Serious Men (14 page)

Basu launched into the structure of the new Seti department, even though the radio astronomers had already been briefed. When he spoke, he kept glancing at Oparna, who decided that she would toy with her mobile. He eventually fell silent because he had nothing more to say and everybody was looking grim and distracted anyway. The brooding wait resumed: all ears were listening for the door.

When Arvind Acharya walked in, one of the scientists stood up on impulse, thereby greatly ruining the ‘aggressive position’ Nambodri had said they should take. Acharya sat between two radio astronomers who looked more keenly at the table than they really needed to. Nambodri was disturbed by his old friend’s calm. He knew something was wrong.

‘Thanks for coming,’ Basu said, with a gracious smile. ‘Let me now …’

Acharya held up his hand to him and said, ‘Shut up.’

Basu’s elegant face appeared to lose size. He tried to form words. ‘Excuse me? I don’t understand,’ he said, looking severe. ‘What do you mean by that?’

Acharya consulted his watch.

‘I don’t understand this.’ Basu raised his voice.

‘Do you understand everything, usually?’ Acharya asked. There was something about the way he said it, with the deep serenity of an ancient pedagogue, that brought about another silence.

The radio astronomers looked at each other. Acharya consulted his watch again. There was the sound of a mobile phone vibrating in silent mode. It was a persistent spasmodic screech. Basu reached for his coat and took out his mobile. He saw the number and went to a corner of the room.

‘Yes, Sir. Yes, Sir,’ the astronomers heard him say with a sinking feeling.

‘Yes, Sir. Yes, Sir,’ Basu said many times. It was a private dialect of bureaucracy, and it had no other words.

When Basu put the phone back in his coat pocket, Nambodri knew the revolution was over. Basu sank into his chair looking pale.

‘Dr Acharya,’ he said, ‘the Minister has asked me to apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you. We are dropping our proposal to start a Seti department and the matter will not be broached as long as you are opposed to it.’

Basu rubbed his nose during the pause and continued, somewhat pathetically, ‘I hope you understand my efforts were in the best interest of science. I really believed that the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is a very important step forward. I thought it had defence implications too. I may have been wrong, but I hope you will get inside my mind and see the …’

‘I have been inside your mind,’ Acharya said. ‘It was a short journey.’

Basu left the room first. Oparna followed. The radio astronomers then rose, one after the other, and left the room in a funereal procession. Only Acharya and Nambodri were left. They sat still, the officious parabola of the oval table between them. Nambodri was smiling. The smile reminded Acharya of the arrack drinkers who used to fall defeated in the paddyfields of his childhood.

‘I thought you were beyond office politics,’ Nambodri said, ‘but it looks as if you have learnt a few things from the little men, as you call us. I forgot how famous you are, Arvind. Who did you call? The PM? The President? Who did you call?’

‘I want you out, Jana.’

Acharya felt sorry for this old man who did not know he was old, with whom he had spent many summers of his youth in a cold distant land, when together they had so much hope for each other and the world.

‘What do you want, you bastard?’ Acharya asked, almost in anguish.

‘What do I want?’ Nambodri said, with a sad chuckle. ‘I just want to search for extraterrestrial intelligence, Arvind. It’s very simple. What do you want?’

‘I want scientists in my institute to work on real science. If radio astronomers here are bored with pulsars, then they must quit and grow rubber on their fathers’ hills. Not chase alien signals.’

‘We have been saying the same things to each other for a long, long time,’ Nambodri said, ‘like two people in a bad marriage.’

‘Tell me something,’ Acharya said, in a tone that was remarkably kind. ‘Do you really believe you are going to find a signal from an advanced alien civilization?’

‘There is no reason why we shouldn’t.’

‘That’s not what I asked. Do you believe you will? What do you believe? Remember the word “belief”? That thing you had when you were twenty? What exactly do you believe? When you wake up in the morning, what do you know is certainly true?’

‘Not all of us are meant to believe, Arvind. Some of us can only wonder and, on good days, hope. Do you really believe that all life on Earth came from outer space?’

‘Yes. I don’t just believe. I know.’

‘Through microscopic spores that came riding on comets and meteorites?’

