Serious Men (6 page)

There was a reason why Nambodri used the word ‘funds’. In the Institute, they looked down upon money. But they respected funds.

Acharya inhaled deeply. He did not like the persistence of other men. He said, ‘Do you remember the time when all of us thought robots would change the face of the Earth? Scientists said robots would do this, robots would do that. But they didn’t do much. Jana, do you know why robots failed? Robots failed because man built them in his own image. The first-generation robots were anthropomorphic. Because man was obsessed with man. Now the most successful robots, say on an auto assembly-line or in an operating theatre, do not look like humans.’

‘What are you trying to say, Arvind?’

‘The human search for aliens is now in the imbecilic stage that robotics once was,’ Acharya said, an ominous edge in his voice. ‘I will not support people who presume that somewhere, far away in space, there could be beings so human that they will build machines that will send us a radio signal. Man is not searching for aliens. Man is searching for man. It’s called loneliness. Not science. The universe is simply too vast, and we know too little about consciousness, to invest in a quest that rests on a narrow concept of life. Scientists want to search for alien signals because that’s what gets them publicity. They are like Jesus Christ.’

‘Jesus Christ?’

‘Yes. They are exactly like Jesus Christ. You know that he turned water into wine.’

‘I’ve heard that story.’

‘From the point of view of pure chemistry, it is more miraculous to make wine into water than water into wine. But he did not do that. Because if he had gone to someone’s house and converted their wine into water, they would have crucified him much earlier. He knew, Jana. He knew making water into wine was a more popular thing to do. Searching for extraterrestrial signals is like that. It is more glamorous than searching for pulsars. Lay people love it. Journalists love it. A more meaningful thing to do is to investigate the stratosphere for evidence of microscopic aliens that have come riding on meteorites.’

‘Are you saying, Arvind, there is not the slightest possibility of an alien civilization sending us a signal?’

‘There is always a mathematical possibility.’

‘That’s good enough, isn’t it? A mathematical possibility. Listen to this, Arvind. In 1874 the
American Medical Weekly
reported something strange. During the Battle of Raymond in Mississippi in 1863, a bullet hit the scrotum of a soldier, shattering his left testicle. The bullet penetrated the left side of the abdomen of a seventeen-year-old girl who was sitting in her house nearby. Nine months later she delivered a healthy boy. Apparently, the bullet had carried with it some of the soldier’s semen and had entered the girl’s ovary. That’s how she had become pregnant with the soldier’s child.’

‘That’s what she told her mother.’

‘A mathematical possibility,’ Nambodri said, ‘A mathematical possibility however small, is enough for us to go in search of truth. In science, hope is everything.’

‘Hope,’ Acharya said, with bitter memories, ‘is a lapse in concentration.’

Nambodri looked gloomily towards the window and rubbed his nose. He knew he had to find more diabolic ways to win this war. And he had to find battlefields where Acharya did not know how to fight. This insufferable fat tyrant was once a lanky affable boy with a lot of mischief in his eyes. When they were in Princeton, Acharya was famous for growing marijuana in a flower pot. He even wrote a secret manual called
The Joint Family,
with clear instructions for future generations on how to grow the grass in a hostel-room environment. How did that boy become this monster who was willing to antagonize everyone for the sake of something as ephemeral as conviction?

Nambodri rose from the chair and headed for the door. Just then something crossed his mind. ‘You do know about the Pope, don’t you?’ he asked. ‘What about him?’

‘Arvind, switch on the TV.’

‘Why?’

‘The Pope is dead.’

The two men looked at each other through a perfect silence. Then Acharya smiled.

He and Pope John Paul shared a past. The top cosmologists in the world were once invited to attend a conference in the most unlikely venue for such a gathering – the Vatican City. The Pontifical Academy of Sciences hosted the scientists because the Pope had figured out that the Big Bang theory was not in conflict with the Old Testament after all, and he wanted to support it cheerfully. Since the Big Bang claimed that the universe had a beginning, it left room for God to do something, like create the beginning. Heretics like Acharya were invited to educate them that God and science can coexist. At the end of the conference, the pontiff met his guests, one after the other, at his summer residence, Castel Gandolfo. In the long queue that moved towards the holy man, the famous crippled scientist Stephen Hawking was right in front of Acharya. When Hawking was wheeled to the Pope, the pontiff famously knelt down on the floor and had a lengthy conversation with him. Then Acharya walked towards the holy man and said something to him in his ear. The Pope turned away looking dismayed. What exactly Acharya had said was never known. He would never tell. The Vatican refused to comment, but a spokesman later said, ‘What that man told the Pope is not important, but, yes, I don’t think he will be invited here again.’

