Serious Men (7 page)

Oja wiped her tears and looked angrily at her husband. The way she looked, he knew what she was going to say.

‘His ear,’ she said, and wept, pressing her wrists on her eyes, ‘This might not have happened if we had had gods.’

‘Enough,’ Ayyan screamed.

There was a time when Ayyan thought he might never become a father. Long before he had married Oja, he had once gone to a fertility clinic’s nascent sperm bank with the insane idea of donating his Dalit semen to the fair childless Brahmin couples. He had heard that sperm banks do not reveal the identity of the donor, and so his seed could impregnate hundreds of unsuspecting high-caste women. He hoped stout brooding Dalits would spring up
everywhere. But the doctors there told him that he had a defect and so his contribution could not be accepted. His sperm-count, they said, was just half the normal rate.

He told Oja about the defect many months after their marriage. ‘Since my sperm-count is half the normal rate, you must be doubly prepared to sleep with me,’ he had said. She replied in a lethargic way, in the middle of folding clothes, ‘I don’t understand all this maths.’ Despite his fears, just three years after their marriage, Adi was born. In the insanity of her labour, Ayyan will always remember that Oja had screamed the filthiest abuse at him. He didn’t know any woman could mouth such words, let alone his wife. ‘My husband is a son of a whore. May his arse explode,’ she had screamed in Tamil. But it was a tradition. Women in her tribe had to abuse their men when they were in labour.

As Adi grew up, they slowly learnt that he was almost entirely deaf in his left ear. Oja believed that the gods were angry. Buddha’s eternal smile, she had always interpreted as the peace of a cosmically powerless man. It was the other gods, the Hindu gods, who had all the magic. One night, she told her husband with a wisdom that baffled him, ‘You love this man who found God under a Peepal tree. Do you know that a Peepal tree is a Brahmin? Yes it is.’

Ayyan could never bear it when he saw Oja cry. His heart grew heavy at the sight and his throat felt cold. He thought of what he could say about the elephant god whom he would fling by the wayside tomorrow. He searched for something entertaining. ‘You know, Oja,’ he said, ‘an elephant’s trunk has four thousand muscles.’

There was a time when she used to love such facts. She would marvel at a world that was so strange and at her man who knew so much. He collected such curious facts every day to ration them out to her.

‘Did you know elephants can swim?’ he tried again. ‘Five years ago, a whole herd of elephants swam three hundred kilometres
to reach a far island. Can you imagine? Thirty of them swimming three hundred kilometres. Their fat legs pedalling underwater.’

Something happened in the trembling vessel on the stove, and she busied herself with that.

After dinner, which was saved only by the prawn fry, Ayyan went up to the terrace for the meeting. He took his son along. Adi was wearing both the caps his father had got him, one over the other. Against a bleak starless sky, over a hundred men and a few women were gathered. Some were sitting on chairs; some sat on the tar floor of the terrace; others were standing. A drunkard sang softly. At the heart of the conference were three men who looked cruel. They were the agents of a builder. One of them was a fat man with moist black lips and calm eyes. He was an old hand of the underworld who mended his ways after the spiritual experience of being shot by the police. It was said that every Tuesday, when he went to the Siddhivinayak temple in Prabhadevi, he wore a bloodstained vest with three bullet holes in it.

Every now and then, builders who eyed the vast sprawling property on which the grey blocks of BDD stood started a round of enticements to lure the residents into selling off their flats. This nocturnal meeting was one of the many Ayyan had seen. He knew nothing would come out of it. There were too many dissenting voices and an irrational greed. Some thought they could extract more if they waited. Alcoholics wanted to sell fast, and that strengthened the resolve of those who wanted to wait. And then there were many who feared that they would not be able to survive in the new skyscrapers that the builders had promised. ‘My sister says that in the apartment blocks, you have to keep the doors shut,’ a woman was saying aloud, but not to anyone in particular. Someone was telling the agents that all the forty families on the ground floor would have to be given adjacent flats in the new high-rises because they had lived like one big family for decades. Ayyan wanted to sell, but he knew it was not going to happen soon.

