Serious Men (16 page)

‘We will talk about it later, Arvind,’ Keeble said jovially. ‘Maybe we can meet yesterday, if you have the time.’

When Acharya eventually rose to speak, and steered his trousers around his waist, Oparna laughed. A studious stranger sitting next to her looked at her curiously before returning his expectant eyes to the stage. Acharya walked like a tusker to the podium. Oparna felt the world around her quietening. There was then a silence that was eerie and total. It was broken by the squeal of the mike when he tapped it gently.

‘I like Henry Keeble very much and so it hurts me to say that the end of quantum physics is near,’ he said, his voice manly and powerful. Yet, innocent, rude and pure. ‘The Large Hadron Collider will confirm that many exotic particles do not actually exist and that many among us may have been talking rubbish for the last three decades. Maybe we cannot understand physics at the quantum level without understanding other things which are not considered physics today. Other things like …’ He paused. He appeared to decide if he must say it. He did not say it.

‘I believe it is time for a new kind of physics to arrive,’ he said. ‘Honestly, I don’t know what this new physics will look like. Anyway, I am too old for that revolution. Maybe someone in this auditorium will one day bring it to us. But this is not what I want to talk about today.

‘There are research students here who will be leaving us this year. They will be pursuing their interests in other universities. I came here, primarily, to tell you something. Go with the knowledge that man has just scratched the surface. It is a very impressive scratch and we must be proud. But there is a lot, a lot of things, to be done. I wish I were as old as you now, at this time. There is so much to do. But I have no tips on what you must do. In fact, I came here to say what you must never do. There is no pleasant way to say this, so let me say it the way I want to say it. Most of you will probably never really discover
anything. You may not contribute anything to the great equations that describe the universe to the world. But you will have the good fortune of encountering people of exceptional intelligence. People who are much smarter than you. Never get in their way, never group together in disgruntled circles and play games. Respect talent, real talent. Worship it. Clever people will always be disliked. Don’t exploit that and crawl your way to the top. By the laws of probability most of you are mediocre. Accept it. The tragedy of mediocrity is that even mediocre people shake their heads and mull over how ‘standards are falling’. So don’t mull. Just know when you’ve to get out of the way. Most of you will be sideshows, extras in the grand unfolding of truth. That’s all right. Once you accept that and let the best brains do their jobs, you will have done your service to science and mankind.’

Oparna studied the faces in the auditorium. There was hurt and there was acceptance. She saw the light in their eyes, and it was a moment she knew she would always remember. They were under a spell, they were at the mercy of an ancient genius who was speaking his mind. The tension eased as Acharya changed course. He began to speak about the Balloon Mission and infected the audience with his conviction that microscopic aliens were falling on Earth all the time.

‘We will find them,’ he said.

Two days after The Talks, the work on the Balloon Mission intensified. The dormant machines and boxes and borrowed research hands in the basement sprang to life. And the lab in the bowels of the Institute became a hive of activity. It was now the most important place in the Institute, connected in spirit to the chamber of Acharya on the third floor. He began to arrive at the Institute before nine in the morning, bumbling down the corridors with more purpose than before, always with a comet tail of research assistants. One by one, Acharya’s old friends from different parts of the world descended for short durations to help. In the company of the old hands he relaxed a bit and appeared
less preoccupied with his own contempt for the world. Oparna began to see him the way she guessed he once was.

His eyes, that usually cast an insurmountable distance, now looked with the connivance of fellowship. The friends who came his way, he hugged fiercely, and in the meetings, which had become some sort of a festive reunion, the old men recounted the memories of their golden days and their battles with people whom they often described in a derisive way as ‘normal’. Acharya was becoming easy to be with. In the middle of a discussion, when someone said the Balloon Mission needed a name, he did not consider it a frivolity. He understood, and was game. He even thought through a brief silence and said excitedly, ‘Superman.’ His bellowing laughter shook his paunch, and a button snapped. They discussed various names until they decided that they would just call it the Balloon Project, probably BP.

