Serious Men (4 page)

The peon covered his mouth with his hand and giggled again, partly from lack of comprehension. Then he remembered something.

‘I’ve got something to show you, Mani,’ he said. He dug into his pocket and took out an ATM card. ‘I got it today,’ he said, and looked at it fondly. ‘All your work, Mani,’ he said.

Ayyan had helped the peon to open a bank account. He somehow knew people everywhere who magically waived the requirement of difficult documents. Ayyan leaned towards the peon and said softly, ‘You know what I used to do when the money machines first came? When the machine would spit out the cash, I would pluck out only the central notes. I would leave the first and the last. It was a difficult art. It needed technique. I had to practise. The machine would swallow the two remaining notes and the way it was programmed then it would not register the transaction. It would spit out a paper that would say “zero rupees withdrawn”. Now these machines have become smarter.’

The peon shook his head in easy awe. ‘You are such a clever man, Mani,’ he said. ‘If only you had the fathers that these men had, you would have had a room of your own today with your own secretary.’

‘There are bigger things in life than that,’ Ayyan said. ‘See where I go.’

The main door outside opened, startling the peon who always
stood erect when surprised. Murmurs from the corridor filled the room like fresh air. Jana Nambodri, the convivial Deputy Director of the Institute and a radio astronomer who was incurably infatuated with corduroy trousers, stood in the doorway holding the door open. ‘Good morning,’ he said cheerfully. His hair always distracted Ayyan. It was a silver tidal wave that lent him an amicable flamboyance. And he had a long benevolent face that clever women usually mistrusted.

There was always a quiet dignity about Nambodri, something very calm, even though he was at the heart of The Giant Ear Problem. He wanted to scan the skies with radio telescopes and search for alien signals, but Arvind Acharya would not let him.

‘I believe he has come,’ Nambodri said, making eyes at the inner door in a conspiratorial way.

‘Yes he is inside, Sir, but he has asked me not to disturb him for thirty minutes,’ Ayyan lied. He never missed the slightest chance to cause the smallest misery to a Brahmin. Nambodri stared at the floor for a moment and left.

‘There is something happening here, Mani,’ the peon said. ‘My chaps are telling me that something big is going to happen. Things have been very tense. Old men are speaking in whispers in the corridor. What is it?’

‘War of the Brahmins,’ Ayyan said. ‘That’s what is going to happen. It’s going to be fun.’

‘War? What war?’

Ayyan studied his fingers thoughtfully. ‘It’s like this,’ he said slowly. ‘Some men here want to search for aliens in space by using something called a radio telescope. They think we might receive messages from life forms in outer space. But the Big Man inside says they are talking rubbish. He won’t let them search for aliens that way. He says there is only one way to search for aliens – his way.’

‘And what is his way?’

‘He says aliens are as small as germs. They are falling all the time from the heavens to the Earth. So he wants to send a balloon up and capture them.’

‘That’s it?’ the peon whispered.

‘Yes, that’s it,’ Ayyan said.

After the peon left, Ayyan went through the research papers that the peon had brought for Arvind Acharya. There was a lot of maths in the pages and its incomprehensibility lent it an air of special wisdom. Ayyan had developed the habit of reading anything in front of him, even if it was something he did not really understand, because he believed that one reason why everybody was here, including the sons of municipal sweepers, was to collect as much information as possible before dying with a funny look on the face. All through his boyhood he had read anything he could lay his hands on. That’s how he had taught himself English. Even when he used to go with friends to art film festivals to watch the uncensored nudity in foreign films, he tried to read every word in the free brochures.

Ayyan read the White Dwarf’s grim tale with his elbows on the table and fingers gathered around his temples. He looked more resolute than interested. But progress was hard. He could not get through the numb dullness of the prose. Then the sharp fragrance of lemon reached him. He looked up. She was always a sight.

He dialled a number briskly and said, ‘Dr Oparna Goshmaulik has come, Sir.’ He put the receiver down and pointed her towards the seasoned black sofa. Acharya had asked him to send her in, but Ayyan wanted to take a good look at her. ‘You have to wait, Madam,’ he told her.