Nambodri held the door knob, but he was unwilling to leave his friend without solving an old mystery. ‘What did you tell the Pope, Arvind?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Come on. He is dead now. Some people told me that he looked very hurt. What did you tell him?’

Acharya wanted to chuckle, but these days he discreetly mourned any death, even if it was the Pope’s.

‘He was a good man,’ Acharya said, in a mellow voice. ‘In 1992 he admitted that Galileo was right. He admitted that the Earth goes around the Sun. He was a good man.’

Nambodri left the room with a melancholy smile, thinking of
the charming old conflicts he was never a part of. That smile, Acharya knew, was the summary of all men who stay out of fierce enchanting battles because they want to build their place in the world through the deceptions of good public relations.

A
YYAN MANI ALMOST
sprinted up the steep colonial stairway of Block Number Forty-One carrying a plastic bag which had two caps for Adi and prawn fry that was still hot. The faint smell of prawns made his stomach rumble and he was in a hurry to get home, but he stopped on the first floor when he saw the outsiders. Two girls in smallish T-shirts and fitted jeans, and a tall reptilian boy were surrounded by the tiny women who lived on that floor. ‘The morons have come again?’ Ayyan asked a man who was going down to drink.

These three were among the pubescent scholars of International Board schools who landed occasionally in the name of social work to add a glow to their imminent applications to American schools. They brought food for children, pens for illiterate old men (who hated them) and generally tried to empower the women. They often wandered around the corridors, knocking on random doors. Once they told Oja that she should, ‘share responsibilities’ with her husband and make him wash clothes and cook some days.

Ayyan stood at the edge of the small crowd and studied the scholars. Their faces were so lit by good breeding; they were so distinct, so large. This time the saviours were here to influence women to send their children to English-medium schools. They were also running a campaign to convert all municipality schools into English-medium. When the women noticed Ayyan they smiled at him.

‘His son goes to a good school,’ a woman said pointing to him. The two reformist girls looked at him and smiled approvingly. He wanted to slap them really hard.

‘You came in a Honda Accord?’ he asked anxiously.

‘No,’ one of the girls said, ‘it’s a Lancer.’

‘Yes, yes. That’s the car. The boys are scratching it and trying to break the windows.’

‘Oh my gaad,’ the girls yelped together. ‘Where is the bloody driver?’ one screamed. They ran to the stairs. The boy ran behind them.

Ayyan looked at the crowd of women through a moment of silence and they all burst out laughing.

‘Why do you stand like this and listen to those fools?’ he asked.

‘Timepass,’ someone said, wiping her tears, and they shook again with seismic laughter.

He was confused when Oja Mani opened the door and asked him sternly, ‘Did you read the full story?’ The question was meant for Adi, who was standing near the gas-stove looking exasperated. Oja was in the middle of interrogating her son. She had bought a comic book for him to ensure that he read something normal, something far more ordinary than the fat reverential books that his father was encouraging him to read. She was worried that her son was becoming abnormal. She had seen him on the terrace last evening, standing aloof during a cricket match. She had encroached into the notional pitch and asked the boys to let him bat. They looked at her confused and then ignored her. Adi, from the fringes of the game, had made an embarrassed face asking her to leave. The fear of raising a strange genius was eating her for some time. It had inspired her this evening to buy him a
Tinkle
comic even though it cost twenty rupees. After just a few minutes of sitting with it near the fridge, Adi had declared that he had finished reading it. She did not believe him.

‘Did you read the full story?’ she asked again, pointing to
Tinkle.
The smell of prawn fry distracted her for a moment and she threw a foul look at her husband because she took outside food as a direct affront. Adi came to his father sniffing like a dog.

‘Praan,’
he said.

Oja dragged him away from his father and looked at him severely. ‘Tell me the truth,’ she said. ‘Did you read the whole story?’

Adi made a tired face at his father, pleading for rescue with his large eyes, and said, ‘Yes, I read it’.

