Serious Men (9 page)

The vacant silence in Shruti’s room was stirred by a nasal song. It was in an indecipherable language and its volume slowly grew. It was coming from the tiny wood-framed clock with Thai digits on the nightstand, and it was inevitable that the alarm would now make Acharya and Lavanya look at each other for a moment. The interminable song, probably a Thai song, filled the house as it did every morning. It was the 7.45 morning alarm of Shruti which she had set about five years ago in the ambitions of waking up early and reducing her illusory fat. The alarm never really woke her up but she tried every single day. Acharya used to find it poignant.

The alarm died abruptly, as it always did.

‘You really can’t turn this thing off?’ Lavanya asked.

‘I told you, I tried,’ he said, avoiding her eyes.

After the girl left with a software engineer for California, Acharya told his wife that he had tried to disable the alarm several times but could not figure out how to do it. Lavanya found it hard to believe that a man who was once rumoured to win the physics Nobel did not know how to disable the alarm in a silly timepiece bought in the streets of Bangkok. She suspected that, like her, he too wanted to hear the alarm every morning and enjoy the momentary delusion of imagining their girl still sleeping in her room.

Acharya wondered why daughters always went away. So keen they were on finding a moron and leaving. The futility of love and marriage – did they need a whole lifetime to see through it all? Didn’t they learn anything from the lives of their parents? Inevitably, he remembered the only two instances when he believed he had brought true grief to his daughter. Shruti always laughed at his conviction that he had made her suffer only twice.
‘Every day, you were a monster,’ she would say. The two episodes that he conceded happened when she was eight. The first was the morning she realized that chicken was not a vegetable and that he had lied to her about its origin. The second instance was when she had brought a poem to him that she had written called ‘Infinite Stars in the Sky’. He had taken her to the terrace and showed her the night sky. If the number of stars were infinite in the observable universe, he told her, then at every single point in the sky there would be an endless line of stars stacked one after the other, and that would cause the night to be so illuminated that it would be brighter than day. Since that was not the case, since stars were just tiny points here and there, it meant that the number of stars was finite. She did not know there was a word ‘finite’, and had looked very dejected. She renamed the poem ‘Finite Stars in the Sky’, but it was not the same. She did not write another poem for many weeks after that because she was afraid of her father’s facts.

Acharya was lost once again that morning. This time, he was in the trance of memories. Then he heard the voice. First as a whisper call, like the disturbing voice of conscience in old films that seeks the attention of the hero who searches everywhere for the source of the sound until he finds the speaker in a full-length mirror. The voice, the haunting insistent whisper, became a distant ungifted song that grew and grew in volume and tenor until he recognized it as the voice of Lavanya. ‘You are not supposed to just stand in those shoes. You’re supposed to walk. You wake up before the housewives of Mylapore every morning and then you just stand.’

Acharya went to his room and shut himself inside. He fed The Three Tenors into the music system and triumphantly thumbed the play button as retribution for everything he had to endure in the house. He sat on the edge of the bed and remembered how Shruti used to say that if he had more hair, and agreed to dye it black and comb it sideways, and opened his mouth more often in anguish, he would very closely resemble Pavarotti.

The piercing wail of ‘Nessun dorma’ filled the room, and he yielded to its anthemic glory. He stared back at his own images on the wall. How young and fierce he once was. There was so much hope in him those days for theoretical physics. But now he was tired. He was tired of the battles and tired of rubbish like Tachyons, Higgs Bosons and Supersymmetry. He felt in his bones the weight of how complicated the quest for truth itself had become. How obscure, how mathematical, how pompously it tried to exclude ordinary people. Physics was on the verge of becoming a religion. A medieval religion. A handful of seers stood on the pedestal and lay people had to accept everything they heard. He still found joy in theoretical physics, and in the mysteries of Time and gravity. But there was nothing he loved more now than his search for the eternal spores that came riding on meteorites.

In the decisive finality of ‘Nessun dorma’, so titanic, so perfect, he began to hear discordant beats which he slowly recognized as violent thumps on the door. He heard the desperate voice of Lavanya trying to rise above Pavarotti’s. He was about to increase the volume when he heard her say, ‘Shruti is on the phone.’ That made him open the door.

