about to learn something more about his little world. That there were living things in the cold reaches of the stratosphere; that they were coming down from space not going up from Earth. That we were not alone, we were never alone. For the first time in the history of rationality, the nature of alien life was going to be explained. So they went to hold the large chubby hand of a difficult man, an arrogant man, who more than everything else, was now a discoverer.

When they began to trickle into the waiting-room, the moving honesty of the silent concourse gave Ayyan gooseflesh. He accepted for the very first time that there was, in fact, such a thing called the pursuit of truth and that these men, despite all their faults, held this pursuit very close to their hearts. That day, just for that day, he conceded that there were things far more important in the universe than the grievances of an unfortunate clerk. He kept Acharya’s door open. It did not have a doorstopper, so he shoved a glossy newspaper supplement that spoke of hair-care, meditation and relationships under the crack beneath the door. He went to a corner of the waiting-room and stood in a funereal silence as the men went in to whisper compliments, or to give a pen in appreciation, or to just stand beside him. From where Ayyan was standing he could see Acharya. He looked happy and graceful, as he stood by the large sea window with the old guard and the young. Jana Nambodri too arrived eventually, though his office was the closest to the Director’s. He went into the open chamber and said, ‘Something in me dies when a friend does well.’ And they hugged.

Later in the evening, the Press Officer sombrely surveyed the ground-floor media-briefing room. There were about twenty journalists. Photographers were taking up positions near the dais. Large men at the back were setting up their cameras. The Press Officer searched the faces of the journalists. He knew most of them. They were seasoned science reporters. He looked with concern at some young fresh faces. He asked their names and said sternly, but with the occasional servile smile, ‘Please read the release very carefully. Everything you need to know is in it. I hope you are aware that the Director is extremely short-tempered.’

A photographer came to him and asked if the aliens could be photographed.

‘No, no,’ the Press Officer yelped. ‘They are microbes, they are microbes. And right now we are not in a position to release their visuals.’ He looked worried now. ‘Listen, don’t ask him
anything directly. Ask me. And be very careful when you take pictures of Dr Acharya.’

‘Careful, meaning?’

‘Don’t get too close. Don’t use flash. Just make sure he is not annoyed, OK? I don’t know what will make him go mad.’

The memories of what had happened when Stephen Hawking had last visited Bombay were vivid in his mind. A horde of photographers had surrounded the crippled physicist. Hawking’s delicate face could not take the explosion of flashes all around. He had looked frightened in his wheelchair, unable even to beg them to stop. Acharya had come to his rescue, charging towards the photographers with clenched fists. ‘He deserved better treatment,’ he later said, ‘even though he is an ambassador of the Big Bang.’

The Press Officer inspected the dais. There were four chairs. He asked a peon to remove one of them. And he said aloud, hands on hip, ‘Dr Arvind Acharya and the team will arrive any moment. I want briefly to tell you what this is all about though I am sure you are aware of it. Everything is there in the printed material I have given you. Please read it carefully. Four weeks ago, the Institute of Theory and Research, under the direct supervision of Dr Acharya, sent a hot-air balloon from our Hyderabad launch facility. The balloon went up with four samplers. Samplers are sterilized steel devices that are opened by remote control at a particular altitude. The samplers captured air at the altitude of forty-one kilometres. The objective of the balloon mission was to see if there is any life forty-one kilometres above the Earth. At this height, if there is life, it would mean that it is coming down, not going up. Out of the four samplers, two have been sent to Cardiff and one to Boston. They are being studied there right now, even as I speak. We studied one sampler right here in our Astrobiology lab. And we have discovered a rod-like bacillus and a fungus. This is an astonishing discovery because this is the first time anyone has even come close to discovering aliens. Also, this reopens the debate on whether some diseases which appear suddenly, like SARS, are actually extraterrestrial in nature. And of course, it
makes us question whether all life on Earth, too, originally came from space.’

He wiped his forehead. His face did not suggest that mankind was at a significant junction. He was more concerned with the little matter of the press conference proceeding smoothly without any mishap.

‘There they are,’ he yelped.

Acharya walked in with his two American friends who were as tall as he was.

‘Where is Oparna?’ Acharya asked the Press Officer, who whispered, ‘She did not want to come, Sir. She wanted to be low-profile. She insisted, Sir. I tried.’

Acharya took the centre chair on the dais. He was flanked by the two white men.

‘Dr Arvind Acharya,’ the Press Officer said grandly, adding, more softly, ‘Dr Michael White is to his right and Dr Simon Gore is to his left. They are astrobiologists from Princeton. They assisted our research and independently supervised the analysis of the contents of the sampler. I leave the floor to the scientists.’ He went to a corner of the room and studied the journalists with a harrowed face. (He hated journalists.)

‘I’m sure you have been briefed,’ Acharya told the audience. ‘I’ve nothing more to add except this. Oparna Goshmaulik was the project coordinator. She was involved in the project before the launch and she was in charge of the analysis of the sampler. Unfortunately she could not make it today. Now, you may ask questions.’