Some men spotted Ayyan, and egged him to get closer to the agents. ‘Ask questions,’ an old man begged him, with hope in his cataract eyes.

‘Mani has come, Mani has come,’ someone said aloud.

Adi looked severely at a woman and said, ‘That’s our chair.’

Ayyan endured the meeting in silence wondering if there was a way he could decide for all these fools and settle the matter once and for all. But how? He thought a good special effects engineer could pull it off. Make God appear and say in cosmic echoes, ‘Sell your stupid homes. Take ten lakhs for every flat and be done with it. And don’t piss in the corridors, you bastards.’

When the meeting ended with the plans for holding another meeting, Ayyan took his son for a long walk to the Worli Seaface. The furtive couples and brisk walkers had left, and the promenade was almost deserted. They ambled in the gentle breeze for a while. Then they sat on a pink cement bench. Adi was sleepy. He was leaning on his father, but his eyes were open.

‘Say, “Fibonacci … Fibonacci”,’ Ayyan said. A familiar look of concentration came to Adi’s face. He played with the words in his mind. His father mouthed the words slowly. ‘Fee bo na chi.’

Adi repeated after him, ‘See rees. Fee bon a chi see rees.’

Ayyan said, ‘Fibonacci Series.’

Adi repeated the words.

‘Brilliant,’ Ayyan said. They sat there in silence and listened to the soft lull of the Arabian Sea.

Adi yawned and asked, ‘What if someone finds out?’

R
OUND
T
ABLES WERE
oval even in the Institute of Theory and Research. That was the first thought that came to Oparna as she reached the second-floor hall for the monthly Round Table. She had missed the last two and so this was her first. There was a massive oblong desk at the centre of the room around which men were sitting in agitated concentric circles. Some were standing and chatting. Cheerful peons were passing biscuits and tea. There was much gaiety and jostling. Like sperm under a microscope. Most of the scientists were in light shirts worn over loose comfortable trousers. They were austere men who knew they were austere. Some of the younger ones were in jeans. Despite the overwhelming informality of this place, the loose shirts, the tempestuous white hair and the leather sandals, they were so clearly the masters in the room, their special status differentiated from the final concentric circle where the secretaries stood silently, sullen and unspeaking, as though the biscuits were stale. In the eye of the room’s gentle commotion was the solid figure of Arvind Acharya. The men either side of him were turned away, talking animatedly with others. Once again, he was a rock in the stream. All turbulence went around him.

When Oparna walked in, a silence grew. She made her way nervously through the outer rings. Grey balding heads turned, one after the other. There were two female secretaries somewhere on the fringes, but she felt as though she were the only woman in the room because she knew the men felt that way too. Jana Nambodri, with that cloud of stylish silver hair, short-sleeved shirt neatly tucked into corduroy trousers, was at the
oblong table, directly facing Acharya. Nambodri stood up, and with an elaborate sweep of his hand showed her an empty seat in the second row. She inched her way delicately towards the chair. Old men in her path moved their legs and made way. Some of them turned away uncomfortably as her back almost grazed their tired faces. Some pretended to continue chatting while looking at her rear in respectful nonchalance.

‘She is a Bengali?’ a man intended to whisper, but the silence was so deep that everybody heard it. (The man probably was a Bengali.) Faint chuckles filled the air.

‘Historically,’ Nambodri said aloud, ‘the only just punishment for a Bengali male has been a Bengali female.’ A round of laughter went through the room. ‘We forgot to mention it before, gentlemen, she is our first female faculty,’ Nambodri declared.

One man clapped. The solitary applause was about to die prematurely, but the others joined in to reinforce the compliment. The applause faded into a long comfortable silence.

And that was how the evening would unfold, with festive commotion giving way to silences, and silences broken by profound questions about the universe, and questions easing into laughs. It was a long tradition here for the scientists to meet on the first Friday of every month and chat.

Ayyan Mani surveyed the room with his back to the wall, as he had done many times, and tried to understand how it came to be that truth was now in the hands of these unreal men. They were in the middle of debating the perfect way to cut a cake and were concluding that carving triangular pieces, as everybody does, was inefficient. Then they made fun of a French scientist, who was not in the room, because he had said that man would never devise a way to predict the highest possible prime number. After that they began to wonder what the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva would reveal.

