Serious Men (15 page)
He looked forward to disrupting every class. The disruptions
began to annoy his teachers. They were increasingly baffled by his questions. They began to write notes in his handbook summoning his parents, and that created moments of fear and entertainment at home. Oja was concerned, but she was also excited by the prospects of a genius. ‘I want him to be normal,’ she would say, but she told everyone about his brilliance. She circled fire around his face and stained his cheek with black powder to exterminate the evil eye. The myth of a child genius was surprisingly simple to create, Ayyan realized, especially around a boy who was innately smart and who wore a hearing-aid. Adi had simply to say something odd in the class once a week to keep the legend alive.
It was easy and it was fun, but Ayyan wanted something more. So he arranged for the fictitious news item about Adi. It was still simple. The whole game could be called off at any moment. It had to end some day anyway. And it had to end before they got caught. He believed in his heart that he could get away with it. He found some comfort in the fact that he was not the first person to create the myth of genius around his child. There were people, mothers especially, who had spun far greater yarns. He had once read the incredible story of a French girl called Minou Drouet, a name he could somehow never pronounce. She published her poems when she was just eight. Her poems stunned the giants of French literature until some people began to say that it was her mother who was writing them. Little Minou was tested. She was asked to write poems in front of people. And she did. But the whole matter was never resolved. Even today people did not know if she were a child prodigy or her mother’s fraud. Then there was another girl, a Russian child called Natasha Demkina, whose mother claimed that the girl had X-ray vision. Many doctors even confirmed that Natasha had that ability, but there were many who said she was a fraud. Ayyan wanted to meet those marvellous mothers. He believed he understood them, and understood why they did what they did.
But he would not go too far. His game would end soon. It troubled him sometimes, the readiness with which his son was
playing the game. Some days, Ayyan noticed that the boy chose to forget that it was all just a game. He believed that he truly was a genius. He loved the word. He mentioned it in his sleep.
The innocent face of Oja, in the glow of her overnight turmeric treatments and the illusion of a sudden extraordinary life, haunted Ayyan. She must never know the truth because she would never forgive him. The lies he had told her had already taken root and created a fable in her mind. It was too late to retract them. She must live with those lies forever. It frightened him, the thought of living with a woman for a whole lifetime without telling her that he had once fooled her. Even though he survived the world through unambiguous practicality, he believed that a man’s bond with his wife should not be corrupted by too much rationality. Marriage needed the absurdity of values. In the world that lay outside his home, there was no right or wrong. Every moment was a battle, and the cunning won. But his home was not something as trivial as the world. To fool Oja into believing that her son was a genius was a crime, a crime so grave that it did not have a punishment. But the game was also a magnificent lure. He loved it.
That’s what frightened him. Despite his own disgust at the cruelty of the myth he was creating around his son, Ayyan feared that he might not be able to stop. He was falling into the intoxication of the game, its excitement that was so potent. He thought of his alcoholic brothers, in whose eyes he had once seen the desperation to live, but who could not escape the powerful addiction that triumphed over the spirit of life. The thrill of erecting the story of a boy genius and the tales that drew his small family in a cosy huddle in their one-room home — he did not want to lose all that. Because that was all they had. So, what must a man do?
An ordinary man wants his wife to feel the excitement of life. Ayyan had been born into poverty that no human should have to endure; he absorbed the rudiments of knowledge under the municipality’s lights; he learnt the guile to feed himself and his family; and he was now stranded because there is only so far that
the son of a sweeper can go. Ayyan had no exceptional talent, but he was bright enough to see so clearly the futility of hope and the grimness of an unremarkable life ahead. So what must a man do? Without the sport of his son’s genius, Ayyan knew that the routine of his life would eventually suffocate him. The future, otherwise, was all too predictable. He would type letters for the Brahmins, take their calls and suffer their pursuit of truth. Then, every single day of his life, he would climb the steep colonial steps of BDD, wade through its undead, and find refuge in the perfunctory love of a woman who did not really look at him any more. He would live out his whole life, so unspeakably ordinary, in a one-room home that was a hundred and eighty square feet (including the illicit loft).
Ayyan began to walk briskly now because that always abolished his sorrows and fears. He appeared so purposeful when he entered the BDD chawls that the defeated eyes of drunken men on the broken walkways looked at him with envy. Here, a man with purpose was a fortunate man. He went through the yellow walls of the top floor and felt the stares from the open doors. Children were playing and screaming on the corridor. Dreamless women combed their hair slowly. Silent widows, ancient and bent, sat on the doorways, their gazes transfixed at a past.
As he passed through the open doors of the corridor he caught voices of the lives in every cell. A woman was saying that she would never buy onions again, he did not know why. Next door, a peon had just returned from work and was sharing a leftover cake he had pinched from someone’s birthday party in the office. Further down, a man was asking for the price of a Maruti Zen on his mobile. These were voices he usually heard. But then, he heard a language that was alien to him. He heard a mother slap her boy. He yelled. Then she gave him a whack on his back. The boy ran out into the corridor patting his mouth, and he sprinted to and fro as if trying to dodge his own pain. So far, there was nothing unusual. Then Ayyan heard the woman scream above the boy’s wails, ‘Do your homework, or I will kill you.’
That, he had never heard in this place before. What Oja had told him was true then. Ever since Adi appeared in the newspaper, mothers, especially in this block, had gone insane. They were belting their sons and making them study, while Oja was buying kites, cricket bats and comics for her son in the fear that he might otherwise become more abnormal than he already was.
