Serious Men (3 page)

During that time, he had a nightmare that he would never tell Oja. He dreamt that he was summoned by God, who looked exactly like Albert Einstein but highly illuminated. God asked him: ‘Why did you get married?’

Ayyan answered earnestly, ‘To have sex any time of the day or night’.

God looked at him with a thoughtful face for an instant, and the creases of a smile appeared. The smile became a laugh and the laugh burst into echoes. Men and women on the streets, too, looked at Ayyan and laughed uncontrollably. People who were dangling from the doors of a local train threw their heads back and laughed. The motorman stopped the train to laugh. Fish-sellers in the market covered their mouths and laughed. Even the framed portrait of Jawaharlal Nehru held his stomach and laughed until the rose fell from his buttonhole. Then Ayyan saw the face of his beautiful wife on a giant public hoarding, so embarrassed and so elegantly distraught by it all. That wraith woke him up because he could not bear to see her like that.

When he realized it was just a dream he turned to her sleeping figure and hugged her. Though her eyes were shut, she accepted the embrace hungrily as though she too had arrived at the same scene in her own dreams.

A
T THE SCHOOL
gates, Ayyan feasted on modern young mothers. Their faces were still youthful, loose flesh shuddered inside their small tops like water in the immoral pink beds of Tamil films; their trousers were aghast at the tightness of it all and their asymmetric panty-lines were like birds in the sky drawn by a careless cartoonist. These days many young mothers wore long skirts too. They looked nice, he thought. In the chawls, mothers never wore skirts. Two years ago, misled by aspiration, a woman had tried. By the time she reached the broken cobbled ways, so many people had laughed at her, so many eyes had judged her intent, that she ran back home, made peace with her fate and returned in a salwar.

In the mornings, the air was somewhat tense around the school gates. Boys in whites and girls in blue pinafores walked away from their parents with unhappy faces. In the evenings, they ran happily towards the gates, the way earthquake survivors in this country might run towards the BBC correspondent.

Ayyan inspected his son. Adi was in a white shirt and shorts. And smart black boots. His bag, oversized for a boy of just ten, was in his father’s hand. The sight of the calm studious boy comforted him. And the secret game that they were playing, the mother of all games, filled Ayyan once again with anticipation. That’s all he asked from life some days, the exhilaration of anticipation.

The solitary guard, in the khaki uniform and cap he was forced to wear, was looking at the backs of the departing young mothers as though his wife was morally superior. He gave a friendly nod to Ayyan, almost nudging him with his eyes to pay attention to
one very fleshy young mother. Ayyan ignored him. He always did because he wanted the guard to know that they were not equals, that he must respect him the way he hurriedly saluted the fathers who arrived in cars. But the guard knew that he did not have to concede.

The Principal was a tough Salesian matron. Her veil rested on half her scalp. She had a thick volatile face and severe eyes. She was square and muscular, and the calves that showed beneath the habit sported wiry hair. Her name was Sister Chastity.

Jesus Christ, with a crown of thorns on his head, surveyed the room morosely with a hand on his visible heart, which was on fire. The Principal was environmentally conscious (uncharacteristically for a Catholic matriarch). Her table was littered with articles made out of paper and other recycled things. ‘Everything in this woman’s room was once something else,’ Ayyan had told Oja after he first met Sister Chastity.

‘So, we meet again,’ Sister Chastity said unhappily, pointing Ayyan to a chair. She usually spoke to him in Hindi with a faint Malayalee accent. ‘How come the mother never comes when there is trouble?’ she asked.

‘She is scared of you and very ashamed of the boy.’

‘Where is Adi? Already in class?’

‘Yes.’

There was an uncomfortable silence, because Sister Chastity wanted it. She then said, ‘Mr Mani, I don’t know if your son makes me happy or sad. When he is asked to do addition, he talks about things that boys many years his senior do not even understand. He wants to know about the speed of light and the acceleration due to gravity and things like that. Obviously, he is some sort of a genius and we have to nurture him. He is very special. But his conduct in school, the way he blurts out things in the middle of class, questions the authority of his teachers, you know, we cannot tolerate these things.’