The moment Oparna Goshmaulik had walked into the Institute, three months ago, for the interview, in a blue sari that the stenographers thought was a devious masterstroke, and with her wiry black hair tied back in a fierce knot, she was a commotion. Even now, almost beautiful in a deliberately modest cream salwar chosen to calm the men, she was an event. Aged scientists always veered towards here on the corridors and narrated the many tales of their past, the great things they had done. In the overtures of mentoring, they tried to smell her breath.

She had a round unsmiling face and the flawless skin of lineage; moist lips; and eyebrows arched in a surprise she probably did not intend. Her eyes were arrogant and distant some days, smiling other days.

Ayyan was watching her surreptitiously as she stared thoughtfully at the floor. Another high-caste woman beyond his reach. She went to the Cathedral School in the back seat of her father’s car. Then on to Stanford. Now she was here: the Head of Astrobiology, the solitary queen of the basement lab. So easy it was for these women. Soon, some stupid reporter would write that she had ‘stormed the male bastion’. All these women were doing that these days. Storming the male bastion. ‘Rising against the odds’ – they all were. But what great subjugations did these women suffer, what were they denied by their fathers, what opportunities didn’t they get, what weren’t they fed, why were they so obsessed with their own womanhood? Oja Mani did not even know that there was something called womanhood. ‘Downmarket’ was what women like Oparna would call her, even discreetly laugh at her perhaps if they met her: at the powder in the nape of her neck, the oil in her hair and the yellow glow of turmeric on her face.

Ayyan felt an immense hatred for Oparna and all her friends. Of course, they too had miseries. Chiefly, the state of men. They were obsessed with men. And men were people who were different from him.

Oparna knew he was looking. Jerk. She looked up from the floor to meet his eyes. Ayyan caught her naked glare only for an instant before turning away, but that moment was enough for him to decide why she had always seemed so familiar to him.

So composed and normal she appeared, but in her eyes he saw the hidden insanity of some women that drove men to the security of marrying others. Through the promise of transience, they would lure men, and frighten them while lying spent by weeping uncontrollably or muttering the name of a man from their distant adolescence. Oparna Goshmaulik was an enchantment that was always beyond his fortunes, but despite the
unscalable rungs of society, there were only so many types of people and once upon a time, he had rumbled with the type of Oparna.

That was over a decade ago when he was a young salesman for Eureka Forbes. He would woo typists, secretaries and shop attendants, and mesmerize them with his general knowledge, the future rebellions he planned against the rich, and his jokes about the Brahmins. They would let him squeeze their breasts on the Worli Seaface. Then, misled by decency, they would ask for marriage. And weep through the pause. Traditionally on the Worli Seaface, infatuation fondled and love cried. He was terrified of that love.

When they began to brush his hand away from their impoverished chests and talk about where it was all heading, and whispered to him the simplicity of marriage, he left them in the knowledge that they could cash in their virginity somewhere else. But some who made love to him in the bushes of Aksa beach, or in the cheap hotels of Manori, were the dangerous kind. It was them he saw in the deceptive calm of Oparna. After their coy nudity and uncontrollable moans that he had to muffle by stuffing his fingers in their mouths; after their easy compliments about how good a lover he was, how thoughtful and informed, how big his penis was (though they had not slept with too many men) came their madness. They would weep for no reason, talk about death, and with great sorrow that matched the despondence of the pale yellow walls of the cheap nocturnal rooms, ask for marriage. They made him fear love, and drove him to the hard mattress of a prostitute in Falkland Street, whose bedsheet was still soaked in the sweat of clients who had been with her before him. As he rocked her beneath him, he would always remember, she sang a song:
‘Joot Bhole Kauva Kate’.
It had no meaning. She meant no metaphors. When he asked her to shut up, she said, ‘But I have to while away the time.’ He threw some notes at her and ran. Her laughter echoed behind him. No wail he had heard in his life equalled the melancholy of her psychotic laughter.

Often, he used to tell his girls, as they looked at him with growing affection on the parapet of the Worli Seaface, ‘What is the saddest sight in the world? A couple weeping together. At their failed love, or at the ruins of their home demolished by the municipality, or at the funeral of their child. There is something about a man and a woman weeping together. Nothing is more heart-breaking.’ But he knew that the laughter of that whore was far worse. He would never forget it. ‘Come back, hero,’ she had said.

