Serious Men (13 page)

Ayyan had a stock of blank envelopes marked Ministry of Defence in the bottom drawer. He usually opened Acharya’s official courier mail, read the letters, relocated them in fresh envelopes, recreated clerical scribbles and stapled back the receipts. He studied the latest arrival for another minute before opening it.

The letter was from Bhaskar Basu, a powerful Delhi bureaucrat in the Ministry of Defence who had once perilously tried to establish control over the Institute. He did not believe that scientists should be allowed to manage the Institute. Managing was the job of bureaucrats. But in that meeting when he had tried to wrest control, according to a legend, after Basu made an elaborate presentation about his future plans, there was a long uncomfortable silence which Acharya broke with a calm observation, ‘But you graduated in sociology.’ He had said nothing more, but the meeting had collapsed.

Ayyan folded the letter and put it in a fresh envelope. He checked the voluminous dictionary for the meaning of the word ‘synergize’. It was not the first time he had looked up the word, but despite many attempts he never fully comprehended its meaning. Once more he tried to understand, but gave up. He got the full import of the letter though. It was a major breach. The authority of Arvind Acharya was being challenged. The first arrow had arrived. The excitement of being in the best seat to watch the duel filled him. He decided that whatever happened in his life, he would take no time off in the coming days. The clash of the Brahmins, an entertainment that even his forefathers enjoyed in different ways in different times and had recounted in jubilant folk songs that they once used to sing beneath the stars, was now coming to the Institute.

Nambodri was not a man who went to battle unless he knew he was going to win. This was because he was a coward. Acharya, on the other hand, did not know how to fight small men who were, probably, the rightful inheritors of an office, any office. But he had that terrifying quality called stature, something that his colleagues, of their own accord, had granted him. From what Ayyan had heard of the battles of the Brahmins, it would be bloodless but brutal. They would fight like demons armed with nothing more than deceit and ideals – another form of deceit among men from good families.

Ayyan went into the inner chamber with the letter. He placed it carefully in a vacant island in the sea of papers on the table.

‘From the Ministry,’ he said.

Acharya did not look up. Twenty minutes later, he opened the letter. He read it just once and put it in the large bin that was nearly as tall as the table. He turned to the window and stared at the sea.

Ayyan entered with some files to check if Acharya had read the letter. The envelope was missing from the desk and Acharya’s face no longer wore its customary peaceful expression. His eyes were burning in the glow of the setting sun.

When Ayyan went back to the anteroom, the mobile phone on his desk was ringing. He could barely recognize the voice of Oja at the other end.

‘He burnt her,’ she said, crying, ‘he burnt her.’ She was calling from a phone booth outside BDD. Through the background noise of horns and the laughter of men, Ayyan could hear her desperate gasps for breath.

It seared him always, the sorrow of his Oja. She said that a boy from Thane had come home with the news that Gauri had been burnt by her husband. Gauri was a cousin she had grown up with. The violence of subsidized kerosene that Oja’s mother had once feared might be the fate of her daughter had consumed another woman. Ayyan knew that woman. He had been to her wedding. She was an unremarkable girl who laughed a lot. He remembered her face through the red hood of her cheap bridal
sari. She had tried not to giggle throughout her wedding. She was then consigned to a life of severe beatings, and now this. Two hours ago, she had died of severe burns in a government hospital. Her body was still in the morgue. Oja did not want to go there. She said she did not want to know how a woman looked after she was burnt. It was something every girl she knew had nightmares about when they were growing up.

‘Some people say that after you are burnt the face looks white, not black – that is if there is any face left,’ she said into the phone, and fell silent. She had nothing more to say, but she did not want to put the phone down. He could hear her breathing.

The main door opened and two scientists walked in. They were in the middle of a loud discussion.

‘When these correction terms become large, there is no spacetime geometry that is guaranteed to describe the result,’ one man said. The other responded, ‘Yes I agree, the equations for determining the space–time geometry become impossible to solve except under very strict symmetry conditions. But my point is …’ He looked at Ayyan impatiently and pointed to Acharya’s door. ‘We have an appointment,’ he said, with a frown, probably annoyed because the impudent clerk was talking on his mobile.

Ayyan picked up the land phone and put it on his other ear ‘Sir, Dr Sinha and Dr Murthy are here.’

The voice of Acharya growled back, ‘I am not meeting anyone today.’

In his other ear Ayyan heard Oja say something, but in the chaos around the phone booth where she was standing and the debate of the men in front of him, he could not make out what she was trying to tell him. ‘And this is a hint that perhaps space–time geometry is not something fundamental in string theory, but something that emerges in the theory at large-distance scales or weak coupling,’ one of the men was saying.

‘I will go now, I think you have a lot of work,’ said Oja, very faintly.

‘Hello,’ said Ayyan, but the line had gone dead.

He put his mobile in the drawer and looked at these men on
the ancient leather sofa, so wise and comfortable in their austere clothes.

One of them was saying, ‘The curvature of the universe, according to Harrison, will be confirmed in our lifetime and I think that is a very important statement. It is nice to know that there are some people who are looking beyond the Collider.’

Ayyan now found these men more unreal than he could ever have imagined. And they were repulsive. He went to the inner door. Acharya was gazing thoughtfully through his window.

‘Sir, they insist on meeting you right now.’

Acharya took his eyes off the window and glared at the table for an instant. Then he walked to his door, flung it open with brute force and yelled at the waiting men who were in the middle of describing the curvature of the universe, ‘Get out, get out. Right now. Get out.’