After dinner, the three of them went to the tar-coated terrace. There were several dim figures ambling beneath the half-moon. From the distant shadows, a solitary drunkard sang of love and liberation. Adolescent girls stood in groups and giggled at the boys. The boys, pale and scrawny, were in an excited state and they indulged in mock fights among themselves to attract the attention of the girls. Oja mingled with the young mothers who were also in their nighties, which bore the indelible stains of turmeric and chilli. The women looked at Oja with affection or malice — Ayyan could never tell which — but they looked at her more carefully than before. And Oja had developed a certain grace, a sort laboured modesty that Miss World affected when she visited children with cancer.
Ayyan held the index finger of his son and went towards an isolated corner. He pretended to study his phone to escape old friends. They still came to him, but though Ayyan smiled and greeted them, he never took his eyes off the phone.
Adi spotted a tennis ball stuck in a drain. He looked around to see if anyone else had noticed it. He tried to extricate his finger from his father’s grip, but it would not release. He pulled hard, but he was not strong enough. They were laughing now, father and son. Adi tried to bite his father’s hand, but even that didn’t help. ‘Let me go,’ he said.
‘Say, “Supernova”,’ he heard his father say. That made Adi forget the ball. He loved this game.
‘Supernova,’ his father said.
‘Supernova,’ Adi said. ‘Easy.’
‘How do stars die, Miss?’ Ayyan said in English.
‘How do stars die, Miss?’
‘How do stars die, Miss, apart from becoming supernovas?’
‘How do stars die, Miss, apart from becoming supernovas?’
‘How do stars die, Miss, apart from becoming supernovas?’
‘How do stars die, Miss, apart from supernovas?’
‘Apart from becoming supernovas?’
‘How do stars die, Miss, apart from becoming supernovas?’
‘Bright boy.’
Adi extricated himself from his father and went to take the ball that was stuck in the mouth of the drain. He looked around innocently before he crouched and pulled the ball out. He played with it for some time. Then he said to his father, ‘I like prime numbers.’
Ayyan ignored him.
‘I like prime numbers because they cannot be predicted,’ Adi said, in a casual, conversational sort of way. ‘You don’t have to talk to me like that, Adi.’
‘Like how?’
‘Like how you are talking right now about prime numbers.’
‘I like prime numbers because they cannot be predicted.’
‘It’s OK, Adi, you don’t have to talk like that with me. We play the game only sometimes. Not all the time. You understand?’
O
PARNA
G
OSHMAULIK POUND
it funny. That the curtain was blood-red, that it went up in somnolent folds, and that there was a silence of anticipation all around. All this drama at an event where the guest lecturer had promised to speak on the ‘Interpretations of Quantum Mechanics’. Even the lights were dimming now. The Talks had begun. It was an annual event in honour of departing research scholars, the Institute’s version of a convocation ceremony but without the black gowns or the precondition that the scholars should now get out into the real world.
The auditorium was full. There were silhouettes on the aisles. Scores of people were outside the doors, denied entry, denied the Interpretations of Quantum Mechanics. And they were disconsolate. She could hear their angry demands to be allowed to at least sit in the aisles. But then even the aisles were filled. This was a strange parallel world.
There was a deafening applause now. On the stage appeared an amicable white man, and Arvind Acharya. The two men sat on cane chairs in the centre of an illuminated circle. The sheer expanse of the stage was fit for ballet but the Institute allowed only lectures. A pretty girl, somewhat preoccupied with her long straight hair, arrived at the podium. ‘Look at my hair, look at my hair,’ Oparna thought she was going to say, but instead the girl said, ‘Science is an evolution of the human mind. It is the true history of mankind.’ After a few lines like this she said that the men on the stage needed no introduction and then she introduced them. The girl was not from the Institute and Oparna
wondered where the men had found her. She remembered Jana Nambodri asking her if she could introduce the guests and hand out the bouquets too. ‘We need some beauty out there’, he had said. She had refused because she had felt like refusing him. Also, even though she understood the banality of men and the aesthetic improvements a woman would bring to an occasion like this, she was privately against women being used as ceremonial dolls. And, for reasons that were not clear to her then, she wanted to look at Acharya from a comfortable seat in the shelter of darkness.
His initial geniality had vanished. His red cheeks were now molten, his infant bald head shone under the lights and he was surveying the audience in dismay. Keeble rose from his cane chair and went to the podium. He drank two glasses of water. He was a tall slender man, elderly and pleasant. ‘It is a pleasure to speak to a gathering like this,’ he said, and then looking at Acharya, he added, ‘A bit intimidating too.’
A gentle hush of laughter went through the auditorium. Some laughed aloud late to show that they understood the joke. Keeble began his lecture. Oparna endured the Interpretations of Quantum Mechanics by observing what Acharya did throughout the speech. He would open his mouth in a trance or glare at the roof, or signal to someone for a glass of water, or a faint smirk would come to his face at something Keeble had said.
At one point, he was looking angrily at Keeble, and she felt nervous. She hoped he wouldn’t do anything stupid. Keeble was talking about Time and was coming to the perilous conclusion: ‘Though Stephen Hawking had misgivings about what he had said earlier, I am of the opinion that the arrow of Time moves both ways. In some conditions we would remember the future and not the past, and a ripple would cause a stone to fall. Time can be reversed.’
Acharya’s deep operatic voice exclaimed, ‘Not possible.’ He said it again, this time softly. ‘Not possible.’
Keeble looked a bit embarrassed, but the spontaneous gasp of the audience, then the laughter and the festive murmurs that
ensued, diminished the shock. Also, there was no malice in the voice that had spoken. Acharya’s comment somehow invoked the spirit of science and everybody understood it that way.