Unable to bear the promises he had to make merely to touch the breasts of girls who said they loved him, and the sudden sorrows of the broadminded women after they had brought their legs back together, and the wails of undead whores, he finally decided to place a matrimonial in the expensive classifieds of the
Maharashtra Times.
And he found a virgin who had none of the memories he had given other women.

A
YYAN
M
ANI HAD
just asked her to go in. Oparna rose from the tired black sofa. She did not know why her heart was pounding. There was something about the hermit who sat inside that unnerved her. Three months ago, Arvind Acharya had interviewed her in between reading something. And when he did look at her, it was with total indifference – as if thirty-year-old women were not regarded as people here. He had studied her gravely and said, ‘You were born after Microsoft?’

She pushed open the inner door and remembered its unexpected heaviness. Acharya, his head bent over some loose sheets of paper on the table, always appeared bigger than she imagined. His desk was cluttered with heaps of bound papers and journals. And there was a curious stone which he used as a paperweight. Some said that it was a piece of meteorite he had stolen from a lab many many years ago. Four fresh orchids stood in a cylindrical glass jar and she knew he was not responsible for them. There was an unnaturally large waste-paper bin near his table, four feet high. Behind him was a long sliding window that was like a living portrait of the Arabian Sea. The walls were stark and empty. No pictures, no framed citations, no quotable commandments that men so loved. Nothing. In the far corner of the room were four white sofas that faced each other around a small centrepiece. The sofas offended her every time she entered the room. White sofas? Why?

She sat across his massive table, wondering whether to clear her throat. That would be too cinematic, so she decided to be silent and look at him carefully. Silver strands of hair on his pink bald head rose and fell in the draft of the air conditioner directly
above him. His thick capable hands rested on the table. His tranquil elephant eyes usually looked directly into the heart of the intrusion. Sometimes they stared like an infant’s.

Occasionally, Oparna googled Acharya late into the night. She searched for stray pictures from his youth. He was always in badly stitched suits then, and seemed much angrier; his severe eyes appeared to survey the changing times somewhat baffled as if physics were in crisis. And it really was, according to the young Acharya. He spent the best years of his life in the passion of mauling the Big Bang theory, the world’s favourite idea – that everything began from a microscopic point, that most of the universe was made in about three minutes after an inexplicable moment of beginning called the Big Bang.

How much this man had hated the theory. He accused the Big Bang of being Christian. The Vatican wanted a beginning and the Big Bang provided one. According to him, the Big Bang was that moment in the history of white men when God said, ‘Try to understand from here.’ He did not accept it. Acharya’s universe did not have a beginning, it did not have an end. ‘Because I am not Christian,’ he had famously said. He hated the Big Bang theory so much, and considered it such a repulsive influence of religion, that during a niece’s wedding to an American in San Francisco, when he heard the priest say solemnly, ‘In the beginning was the Word,’ he threw his shoe at the altar.

Around that time (it must have been about thirty years ago) he was at the height of his intellectual powers. Many believed that his work on gravitational collapse would fetch him the Nobel if he behaved and tempered down his embarrassing opposition to the Big Bang. As it was, the odds were stacked against cosmologists. An old rumour had it that Alfred Nobel’s wife had had an affair with an astronomer and the cuckold laid out in his will that those associated with astronomy must be considered to share his money only under exceptional circumstances. Oparna believed that rumour. It was absolutely possible.

Acharya was the type of man who would believe first and then spend the rest of his life seeking that little matter called evidence.
Oparna liked such men. They were obsolete in a world where something as low grade as practicality was increasingly mistaken for wisdom. When they spoke, their words had so much power because they knew there was such a thing called the truth. They just believed, blindly. And for many years Arvind Acharya believed in his heart that microscopic aliens were falling all the time on Earth. To prove it he was finally going to send a hot-air balloon to a height of forty-one kilometres with four sterilized metal containers that would capture air at that altitude. The containers would come down, and in her basement lab Oparna would study their contents. If there were any microbes in the containers it would mean only one thing. They came from space. Mankind would have finally found aliens.