There was a silence for a few seconds. Then a man asked, ‘What exactly has been found?’

Acharya shot a glance at the Press Officer, but answered patiently: ‘A rod-like bacillus and a fungus called engyodontium albus de hoog.’

‘Can you spell it?’

‘No.’

There was a brief silence which was broken by the squeaky voice of the Press Officer. ‘The exact spelling is in the printed
material I’ve given all of you. If you can’t find it I will give it to you after the conference.’

A woman asked, ‘Dr Acharya, why have you concluded that this living matter has come from space?’

‘I have not concluded this. It is a reasonable guess supported by several facts. For example, it is difficult to see how the living matter got there because until now it was believed that bacteria and fungi do not exist at such heights. The chances of bacteria living at such heights due to space debris of defunct satellites are very, very small.’

‘Maybe the sampler somehow got contaminated in the lab?’ someone asked.

‘All precautions were taken to secure the samplers,’ Acharya said. ‘The bacteria and fungus we have discovered are very rare and difficult to culture in a lab environment.’

‘If these organisms really came from outer space,’ a voice asked, ‘how did they survive the extreme temperatures?’

‘In the spore form, microbes not only survive extreme conditions but are almost immortal. It is believed that in the hibernated state they can even live for millions of years.’

‘Dr Acharya, where do you think these microbes come from?’

‘I don’t know,’ he answered with a chuckle. He looked at his two friends and they smiled too.

‘Dr Acharya,’ someone asked, ‘what about the other three samplers?’

‘They are being studied in Cardiff and Boston. The results will be out in two or three months. Their processes are slightly different and so will take more time. We hope to find more interesting stuff in those samplers. In fact, we hope to find organisms that have no history on Earth.’

In the back lanes of the academic world the news of Acharya’s discovery was greeted with joy, and with the inadvertent compliments of scepticism. But in the real world of regular people, for which science pretended to toil, the event went across the
day like an invisible epoch. Between the news of the stockmarket upsurge and Islamic terror and a man stabbing his lover twenty-two times,
The Times
hurriedly summarized an epic scientific labour. Rather as an epitaph tells the story of a whole life in the hyphen between two dates.

A
YYAN
M
ANI PELT
a soporific gloom in his heart that reminded him of the widows of the BDD chawls who sat in the doorways, their cataract eyes baffled at the sheer length of time. These days, there was an excruciating stillness in his world too.

From behind the phones and heaps of transient mail, he stared at the ancient black sofa. Its leather was tired and creased. There was a gentle depression in the seat as though a small invisible man had been waiting there forever to meet Acharya and show him the physics of invisibility. The faint hum of the air conditioner made the room seem more silent than silence itself could have done. A fax arrived. One of the phones on his glass table rang for a moment and stopped abruptly. Voices outside grew and receded. A still lizard, high up on the stark white wall, looked back, needlessly stunned.

Ayyan felt like a character in an art film. Nothing happens for a while, and nothing happens again, and then it is over. There was no goal any more in his life, no plot, no fear. It was a consequence of choosing to be a good father. He had put an end to the myth of Adi’s genius. It had to end before the boy went mad. The game had gone too far. In the place of its nervous excitement was now the ordinariness of the familiar flow of life, the preordained calm of a discarded garland floating in the sewage.

Every morning he woke up in the attic, and went to stand in the glow of the morning light, among people and buckets that inched towards the chlorine toilets. He then bathed by the kitchen in the fragrance of tea and soap, and went to work in a
melancholy train, stranded inside an unmoving mass of bleak, yawning strangers. All that to come here and bear the austere grandness of the Brahmins and their marvellous incomprehension of the universe, and take phone calls for a man who did not want to be disturbed. And finally to go home in the shadows of rows and rows of large grey tenements and eat in the company of a half-deaf boy who had lost all his ill-gotten glory, and a woman whose only hope was in the delusion of her son’s mythical genius. Then, in the morning, to wake up in the attic, again.

This, Ayyan accepted, was life. It was, in a way, a fortunate life. It would go on and on like this. And one day, very soon in fact, Adi would be an adolescent. An adolescent son of a clerk. A miserable thing to be in this country. He would have to forget all his dreams and tell himself that what he wanted to do was engineering. It’s the only hope, everyone would tell him. Engineering, Adi would realize, is every mother’s advice to her son, a father’s irrevocable decision, a boy’s first foreboding of life. A certainty, like death, that was long decided in the cradle. Sooner or later, he would have to call it his ambition. And to attain it, he would compete with thousands and thousands of boys like him in the only human activity for which Indians had a special talent. Objective-type entrance exams. Very few tests in the world would be tougher than these. So, in the enchanting years of early youth, when the mind is wild, and the limbs are strong, he would not run free by the sea or try to squeeze the growing breasts of wary girls. Instead he would sit like an ascetic in a one-room home and master something called quantitative ability.
‘If three natural numbers are randomly selected from one to hundred then what is the probability that all three are divisible by both two and three?’