He did not meet her eyes as he went past her to the hall.

‘I have been banging on the door,’ Lavanya said, and then got distracted by the dust on the door. They had moved from Princeton ten years ago, but she had never gotten used to how easily dust gathered in Bombay.

Acharya held the receiver and grumbled that the line was dead.

‘Obviously,’ Lavanya said, ‘She is not going to wait for …’ She clenched her fist and yelled, ‘I am going to turn off that bloody music.’ The doorbell rang just then and she opened the door with a violent smirk.

‘Good morning,’ said the cheerful voice of Jana Nambodri. He was the best-dressed scientist she had ever known. Dark-brown corduroy trousers and a crisp white shirt today. She knew that he dyed his hair evenly silver, and she was not sure if she
should hate him for it. She had a peculiar soft spot for men who were shorter than her. Also, he was the cultural force of the Professors’ Quarters.

Nambodri was visiting after a long time. She hoped he had come in peace. She let him in muttering, ‘Don’t worry, Jana, I am going to turn that thing off.’

‘It’s “Nessun dorma”,’ Nambodri said, ‘You cannot turn it off like that. It’s disrespectful.’

‘In my house you can,’ she said, and went away.

The two men stood in the living-room staring at each other. They heard Pavarotti perish abruptly, somewhat violently, and the sudden silence made the distance between them seem greater.

‘I’m sorry,’ Nambodri said, ‘The Round Table was not the place for that. I am really sorry.’

O
PARNA
G
OSHMAULIK
WAS
still not granted the peace of anonymity, but she was now an insider. Those cold gazes when she went down the corridors in the wooden beat of her low heels, the number of old scholars who wanted to show her the right path while staring at her breasts, and their wives, some of them, who arrived to have an accidental meeting with her and see for themselves the talk of the Professors’ Quarters – those days were over. Only minor assaults remained. Some wiry postdoctoral students still gaped at her with infatuated eyes, an ancient professor of Number Theory who inhabited the corridors these days waylaid her and showed her his nature poems. Jana Nambodri continued to observe her in a way that he thought was wise and knowing. He wanted to sustain a mild tension between them. A cultured animosity, probably, was the second best thing he sought from a woman. Other radio astronomers still came down to her lab for what they said was just a chat and went back with the news of all that they surveyed – the looming shelves, chromatographs, spectrometers, the eager research students on hire from affiliated universities, the unmoving attendants who waited for something to happen and the many cartons, still unopened, that said ‘this side up’, including the cardboard box of a new coffee machine that they refused to believe was just that. But all this, the attention, malice and affection, she did not mind. Her situation was now improving. She even found the courage to paint her lips. (In pale shades.) Her thick healthy hair was still tied fiercely in the imagined modesty of a pony-tail, but these days she let some curls fall on her cheeks.
She could not abandon the reassurance of unremarkable clothes though. Usually, a long shapeless top over blue jeans. But in the sea breeze, the flowing top sometimes hugged her figure, and she feared she was then a feast.

She ran up two flights of stairs from the basement, humming a tune she could not recall hearing for the first time. She took in the breeze at the porch and the smell of the moist grass and wet earth. A gardener, who somehow did not look naked in just his underwear, was watering the main lawn. She made her way to the canteen: a gracious room with bare wooden tables and metal folding chairs, and large square windows that opened out to the undulating backyard. Here, the sound of the sea was another form of silence. Waiters in dark-brown shirts and trousers were emerging from an inner door carrying plates on their forearms and palms, or were just standing still at various points in the canteen.

She saw Nambodri huddled together with four other radio astronomers whose names she had forgotten. He was speaking into his mobile and the others were looking at him keenly. One of them, a bald man with quivering spectacles on his nose-bridge, reminded her of a college professor who had once asked her in his cabin, ‘Do you respect me?’

Nambodri put the phone in his shirt pocket and said in a soft, serious way, ‘Not today, But he is going to get it soon.’

‘I’m thinking of taking an off this week,’ one man said. ‘He is going to go crazy.’