‘Yes,’ Acharya said peacefully. ‘And you know what? I also
believe that these spores fall on different worlds in different corners of the universe and they spawn life that is suited to those conditions. Life that could be vastly different from what we can imagine. Life that could even evolve into giant zero-mass beings. Like massive clouds. Things we cannot even imagine.’

‘Why don’t you go public on this hypothesis then?’

‘It is not a hypothesis,’ Acharya said softly. ‘It’s a theory.’

In the Institute, a hypothesis was a good idea, but a theory was a good idea that deserved funds.

Acharya rose from the chair, holding his left knee for an instant. When he reached the door, he heard a sad voice ask, ‘Is there a way I can stay on, Arvind?’

Ayyan Mani was furious. The war of the Brahmins had ended so fast. And ended in the banal way in which medieval no-talent writers finished their moral fables — the great triumphing over the petty. The loss of anticipation deepened the grimness of his routine and he was filled with the fatigue of an unbearable boredom. When Oparna stood by his desk and asked to see Acharya, he did not even look at her. He just made a call and sent her in.

She entered the den, as usual, wondering why she could hear her heart every time she saw this man and if this fear had more disturbing names.

‘I came here to tell you that I didn’t know why I was called to that meeting,’ she said. ‘I don’t want you to think that I am part of what they tried to do this morning.’

‘I know,’ Acharya said. She stood there in the vain hope that he would ask her to sit down and tell her how unfortunate it was that she was caught in the middle of all this, or maybe they could talk about the balloon that they would soon send to the stratosphere. But he was reading.

After she left the room, Acharya tried to remember something. He had told himself that he would recall it later, but he could not place the moment. Then it came to him: it was when he had seen Oparna in the conference room, he had felt something. It was like a stab, a trivial feeling of betrayal and then a more elaborate
agony as though she had died and left him alone. He was not surprised that he thought of her death. Everybody died, the young especially. But why should her death make him feel deserted? He considered the matter for a few seconds, but then his mind drifted to the triumph of remembering it. Nowadays, problems that he scheduled for the future never returned to him.

T
HE FUMES GLOWED
in the car lights, and they cast giant fleeting shadows of pedestrians in the air. In the vapours of the late evening traffic, cars and trucks lay stranded on the lane as if they were all trying to flee from an approaching calamity. Heads peered out of the windows. Long lines of honking vehicles melded and expanded until, somewhere ahead, they became a huge unmoving knot of metal and smoke. In the heart of the jam was a black Honda City, its bumper torn off. A girl whose navel was pierced by a glimmer of silver, and whose small pink T-shirt said in gold ‘Skinny Bitch’, was standing in a daze. Her hands were spread out, and she said in English, several times, the same thing: ‘What the freaking hell?’

An abandoned taxi was still kissing the rear of her car. A dark man, who must have been the cab driver, was standing facing her in the middle of the road, sheepish and giggling. People on the pavement looked on in glee. A man who was sitting on his haunches and watching the fun screamed, ‘Now look at
her
bumper.’ Ayyan walked through the situation with a serene smile.

A few metres ahead was a barber’s called Headmaster, and next to it was a restaurant with aluminium-topped tables and wooden chairs. At the entrance, Ayyan spotted Thambe, the tiny man to whom he had handed an envelope full of notes on the Worli Seaface. They sat at a table and ordered tea. ‘The article was great,’ Ayyan said. ‘My boy is so happy.’

‘I hope other papers pick it up,’ Thambe said, flapping his thighs. He stopped a waiter to ask if there was a toilet in the restaurant. The waiter shook his head.

Thambe was a reporter with Yug, and one of those hectic men who did things that did not have a name. He could bring back lost licences, create ration-cards, and he knew the mobile numbers of government clerks.

‘You really did a beautiful job of my son’s achievement,’ Ayyan said.

‘I believe that brilliant boys like your son have to be supported,’ Thambe said, pouring his tea into the saucer.

‘Has anybody from the English papers contacted you about my son?’

‘No,’ the reporter said. ‘The English reporters are such snobs. They never follow up anything we do.’

‘I see. You know, Thambe, it would have been nice if you had put him on the front page. After all, a ten-year-old boy winning a contest like that is no small achievement.’

‘I know. But the front page,’ Thambe said, smiling sadly, ‘is very expensive, Mani.’

‘How expensive?’

‘Oh, it’s beyond us. I don’t even go there. It is for big people.’

