Serious Men (5 page)

Oparna craned her neck to see what Acharya was reading, but from that angle it was hard for her to figure it out.

He was in fact immersed in a confidential report on the mysterious red rains over Kerala. Nobody could convincingly explain the phenomenon that was confirmed by thousands of ordinary people who were stupefied by the red downpour, but he believed he knew what was happening. He was formulating a simple explanation in his mind, when he began to sense a distant smell that he thought was coming from another time, like an old memory. It was familiar, but he could not place it. Then it struck him that it was the odour of youth and it was somewhere very close. Youth. Pathetic, desperate, broke, its glory overrated. He felt in his heart the ignorance and smallness of the mind when the body was strong, and how easily it was brutalized by deceptions that sometimes came as love, and at other times, as convictions.

‘Dr Acharya,’ Oparna tried one more time.

He leaned back in his chair and observed her in a peaceful way. He liked her. She had done reasonable research in South America on the private lives of earth microbes that survived in almost extraterrestrial conditions. She was fresh and bright, and she knew all that she had to know. He preferred the intelligence
of women, which was somehow subdued and efficient, to the brilliance of men, which often came across as a deformity.

He rubbed his hands and said, ‘So, Oparna. Good. What took you so long?’ She tried not to react. He looked at the door and maintained a long comfortable silence.

Oparna probed softly, ‘You called me?’

‘Yes, I did,’ he said. ‘Just wanted to know how the lab is shaping up. Everything OK?’

She thought there was something high maintenance about his face. His teeth were so clean and nothing was peeping out through his nose at all. Extraordinary for an Indian male of his age. The same force that sent the orchids must be maintaining him.

‘Yes, everything is OK,’ she said. ‘But, Dr Acharya, you had mentioned that the basement was a temporary arrangement.’

‘I remember. It’d be nice if the astrobiology lab is above sea-level. It’s a shame. I know, I know. I called you actually to give the bad news. There is no space. The lab needs a large sprawling area and we simply don’t have room anywhere, it seems, but in the basement.’

He stood up. He was probably over six foot two. The enormous black chair shuddered in relief. He steered his trousers around his waist. ‘Let’s go to your lab,’ he said, and dashed out. In the anteroom, he wagged a finger at Ayyan Mani asking him to follow.

The three walked down the interminable corridor. The woody sound of Oparna’s heels was still so alien to the Institute, which was used to the unremarkable silence of men, that Acharya looked back at her and at her feet. She smiled meekly and tried to walk softly. That made her feel stupid, and, for a moment, angry with herself. She was not accustomed to being servile and she wondered why she was so in the presence of this man. She had heard all the famous stories about him. Of his newsworthy rage and tragic brilliance. But she could not accept that this was the way it was going to be between them. She walked faster to keep up with him, and thought of something friendly to say, something equal. ‘This corridor is endless,’ she said.

‘That’s not true,’ he told her.

They took the lift to the basement and from there they walked through a network of narrow corridors flanked by stark white walls and in the ghostly hums of invisible subterranean machines. At the end of a corridor was a door that said ‘Astrobiology’.

It was a huge hollow room. Unopened cartons lay piled up in heaps. The walls were newly painted off-white. And there was this smell of fresh paint. In a far corner was a large ancient desk, with just a phone on it. A wooden chair was by its side.

‘This is what happens when the equipment comes before the carpenter,’ Acharya said cheerfully, and his voice echoed. ‘Oparna, you deal directly with my secretary. He will get you anything you want. Except, of course, windows.’ And he left the room walking away like a tusker.

Ayyan Mani took out a small scribbling-pad from his trouser pocket, poised a pen over it and stared expectantly at Oparna.

‘What are your instructions, Madam?’ he asked. He liked her smell. He wondered how a woman could smell like a lemon, yet seem so unattainable.

She thought he smelled exactly like a room freshener. But at least he didn’t stink like other men. For a fleeting moment, she remembered a friend who went through an insane phase of sleeping only with poor men, really poor chaps. Like drivers and peons. Just to see if they were any different in bed from the MBAs.