‘So fast?’

‘Yes.’

‘What happens in the end?’

‘There are many stories. Which end do you want?’

‘What happens in the end of the end?’

‘Don’t confuse me.’

‘Tell me, Adi, what happens in the end of the last story.’

Adi took off his hearing-aid and shut his good ear with one finger.

‘Adi,’ his mother screamed, stuffing the hearing-aid back into his ear, ‘What happens in the end of the last story?’

‘The giant runs away.’

Oja checked the last page of Tinkle. ‘There is no giant,’ she said. ‘Did you read this book? Tell me the truth. You should never lie, Adi. The end of an ox is beef, the end of a lie is grief.’

‘So what if he does not want to read silly comics,’ Ayyan said, winking at his son who winked back.

‘You don’t interfere,’ she said angrily. ‘This boy is going to become mad if I don’t do something about it right now. Yesterday, he was standing alone on the terrace, in a corner. Other boys were playing.’

Adi put his hand on his head in exasperation. ‘You don’t understand,’ he said. ‘How many times do I have to tell you? I was out.’

‘What do you mean, you were out?’

‘I was in the batting team and I got out.’

‘So?’

‘If you get out, you can’t bat till the next match.’

‘But other boys were playing,’ she said.

‘Don’t confuse me,’ Adi said angrily.

‘Look, Oja,’ Ayyan said sternly, ‘when a batsman gets out, his chance is over. He cannot play.’

‘Why are you always on his side?’ she said. ‘And why are you standing here? The meeting is going on now. You are late.’

‘I’ll go, I’ll go.’

The television was on all this while. Oja now appeared to calm down and she settled on the floor to watch her soap. Ayyan observed her closely. He knew something was wrong. Her eyes had been shifting too often towards the washing machine and even now she was not in the trance she usually was while watching TV. She seemed to be very aware of him. She looked sideways to see where he was.

‘What is it?’ he asked.

‘Nothing,’ she said, and stole another glance at the washing machine. Ayyan opened its lid and peered in. There was a red cardboard box inside. Oja said, first softly and then with a rising pitch, ‘What’s wrong with having a god? All these people have a real god in their homes.’ Ayyan opened the box and there he was – a cheerful Ganesha. It was not the first time she had brought the idol of the elephant god home. Ayyan always threw him away on his way to work. But every few months, the lord returned in different moods.

Ayyan rolled the idol in a newspaper. ‘I will throw him somewhere tomorrow,’ he said.

‘You cannot keep doing that,’ Oja screamed. Adi took off his hearing-aid and shut his right ear.

‘Isn’t Buddha enough?’ Ayyan screamed back. ‘Buddha is our god. The other gods are gods the Brahmins created. In their deviant stories, those gods fought against demons which were us. Those black demons were our forefathers.’

‘I don’t care what the Brahmins did. Their gods are now mine,’ Oja said. Her voice faltered. ‘I am a Hindu. We are all Hindus. Why do we pretend?’

‘We are not Hindus, Oja,’ he said, now calm and somewhat sad. ‘Ambedkar liberated us from being treated like pigs. He showed us how to renounce that cruel religion. We are Buddhists now.’

‘I can live with nothing,’ she mumbled, ‘I don’t even want
dreams. All I am asking is to let me have some gods. Our son is growing up. I want him to know the gods that other boys know. I want to take him to the temple. I want him to be aware of these things. I want real festivals in this house.’

Ayyan considered what his wife had just told him about their son. He had thought about it before. In a way, Adi was growing up like an animal, without any influence of culture. The epics that his father believed were the propaganda of the Brahmins were also the only epics the boy had. And a boy needed those to understand fully that there was an eternal battle between good and evil, and that in an ideal world the virtuous triumphed over the bad. Superman was good, but Mahabharata was deeper. It had complexity. It made the good choose the wrong path, and there were demons who were fundamentally nice persons, and there were gods who ravished bathing girls. Ayyan wanted his son to know those stories. Even though he could not accept Hindu idols in his home, for some time now he secretly wished Oja would win that battle. He wanted to yield but yield grudgingly, so that the religion of the upper castes could be used in his home for entertainment and education, and nothing more. He wanted Adi to grow up knowing morals, patriotism and the gods. And when the boy turned twenty, may he have the intelligence to abandon them all.