‘I am going to make sure that he behaves. It’s hard to control him but I am going to make sure he is disciplined.’

‘Discipline. That’s the word. And that’s all there is to education.’

When it looked as if the meeting were over, she pushed two books towards Ayyan. They were about the life of Christ. ‘My small effort, as usual, to bring you closer to the Lord,’ she said, with a smile. Her eyes grew kind.

‘I love Christ,’ Ayyan said softly.

‘Why don’t you accept him?’

‘I accept him.’

‘Accept him in a formal way, I mean. There is no compulsion, obviously. We never compel. As you know, the fee waiver and other small things we can offer, purely as a concession laid out for financially backward Christians, will benefit you immensely.’

‘I am giving it some thought. I am trying to convince my family. You know, there is this mindset against conversion.’

‘I know, I know. The human mind is so ignorant,’ Sister Chastity said. She held him with her deep hard eyes. She loved pauses. With nothing more than silence she usually asked him either to leave, or stay right there. This silence now was the calm before a sermon. He wondered if she really was a virgin.

‘Mr Mani,’ she said, ‘in a way, you are a good Christian.’

‘I am?’

‘You are, Mr Mani. How beautifully you’ve forgiven the people who brutalized your forefathers. The Brahmins, the kind of things they did. The things they do even now. In private, they still call you the Untouchables, do you know that? In public they call you “Dalits”, but in private they call you such horrible things.’

‘I know,’ Ayyan said, trying to appear angry and moved, because that was what she wanted.

‘Hinduism is like that, Mr Mani. It has the upper castes and it has the Dalits. The Brahmins and the Untouchables. That can never change. People only pretend that it has changed.’

‘You speak the truth, Sister. The Brahmins ruined my life even before I was born. My grandfather was not allowed to enter his village school. They beat him up when he tried once. If he had gone to school, my life would have been better.’

‘Absolutely,’ she said. ‘Tell me, Mr Mani. In the great Institute where you work, all the scientists are Brahmins?’

‘Yes.’

‘And all the peons are Dalits?’

‘Yes.’

‘But that’s not because the Brahmins are smarter than the Dalits,’ she said.

‘No,’ Ayyan said, now allowing himself to be somewhat engulfed by rage even though that was what Sister Chastity wanted. ‘The Brahmins were three thousand years in the making, Sister. Three thousand years. At the end of those cursed centuries, the new Brahmins arrived in their new vegetarian worlds, wrote books, spoke in English, built bridges, preached socialism and erected a big unattainable world. I arrived as another hopeless Dalit in a one-room home as the son of a sweeper. And they expect me to crawl out of my hole, gape at what they have achieved, and look at them in awe. What geniuses.’

‘What geniuses,’ she whispered angrily.

‘They are murderers,’ Ayyan said, noticing that she smiled exactly like him. Invisibly.

‘That’s why you’re a good Christian, Mr Mani. You’ve forgiven them, the Brahmins, whose great fiction Hinduism is.’

‘I have not forgiven them,’ Ayyan said, ‘And you know that. I have long renounced Hinduism. I am a Buddhist.’

‘Mr Mani,’ she said with a tired face, pushing the two books she had gifted further down the table towards him, ‘Hinduism, Buddhism – all the same thing.’

A
YYAN
M
ANI WALKED
through the low, elegant gates of the Institute and sought the will to survive another day in this asylum of great minds. He waved in greeting to the dispirited guards in their glass box who smiled at him.

‘Run, you are late,’ one of them shouted with a fond chuckle, ‘the Big Man is in already.’

Ayyan never understood why this place was so seriously guarded. After all, what happened here was merely the pursuit of truth.

The Institute of Theory and Research stood on ten acres of undulating lawns and solitary ancient trees. At the centre of the plot was a stout L-shaped building that held its breath inside shut windows. It ran along two sides of a carefully pruned central lawn. Beyond the angular building, the backyard rolled towards moist black boulders. And then there was the sea.

Here sanity was never overrated, and insanity never confused with unsound mind. Sometimes on the pathways calm men spoke to themselves when they needed good company. This was a sanctuary for those who wanted to spend their entire lives trying to understand why there was not enough lithium in the universe, or why the speed of light was what it was, or why gravity was ‘such a weak force’.