The string theorists jumped. They looked confused and hurt, but they walked away without a word.

Deep inside himself, Ayyan roared with laughter. It showed on his face in a faint twitch at the edge of his lips.

Acharya returned to his chair and continued his sullen survey of the Arabian Sea. He sat like that for over an hour and then he felt an indefinable pain that he recognized as a familiar sorrow. Slowly, he understood what it was: Lavanya. Her eyesight was failing and there was a stent in her heart too. But why was he thinking about her? Yes, at six, he had to take her to the hospital. The driver was not coming in today and so he had to drive. There was something funereal about it, he thought: an old man driving his old woman to the hospital. Something very lonely about it. Something very sad and American. He got up and steered his trousers around his waist.

At the end of the main driveway of the Professors’ Quarters there was a hard-surface tennis court. An instructor was coaching three little girls who were in frilled tennis skirts. He was gently lobbing the ball across the net to them. One of the girls was bored with the proceedings. She began to pick up jasmine flowers that had
fallen on the clay court, and she arranged them on the fading baseline.

Lavanya was watching her. She was reminded of Shruti who was now a married woman and many worlds away. She felt deserted that moment, but was comforted by the thought of her husband who would soon come bumbling down the driveway. She was in the shade of a neem tree, and leaning against an ancient sky-blue Fiat – a relic that was misunderstood in the Quarters as a symbol of Acharya’s simple ways. The truth was that he had neither the money nor the patience to sell his ancestral lands and buy a new car with the loose change. There was a time when she used to tell him, almost every day, that he should sell off the worthless fields and that monstrous house in Sivagangai which was haunted by the ghosts of her in-laws.

She looked at her watch. It was time, but she knew she did not have to call him. It was very strange how he forgot just about everything else but always remembered her hospital appointments. There he appeared at the gate and walked down the driveway, exactly the way she had imagined. He was an old man now, she thought, and for some reason that made her laugh.

Acharya did not say anything to her. That was not unusual. They got into the car and drove in silence. Taxis broke lanes and crossed his path, singing cyclists almost died under his tyres and gave him self-righteous glares before resuming their songs, buses were at his bumper and pedestrians stood in the middle of the road waiting to cross the other half, but Acharya’s blood pressure did not rise.

‘This country has become a video game,’ he said. He did not speak for the rest of the journey.

When they reached the Breach Candy Hospital, he got out of the car, locked the doors and went into the porch. At the reception, he realized that he had left something in the car. He went back, muttering to himself. Lavanya was sitting inside the car with a calm expression on her face.

‘You can open it from inside,’ he told her.

‘I know,’ she said, as she struggled out of the vehicle.

‘Then why didn’t you do it?’ he asked angrily. ‘Why are you being dramatic?’

‘I am being dramatic?’

‘I know I forgot you in the car. So?’

‘So nothing. It happens. Did I say anything?’

That night, after they returned from the hospital, Acharya could not sleep. He stood on the long, narrow balcony and looked at the dark sea and at the heavens above. It was a moonless summer night and he could see the stars. Once, he knew them intimately and by their names. Some people wanted the excitement of searching for signals from those faraway places. They were not romantic men who had the endearing desperation of a child. They were rotting scientists who were stranded in mediocrity, who had slogged for years in radio astronomy and had found no glory. They wanted the easy fame of a dramatic nonsense. They were willing to go to war with him for that. He knew how to fight them. Another battle, he thought. And he felt tired.

S
EVEN MEN WERE
gathered around the oval table. In the silence of an unnerving wait, they could hear the hum of the air conditioning. They were waiting for something to pass. Every time there was the slightest sound outside, they would look up at the closed door and return to a wait that they knew would soon end.

The door opened, and an almost perceptible wave of fear and anticipation went through the room. But when they saw Oparna Goshmaulik there was relief. She sat down, wondering who had died. ‘Thanks for coming,’ Nambodri said, the exhilaration of seeing her subdued by the heaviness of the moment.

She raised her eyebrows to ask what it was all about.

‘You will soon know,’ he said.

A few minutes later Bhaskar Basu walked in. He was a trim tidy man who suspected that he was good-looking. His jovial grey hair was distant cousin to Nambodri’s radiant aureole. The frames of his spectacles were thick and artistic. Behind the glasses, his narrow eyes looked shrewd and capable. Asshole, Oparna guessed.

Basu’s searching eyes, inevitably, rested on her. He asked Nambodri, ‘Won’t you introduce us?’

Oparna did not understand this peculiar habit of Indian men. If they could letch at her so overtly, they might as well ask her directly who she was. Why did they always turn to someone else and say, ‘Won’t you introduce us?’ It was so pathetic.

‘Oparna Goshmaulik,’ Nambodri said, ‘Head of Astrobiology.’

‘A Bengali girl,’ Basu said, a light coming to his face as if an inner bulb had switched on. He said something to her in Bangla and she tried to respond with something approaching a polite smile.

Basu turned self-important and stylish. He leaned back in his chair and broke the silence of the scientists around him.

‘Don’t worry, I am going to take care of it. I am here now,’ he said. ‘The old man is not here yet? I think we should call him.’

‘He will come,’ Nambodri said dryly. He feared that the presence of Oparna was inspiring the bureaucrat to assume a certain coolness that could be suicidal. Acharya, if slighted, was capable of flinging a paperweight at the offender. Oparna was in that room because Nambodri wanted her to witness the first tremors of a shift in the balance of power, and also to disrupt the Balloon Mission. But he was beginning to regret the move. Basu was getting carried away.