Acharya’s office had been transformed into a bustling place, and Ayyan Mani in the anteroom was no longer a medium. All sorts of people had the right to walk in. But after the initial impetus, and after the old friends had fulfilled their promises, they all went back to their countries. Acharya’s room returned to its calm. Ayyan slowly rebuilt the wall again between Acharya and the rest of the world, but his importance was somewhat diminished because the natural force of the events granted Oparna the undeniable right to open the sacred inner door whenever she pleased. Acharya began to spend most of his time with her, and they often worked together into the stillness of the night.

I
T WAS PAST
midnight, and they were probably the only people left in the Institute. The lone window in his room was shut, but the smell of the impending monsoon was in the air — a whiff of salt and wet earth that lulled the mind into sleep or into remembering old rains. Acharya was reading a long list of lab equipment that had to arrive. He finally took his eyes off the material to give them relief. He removed his glasses, leaned back on his enormous black chair and stretched. He looked at the girl who was sitting across the table from him. Her head was bent in intense concentration. Oparna was reading
Elementary Descriptions of Non-culturable Bacteria.
She was a reassuring sight, almost pleasing. There was this unremarkable happiness inside her. She laughed easily, and her laughter had a womanly tolerance about it, as though she had heard the joke before but still liked it. And when she chuckled, especially when the men had tried to find a name for the Balloon Project, she would cover her mouth with one hand and arch a bit. And there was this fragrance of lemon about her, a very expensive lemon. She was a few inches shorter than Lavanya, but somehow appeared tall. So firm and strong and agile, she was. Very tidy too. She was always producing tissues from her large olive-green bag.

Girl, he thought, and found it silly that he should think she was a girl because she obviously
was
a girl. Yet, if she died, mysteriously murdered probably, the newspapers would write, ‘A thirty-year-old woman was found dead in suspicious circumstances.’ They never described a thirty-year-old as a girl. He wondered why. Even she would die one day, and he felt sad it
should be so. There was so much life in her, and so much beauty. She had a startling face, which he could not see right now. He looked apologetically at the reasonable mounds of her breasts. Her long fingers were toying with a thin gold chain around her long young neck. He strained to see her feet. But he could not see them from that angle. He liked the way her slender toes rested on her thin slippers. Her toenails were always red, and her fingernails pink. He concentrated on her head, which was still bent. Her thick real black hair was stretched to full tension and tied back in a severe pony-tail. He found it funny.

‘If I strum your head, there will be music,’ he said.

Oparna looked up. When their eyes met, he did not know why he felt he should not look at her. ‘Just an observation,’ he told his paperweight.

‘Sorry, you said something?’

‘I said nothing. Nothing important, actually.’

She smiled and went back to
Elementary Descriptions of Non-culturable Bacteria.
But she was not reading. She had not been reading for some time. You must strum then, she wanted to say. Unknowingly, her finger circled a curl that was falling on her cheek. She knew he had been looking. And her heart was pounding, her throat felt cold. She quietly conceded that she was all messed up and there was no hope for her. So many cute men in this country nowadays, all beginning to wear good narrow shoes too, and here she was hoping that a giant astronomer whose shirt buttons actually rotated in the strain of his stomach would look at her more carefully and find something more he could do with her hair. But he did have a very beautiful face and pure luminous eyes that sometimes stared like a child’s. She knew how insane a man could make her, and she feared that. But what could she do?

An hour later, they stepped into the anteroom together. (Ayyan had left a long time ago.) They went down the corridor which was now completely deserted. They went in a silence that made them feel like accomplices.

Acharya walked with her to her silver-grey Baleno that lay on the side of the driveway. She got in with an expression that she was sure was the face of indifference. As she drove away, he waved, and he realized from the confused face of the night security at the guard post that he was waving long after she had vanished through the black gates. He went home wondering if Oparna had smiled at him through the rear-view mirror.