Ayyan had a haunting desire to escape from this madhouse. Thirteen years was too long. He could not bear the grandness of their vocation any more, the way they debated whether universe must be spelt with a capital U or a small u, and the magnificence with which they said, after spending crores of public money,
‘Man knows nothing yet. Nothing.’ And the phoney grace with which they hid their incurable chauvinism and told reporters, ‘A physicist is ultimately judged through citations.
She
has to constantly publish.’ They were highminded; they secretly believed that their purpose was greater; they were certain that only scientists had the right today to be philosophers. But they counted cash like everyone else. With a wet index finger and a sudden meditative seriousness.

Even though Ayyan was late for work that morning, it was inevitable that he would stand in front of the blackboard in the porch of the main block. It was a morning ritual that always cooled the fever in his chest. THOUGHT FOR THE DAY, the blackboard said in indelible white ink. Under it was an ephemeral thought, written in chalk:

Ayyan took a duster from the top of the blackboard and erased Einstein’s famously abridged message. Then he pretended to look into a paper, just in case somebody was watching. And he wrote:

Bill Gates never said that. Some days, Ayyan invented quotes that insulted Indian culture, that exclusive history of the Brahmins. Nobody remembered when exactly Ayyan was assigned the task of writing the Thought For The Day or by whom. But he did it, without fail, every day. Most days he wrote genuine quotes. Some days he had fun.

He took the lift and travelled in the carefully maintained silence of three sweet-smelling elderly scientists who were lost in very deep, expensive thoughts. He got off at the third floor and walked down an almost interminable corridor that was jokingly described here as ‘finite’. The corridor was flanked by numbered doors. Behind every door a great mind sat, and in between solving
the mysteries of the universe, some of them were hoping that one man died. Things were getting a bit tense. A war was brewing. Everybody knew it here as The Giant Ear Problem.

At the far end of the corridor was a door that said ‘Director’. It opened to a commodious anteroom, almost as large as Ayyan’s home. He yawned as he sat in a nook behind a monitor, three telephones and a paranormal fax machine that came to life with the furtive whisper of a secret. Facing him across the width of the room was a seasoned black leather sofa, now vacant but with the irreparable depressions of long waits. Between his table and the sofa ran a short corridor that led to the door that announced its infernal occupant – Arvind Acharya.

Ayyan looked at the door without fear and dialled a number. ‘I am sorry I am late, Sir,’ he said, ‘Any instructions for me?’ The line went dead, as expected. Ayyan put the receiver down and calmly studied his fingers. The receivers of all three phones on his table were on their cradles. That was rare. Usually, one of the receivers was left off the hook. That was because he almost always arrived before Acharya, called one of the Director’s landlines from here and left the receivers of both the phones slightly askew. That way Ayyan could just pick up his phone and hear the conversations in Acharya’s room, and keep abreast of all the developments in the Institute and, as a consequence, in the universe.

A peon walked in and filled the anteroom with the faint odour of jaggery. Some peons had that smell. He dropped a thick wad of papers on the table.

‘For the Big Man,’ he said softly, throwing a nervous glance at the inner door.

Ayyan flipped through the pages of the material and chuckled. It was yet another epic analysis of cosmic observations by a visiting researcher. This one tried to prove that a distant object was indeed a White Dwarf.

‘What is this, Mani?’ the peon asked with sudden curiosity, ‘Do you ever understand these things that land on your table?’

‘I do, my friend, I do,’ Ayyan said, and tried to think of a way
to explain. ‘The chap who has written this is trying to say that an object far far away in space is a type of star.’

‘That’s it?’ the peon said, almost angrily.

‘Yes, that’s it. And this type of a star has a name,’ Ayyan said. ‘White Dwarf.’ That made the peon giggle.

‘One year later,’ Ayyan whispered, ‘another man will say, “No no, it is not a White Dwarf, it is a Brown Dwarf.” A year later, someone else will say, “No no, it is not a Brown Dwarf, it is not a star at all, it is a planet.” Then they will argue over whether it is a rocky planet or a gaseous planet and whether there is water out there. That’s the game, my friend, that’s exactly the game.’