‘Your editor knows that you … you help friends?’

‘You are asking me if the editor knows if I take money to write? Be direct. We are friends now. Of course he knows. You know how much my salary is? Eight hundred rupees. When he hired me, he said, “We don’t pay much.” Then he took out a press card with my photograph on it and said, “Now go out into the market and make whatever you want.” ‘

They drank their tea silently. Then the reporter said, ‘I have to go now. So if …’ Ayyan took out his wallet and counted some notes.

‘This is for friendship,’ he said, as he handed the cash to Thambe. ‘The advance I gave you, that too was for our friendship.’

‘Friendship, of course,’ the reporter said. His face turned serious as he counted the notes. It was the same serious face, Ayyan remembered, that descended on the great minds of the Institute when they counted cash.

‘Friendship is everything,’ Thambe said, somehow finding space for the notes in his shirt pocket, which was already bulging. ‘I took your word, Mani. You said your son won the contest, I believed you. No questions asked. That’s friendship.’

‘Is there a way such a friendship can get English papers to write about my son?’

On his way back home, a familiar gloom filled Ayyan. There was no getting away from it. He tried to fight it by imagining the face of Oja Mani, how jubilant she had looked when Adi’s teacher had sent the first frantic note about the boy’s insubordinate brilliance. But the gloom only grew into an acidic fear in his stomach. Fear worried him because it reminded him that life was not always a familiar place. This game he was playing was far bigger than the other plots of his life. The game, this time, was his son.

The rise of Adi as a child genius had begun about a year ago when Ayyan had gone home late one evening and Oja had opened the door with tears in her eyes and a deep joyous smile that made him suspect that her demented mother had finally won a lottery.

‘My son got 100 per cent in the maths test,’ Oja had said. ‘There are forty-two boys in his class. All fair and rich and fat. My son was the only one who got 100 per cent.’

Oja, who usually stared blankly at him without ambition or hope, and sometimes in the sorrow of being stranded in a humid hell, was so ecstatic that only tears could release the joy. That night he had taken Adi out for ice-cream. When they were walking down the Worli Seaface he heard the boy mutter the name of every car that was parked or was passing by. He had merely to look at a car, its front or its rear, and he would know its make. It seemed exceptional, but Ayyan knew there was nothing there more than a simple streak of smartness that most children possessed. He had heard a thousand times men chatting in the train about the brilliance of their children – ‘My son is just three but he knows how to turn on the computer and send
emails. He is a genius.’ Or, ‘My daughter is ten but she knows the names of all the lakes in the world.’ It was in that way that Adi was smart. ‘City, Ambassador, Zen, Esteem, City,’ the boy was saying on the promenade. The vigilant mind of Ayyan began to think of a simple plot, to achieve nothing more than some fun and a distraction from the inescapable miseries of BDD.

From that night, he drew Adi into a pact. ‘Our secret,’ he would tell his son, and make him memorize questions that he should ask his teachers. Ayyan devised simple questions, like, ‘What is gravity made of, Miss?’ Or, ‘Why are leaves green?’ He asked Adi to raise these questions any time during the class, never mind the context. ‘It’ll be fun,’ he told his son.

At first, the boy’s questions in the class seemed endearing. Teachers found him cute and, of course, bright and curious. Slowly, Adi’s questions became more complex: ‘If plants can eat light, why aren’t there things that eat sound?’ Or, when he heard a cue word like ‘ocean’, he would yell in the class, ‘The average depth of the ocean is 3.7 kilometres, why aren’t lakes so deep?’ When his teachers, still enamoured with his oddness, tried to engage him in a conversation about light, or sound, or the ocean, Adi clammed up because he did not know anything beyond what his father had taught him. But his silence did not surprise the staff. He was, after all, just a little boy. An odd, laconic little boy who was also partially deaf.

When it all began, Adi used to mumble to his mother about having a secret pact with his father, but she dismissed it as the prattle between father and son. In time, Adi began to enjoy the attention he was receiving at school. He began to understand that he was considered extraordinary, and not ‘special’ which was what they called the handicapped. He began to attach a certain importance to the pact with his father and even understood the reason why it had to be a secret. He vaguely knew that his mother would not tolerate the game he and his father were playing, and her opposition would deprive him of the status he was beginning to be granted in school.