Ayyan looked at her back as she walked into the expanse of the almost empty lab and put her hands on her hips. Those hips curved so beautifully. Even in the intentional modesty of the salwar kameez, he could see how perfectly sculpted she was. He wondered how she would look naked. He tried to imagine her face as he plundered her in the bushes of Aksa.

‘I think I will see the plans first and send you a detailed list of things to be done,’ she said, without turning. ‘I hope you will move fast. I hear you are a very efficient man.’

‘I am just a small man, Madam,’ he said. ‘A small man who manages this and that sometimes.’

‘That’s not what I’ve heard,’ she said, walking towards him and attempting a calculated smile.

‘What am I, Madam, in front of scientists like you?’ he said. ‘It is through the great things you people do that I learn a little here, a little there.’

‘OK then,’ she said exhaling loudly. ‘I will see you soon.’

When he was at the door, he said, ‘It’s so hot here.’ He walked briskly to a corner and turned on the AC. ‘Madam,’ he said softly, ‘can you tell me something about the Balloon Mission?’

‘Why do you ask?’

‘Every night I make up a science story for my son. That’s how I put him to sleep. All my material comes from the Institute.’

‘That’s sweet,’ she said with a chuckle. (Ayyan, of course, knew it was very sweet.)

‘How old is he?’

‘He is ten.’

‘I don’t know how much you know,’ she said, ‘but it’s like this. Twenty thousand meteorites hit Earth’s atmosphere every year. They are so small that they burn up immediately. Dr Acharya believes that some of them carry extraterrestrial living matter, like an alien DNA or even fully formed microbes or something entirely unknown to man. These things survive their entry into Earth and take a while to come down. We are going to send a balloon high above the Earth. The balloon will carry four samplers. Samplers are sterilized steel cans that will be controlled by remote from the ground. They will open at the height of forty-one kilometres, capture air, and shut immediately. I will study the samplers after we bring them back down. I’ll study them right here where we are standing.’

‘What if you find something?’

‘Then Dr Acharya becomes the first person to find living matter from outer space.’

‘Why forty-one kilometres above the Earth? Why not twenty, or ten?’ he asked, narrowing his eyes to show curiosity – though he knew why.

‘Because, because,’ she said, with mild appreciation, ‘nothing
from Earth floats to that height. Even volcanic ash does not go up that high. So if we find, say, a bacterium at that height, it will mean that he was coming down, not going up.’

‘It’s so interesting what you people do,’ he said. ‘I think I can cook up a great story for my son tonight.’

As he walked to the door, Oparna asked, ‘What do you know about the Giant Ear?’

‘Nothing that you don’t know, Madam,’ he said, walking a few steps back in. Giant Ear was the name given to thirty radio telescopes, a vast array of mammoth dishes pointed at the sky. One after the other, they stood like white monsters on vast farms, about a hundred kilometres from the city. ‘Have you seen them?’ he asked. ‘They belong to the Institute.’

‘I saw them once when I was driving past,’ she said. ‘They look beautiful, and evil.’

‘There is one strange thing about the Giant Ear,’ Ayyan said softly. ‘You won’t find a single champagne bottle there.’ (The way he pronounced ‘champagne’ was a bit funny but she did not react. She was more intrigued by what he had said.)

‘Champagne bottle, you said? There is no champagne bottle inside the Giant Ear. Why should that be strange?’

‘Madam, every radio telescope in the world keeps a champagne bottle. It is a tradition. The bottle has to be opened when there is a contact with an alien signal.’

‘Why doesn’t the Giant Ear have a champagne bottle?’

‘You know why,’ he said, with a conspiratorial smile. ‘The Director hates the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. He says it is not science. He really hates it. The radio astronomers here have been begging him to let them search for signals of intelligent life. But he is not going to allow that.’

‘I know, I know,’ she said, almost dreamily. ‘I wonder why he is so adamant about these things?’

‘The heavens speak very softly to the Earth, Madam,’ Ayyan said. ‘A mobile phone left on the Moon would be the third clearest radio signal in the entire sky. So you can imagine how easily the gadgets we use can interfere with radio telescopes. A passing
car’s radio could start wild rumours of alien contact. So the Director thinks it is an imperfect way to search for aliens. Also, he does not think aliens are in the habit of sending signals.’