It was strange, the way she had got into her car without a word. She was probably angry because he had made a personal comment. He wanted to call her and ask if she was angry, but that, he knew, would be very silly. He turned the key, and opened the door of his home carefully so that Lavanya would not be disturbed, and felt his way from the dark hall to the bedroom. He could see the figure of Lavanya lying on her bed with her hand on her forehead. And the odours of Kerala’s curative oils reached him.

Oparna drove down the Marine Drive with the windows open. The road was empty and against the lemon-yellow street lights she could see a gentle drizzle swaying in the wind. She was thinking of Acharya’s eyes.

At the gates of a high-rise building in Breach Candy, a security guard let her in, his small-town eyes showing faint contempt for a girl who returned home so late. When the lift door closed and became a mirror, Oparna studied it carefully. Her hair was dishevelled, and her long top looked so terrible that she felt like some sort of activist.

When she let herself into her flat she did not know why she became so furtive, as if she had done something delightfully wrong. She tiptoed towards her parents’ bedroom and peeped through the door. They were snoring. Father had a longer hiss. She went to her room, which was in a faint purple glow, its flimsy curtains flying in the wind. She felt shy as she undressed. And smiled to herself when she tried to read.

She lay awake for much of the night, thinking of his infant face and innocent rage. And how easily he understood the world of
microbes. Just a silly crush, she thought – it would go away in the morning.

So it is with all sudden lovers who believed that their torments would vanish in the morning, but inevitably it is already morning when such a convenient consolation comes to them.

She was woken by her mother who usually had an ulterior motive when she did that. After ensuring that she had disturbed her daughter’s sleep, she came back with a cup of tea and said, ‘An alliance has come.’ Oparna’s eyes which had just opened shut tight. ‘The boy is not in software,’ her mother said encouragingly, and added, with an edge in her voice, ‘Now don’t say you are a lesbian.’

I
N THE ‘FINITE’
corridor of the Institute, four astronomers were huddled together, questioning whether twin-star systems were indeed the norm in the universe. They were then distracted by the distant sound of heels. They fell silent and looked in the direction of the prospect.

Oparna appeared. Her hair flying, face glowing, in a sky-blue shirt that for the first time introduced them to the real shape of her breasts, their study in the coming days destined to be called topology. She was wearing a long black denim skirt which had a flower, or something similar, embroidered around the thigh. She passed by them with an innocent smile. They stared at her back. The sound of the heels faded and died. They knew that here as the Doppler Effect.

‘Birthday?’ asked Ayyan Mani.

‘Yours?’ Oparna enquired.

‘No. Is it yours?’

‘I don’t think so,’ she said. ‘Is there anyone with him?’

‘No.’

She pushed open the heavy door that once used to terrify her. She knew what she had to do. She could be a woman and wait for him to collapse, but she could not endure the game that she now realized she had been unknowingly playing for many months. Acharya lifted his enormous head and for a moment he looked as though he had found the Unified Theory by mistake. He looked down and appeared to study some material on the table. She sat on the chair facing him, crossed her legs, arched her body and looked at him fondly. He looked into her eyes and tried to understand her special glow.

He toyed with the paperweight and spoke of how the cryogenic sampler was still stuck in America. ‘We need to get the Ministry involved,’ he told the paperweight.

Ayyan Mani knew something had changed. He could see Oparna had arrived at a decision. And there was a force in her that morning, a calm arrogance that beautiful women usually had. He recognized it as her real face. The shadow she had pretended to be in this kingdom of men, in her long shapeless top and jeans, that subdued acceptance of all situations, he always knew was just a farce. He lifted his intrusive phone receiver and listened.

‘Contamination is a serious problem,’ Acharya was saying. ‘We have to ensure that there is no way the sampler can be contaminated before or after the mission. If it’s so difficult for the cryosampler to be a hundred per cent sterilized, imagine how vulnerable spaceships are to contamination. When we landed on the Moon or sent the rovers to Mars, we left Earth microbes there.’