‘No,’ Nambodri said calmly. ‘We are all going to be there. It’s very important that we are all there.’

‘Look, I’ve had a bypass. I can’t handle these things.’

‘It’s going to be very good for your heart,’ Nambodri said.

He spotted Oparna, and a smile appeared on his face. He pointed to an empty chair beside him. In his shadowy conference, he did not mind the sudden fragrance of lemon. She was a relief in this asylum. These days, his neat foreign shirts and corduroy trousers and stylish silver hair had found a meaningful audience. She saved him from the banality of the academic
society: those austere men and grotesque hairy women he usually met on the circuit. He had this affliction to be with the youth, the real fragrant waxed youth. Before Oparna came along, his only recourse was the parties thrown by his unscientific friends where young girls gathered around him when they heard he was a radio astronomer. He loved it when their delicate bodies, so slight, stood close to him, their legs so naked, their vodka eyes asking him what exactly he did, and their intelligent nods of incomprehension. He began with astronomy and told them what jazz was and in a naughty way made fun of Bryan Adams. He would search their pretty faces for one-minute crushes. He loved the young and spoke to them in their language.

Oparna suspected as much. He was the sort of man who would say to his son, ‘I am a friend, not a father,’ and then give the boy a condom when he turned eighteen. A waiter brought her usual glass of tea and stared hard as he pushed a sugar jar on the table towards her.

‘Nice earrings,’ Nambodri said, ‘You don’t wear long earrings very often. What’s special today?’

‘Nothing is special.’

‘You need clearance from the old man for another microscope?’

One of the astronomers chuckled. Oparna made a sound that she was certain would pass off as a sporting laugh.

She knew there was a lot of pent-up resentment in these men because they could not accept that something like Astrobiology had become a bustling department in this temple of physics while the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence was not allowed to be even a parenthesis in radio astronomy.

Her mobile rang, and she was grateful for that. The voice of Ayyan Mani said, ‘Sir wants to see you right now.’ She looked at her phone, somewhat confused. She had not given her number to anyone.

Oparna burst into the anteroom and felt the full stab of Ayyan’s calm scrutiny. She was wary of this dark man with his wide eyes.

‘We’ve been searching for you,’ he said, ‘He is waiting.’

As she passed by his table, he studied her back. He was certain the men in this institute of excellence did not know her at all. They were all deformed. Too much education; too much class. They looked at a woman through the charades she created around her, through what she said and how she spoke, and her degrees. And through the many myths of modernity that men and women erected when they were fully clothed. But the bed is medieval, and honest, and in it he wanted to believe Oparna would be something else. She would understand it if a man slapped her in the urgency of love, or to destroy her arrogance. He saw in her the unmistakable insanity of formidable women who longed to crumble. Then the thoughts of Oparna vanished and the excitement of what was to happen next morning filled him. A shudder ran through him. He felt a cold fear in his tongue.

She pushed open the inner door and felt the same odd mixture of cold air and anticipation she felt every time she entered. Meeting Acharya was still an event, though he never did anything to make it an occasion. He was sitting behind his massive tumultuous desk. As always, his pink bald head that was now bent over something on his lap appeared larger than she had expected. She sat across the table and murmured, ‘I am here.’ He did not look up. It was a convenient moment for her to observe him carefully. Big ears, she thought, and his hand that rested loosely on the table was clean and brutal. She wondered, once again that day, how he might have looked when he was young. The archive pictures on the net were not good enough. And the vacant walls of his room frustrated her. There was not a trace of him here. A young sepia Acharya glaring from the wall might have been entertaining.

All through her brief struggle in the Institute, the infatuations of strange men and the malice of others, and some who were afflicted by both, working with Acharya had a calming effect on her. Their conversations were dry, chiefly about equipment purchases and setting up the lab. But there was something about
being in his presence that she liked. He was a shelter. In his shade, she felt absolutely ignored. She had craved that always, from the uncles who used to touch her when they came home for the family dinner, from the boys outside her house who used to play cricket, and all the men who came her way. Finally, here was a man who did not notice her. It was like being in the dark corner of a theatre and watching a good play.