‘You know a lot, Ayyan,’ she said, with an honest smile.

‘I am just a small man, Madam, who picks up this and that through the great things that people like you do.’

Her nipples, he observed, had hardened in the air conditioner’s draught.

After he left, Oparna sat by the desk and looked blankly at the walls. She sat for hours like that, with nothing to do. She felt in her heart an old nameless sorrow. That same melancholy of a twilight rain in a deserted street. She felt stranded. Five years ago, she would have wept like a fool.

She went up to the porch for respite. She stood behind a fat beam and lit a cigarette. The half-naked gardener who was watering the lawn stared. A few men who were passing by, discussing the Möbius Strip, fell silent.

‘Yes, yes, stare at me. You’re right. I smoke. I must be a whore.’

The stares would always follow her here and she would grow to accept that she was in the world of men. She would learn to laugh at things that did not make her laugh. She would smile when Jana Nambodri said, ‘We have been seeking beauty in physics, but it looks as if it has come to Astrobiology.’ And she would smile when she learnt that the ladies’ rest-room on the third floor was called Ladies and the men’s was called Scientists. She would endure the men who inescapably fell towards her in the corridors and gave her guidance she never sought. She would try to pass through the long corridors of this place like a shadow, and she would fail every day.

She took one long drag and threw the cigarette butt, and felt a bit manly as she squashed the stub with her foot.

A
RVIND
A
CHARYA LIKED
the brooding hum of the air conditioner. It reminded him of the faint drone that was once speculated here to be the sound of the early universe. He was listening to the hum intently and reading another report on the red rains over Kerala. Ayyan Mani walked in holding a bunch of fax messages.

‘Dr Nambodri is here,’ he said, setting the papers on the desk. He always spoke in Tamil to the Director because he knew it annoyed him. It linked them intimately in their common past, though their fates were vastly different. Ayyan’s dialect, particularly, almost always distracted Acharya. It reminded him of the miserable landless labourers, and their sad eyes that used to haunt him in his childhood when he watched the world go by from the back seat of a black Morris Oxford.

Acharya put the Red Rain papers on the table and placed an irregular black stone on the material. ‘Send him in,’ he said. He leaned back in his chair and awaited the simple duel that he would win. Jana Nambodri entered looking more cheerful than the circumstances allowed.

‘So you are on for dinner tonight?’ he asked, as he sat across the desk from Acharya.

‘Of course, and you are serving fish this time,’ Acharya said. ‘Arvind, try to understand. We are married to hopeless vegetarians.’

‘I get fish in my house.’

‘OK, I’ll try,’ Nambodri said, and, as casually as he could, ‘The Seti conference, Arvind. Remember? Jal has been invited to Paraguay for the Seti conference.’

‘Ah, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence in Paraguay,’ Acharya said, with a soft chuckle. ‘Jana,’ he said, turning serious, ‘is there any evidence that Paraguay actually exists?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Do you know anybody from Paraguay?’

‘No.’

‘Nobody does.’

‘But somehow I do believe Paraguay exists,’ Nambodri said.

‘I gather they are not sponsoring his trip? We have to pay?’

‘Yes, but it is important that he goes.’

‘We can’t afford it,’ Acharya said. He lifted a pen from one holder and put it in another.

Nambodri expected this. This man was a stingy bastard these days. He was saving every rupee for the Balloon Mission. The men looked at each other with the comfort of an old friendship and with the strains of a dispute that was threatening to become destructive.

‘It’s all right,’ Nambodri said. ‘It’s your decision. But Arvind, I came here to talk about the Giant Ear.’

Acharya let out a soft groan.

But Nambodri persisted. ‘We are getting a lot, a lot of requests from radio astronomers all around the world for the Giant Ear,’ he said. ‘You have to seriously consider the matter. You have to let the Giant Ear search for alien signals. Even the astronomers in our Institute are unhappy with the ban.’

‘I am not going to let anyone use the Giant Ear for nonsense,’ Acharya said, and he looked around the room calmly.

‘Universities have approached me with very attractive usage fees,’ Nambodri said, somewhat desperately, though he had intended to be politely strong.

‘We are not in it for the money. We are scientists,’ Acharya said.

‘But Arvind, we need funds.’