Ayyan could not bear it. This never-ending quest for truth. In the simpler ages, wise mendicants, metaphorical zens, sons of God, sages who turned into anthills, all such types could not say
in crisp clear copy that
The Times of India
could publish, the reason why life existed or why there was something instead of nothing. They could have just said it in a neat paragraph and solved the mystery once and for all. But they didn’t. They told fables instead. Now, truth was in the hands of the men in this room, and they were more incomprehensible than the men of God. Ayyan was certain that there was no such thing called truth. There was only the pursuit of truth and it was a pursuit that would always go on. It was a form of employment. ‘Everything that people do in this world is because they have nothing better to do,’ he told Oja Mani once. ‘Einstein had something called Relativity. You scrub the floor twice a day.’

The Round Table had begun to discuss the fate of Pluto. Oparna Goshmaulik was following every word carefully. She did not understand many things that were being said, but the melancholy induced by her basement office was being lifted. She had always liked the company of men who knew a lot. She tried to understand why they were talking about Pluto with so much seriousness. She liked Pluto. From the arguments around her, she pieced together that the planet had been recently dropped from the model of the solar system at a science exhibition in America. And that had caused, not for the first time it seemed, a fierce debate over whether it should be considered a planet or a diminished member of the Kuiper Belt.

‘Pluto is too small, too small. It can fit into America. It’s so small,’ one man said vehemently.

Even here, she told herself without malice, everything is a kind of penis.

Nambodri, who was turning towards her and throwing the glances of an aspiring mentor, asked, ‘What do you think, Oparna?’

She pretended to be coy because she wanted to convey that she believed she was not qualified to have an opinion. After all she was just an astrobiologist, not an astronomer. That meekness, she knew, the men would like.

She said, ‘I’ll be quite sad if Pluto goes. I am Scorpio.’ Once
again a silence fell because of her. Oparna awkwardly explained, ‘Scorpio is ruled by Mars and Pluto.’

‘So she is a Scorpio. Like me,’ a man said in a low tone, hoping to set off a round of laughter, but somehow this did not happen.

‘What are the Scorpio traits?’ a voice asked derisively and chuckled. It was first a robust chuckle, but it soon faded into a self-conscious giggle when the source realized he had no support.

‘Intense, strong, confident,’ Nambodri said, looking at Oparna, ‘and passionate.’ A faint laughter died quickly. Oparna managed to smile and mumble, ‘Astrology is not a science, you know.’

‘That’s why it’s not in dispute,’ Nambodri said.

Matters slowly moved to another simmering issue: quotas for backward castes in colleges. There was a fear that the Institute of Theory and Research might be asked to allocate seats for the lower castes in the faculty and research positions. The general mood in the room turned sombre. Some men threw cautious glances at the secretaries and stray peons when there were comments on the political aggression of backward castes. Ayyan looked on impassively. He had heard all these arguments before and knew what their conclusion would be. The Brahmins would say graciously, ‘Past mistakes must be corrected; opportunities must be created,’ and then they would say, ‘But merit cannot be compromised.’ He imagined Nambodri cleaning a common toilet in the chawls and telling his son while he was at it, ‘Son, merit cannot be compromised.’ Brutal laughter echoed inside his head, showing in his face as nothing more than a faint twitch.

‘It’s foolish to think that we all come from a privileged background. I come from a humble family,’ Nambodri was saying, softly, with an air of mellow introspection. (Ayyan could mouth the words he was about to hear, and he would have got most of them right.) ‘I had to walk five miles to school. I remember one day, we went hungry because my father was caught in a storm and he could not come home for three days. I survived all that
and managed to reach the cream of Indian science, not because I was a Brahmin but because I worked very hard. And put my IQ of 140 to good use.’

Unconsciously, he threw a look at Oparna to check if she was listening. ‘I think it is stupid of people to think we, I mean the Brahmins, are privileged and all that. You know, the richest boy in my class was a Dalit whose father owned a truck business. He had a big house, he had a car and all that. I do feel bad about what my forefathers did …’