Serious Men (17 page)

‘Are you trying not to look at me?’ Oparna asked.

The insubordination of women, he would understand in time, is often a consequence of infatuation, but that morning her question registered as an anomaly. He answered nervously, feeling an unfamiliar excitement in his stomach, ‘What do you mean by that, Oparna?’

‘You can look at me as long as you want.’

‘I don’t understand your behaviour. It’s strange.’

‘Did you sleep last night?’ she asked.

‘How is that important?’

‘To the Cosmic Ancestry Theory? No it’s not important. Just felt like asking. Should everything always be important?’

‘No.’

‘I could not sleep,’ she said.

‘So?’

‘Because of you.’

‘I don’t understand what you are trying to say.’

Acharya’s mind went to a distant day in his childhood when he
had seen, for the first time, a fish die. The final frantic palpitations of the fish was the condition of his heart right now. He toyed with the paperweight and through the silence that Oparna granted he heard faraway phones, stray horns, even crows and some orphan sounds he could not recognize. The silence approached a point after which it would cease to be part of the conversation and become a deafening diabolic force. But he did not offer to speak. Oparna got up to leave. The demented mirth of mischief and insolence had left her face. She walked to the door and looked at him with an affection that was at once hopeful and melancholic. Like light was both particle and wave.

After she left, in the sudden desolation of the room, he tried to understand the tumult inside himself. He could feel a strange nameless fear, but he was euphoric too. The mascot of real joy he had always imagined was a simple human smile, but now he suspected that a smile was actually very frivolous. The face of true deep joy had to be an impassive grimness.

He did not understand what had happened to her. She was wooing a fat old man. She must be ovulating. Men appeared attractive to women during that time, he had read. This would pass. Then he realized that he was afraid that it might pass.

His ascetic power of concentration deserted him. He tried to tear himself away from the haunting visions of her face. He forced himself to think of the Big Bang’s devotees, because their thoughts usually built a mad rage within him. But in the place of the old malice was love and pardon for all, and Oparna’s face, like a giant background spirit, appreciating his maturity. He tried to read
Topolov’s Superman,
but he wondered what she would think if she saw him with the violent underground comic. No matter what he tried to do, he realized, the face of Oparna ultimately appeared. In every frame she was there, like R.K. Laxman’s Common Man. He tried desperately to search for a distraction to abolish this distraction, but nothing could cure his fever.

Acharya decided to wander. He walked down the quiet lane from the Institute, through Navy Nagar and all the way to the
Marine Drive. He stood on the broad promenade and looked at the turbulent sea. The sky had turned grey, the wind was strong and it tasted of salt. At a distance, down the curve of the promenade, the sea lashed against the wave breakers and exploded into mists.

He could see the monsoon on the bleak horizon. It was coming like a grey fog. On the road, there was a sort of panic in the evening traffic, as though there had been a morbid warning and everybody was fleeing. The wind became stronger and it blew visible dust, leaves, old newspapers and a forlorn blue kerchief. Then, the monsoon arrived. First as a drizzle. Some evening walkers switched from the haste of exercise to the very distinct haste of running for cover. Old women unfurled their umbrellas with a wisdom that did not have a clear face. It struck him, how complete, how final, an umbrella actually was. As a technology, it would not evolve any further.

The rains became a torrent now. Distant buildings across the bay were no longer visible. He saw an old man jog to a bus shelter, dribbling his swollen testicles on his frail thighs, like a footballer during a warm-up. The young, who had come for the rains, howled. They stood still in the rains. Some of them were compelled to spread their hands in a cinematic gesture because they felt odd just standing. Young girls worried if their blouses had become transparent. But they took the rains on their uplifted faces. They giggled and skipped and ran, as if they were in a sanitary-towel commercial.

Then, the rains were gone. The clouds cleared. A new light descended on the Marine Drive that made everything glow. Acharya thought his vision had improved. The evening walkers returned. Old couples were reunited. They went carefully on the wet tiles, wise in the knowledge that they had now reached an age when a slip could lead to death. They went slowly, four frail hands holding a single umbrella that was bending in the breeze. They must have been thinking of old monsoons, many monsoons. When they were young and strong, and the rains never seemed so grey.

When he reached home, fully soaked, his white full-sleeve shirt now transparent, his trousers resting precariously below his hips and held in place only by the grip of wetness, Lavanya put her hand on her head. ‘Who are you?’ she said. ‘Archimedes?’ As she dried him with a towel that felt very warm, he stared at her. She was so frail, the skin on her forehead so tired, her dyed hair scanty. He counted thirteen lines on her neck. What must a man do?

In the days that followed, he tried to ignore Oparna. That, he thought, was a solution. He would not summon her until she came to him without being invited, and though he felt a nervous excitement in his stomach every time he saw her, he would talk to her about the weather conditions over the launch facility in Hyderabad, or the optimum size of the balloon, or something like that. And she would just stare at him. ‘We need to lock the sourcing of the laminar air-flow cabinet,’ he would say. ‘We need to lock many things,’ she would tell him. And he would say, ‘I got a letter today. Cardiff has agreed to be part of the mission.’ And she would take mock offence and leave his room.

Every night, he stood on the narrow balcony, nine floors above the ground, lost in the intoxication of Oparna, his reveries mistaken by his wife as his incurable affliction with the pursuit of truth. Lavanya did get confused when he once laughed in his sleep. Occasionally, she even found him looking at himself intently in the mirror. And yesterday morning, once again, he had taken vegetable stock from the freezer thinking it was ice. He had done that before, but this time he gulped down the juice and did not notice that anything was amiss.

Lavanya, though irreparably influenced by her mother to suspect men because they were unstable people, would have never guessed that the Big Bang’s Old Foe could be lost in the thoughts of a girl who was born after man had landed on the Moon.

In the Institute, Oparna was now a carnival. Her hair was called ‘dynamic’ by the scientists because it was different almost
every day. Her long floral skirts and tight blouses, her fitted jeans, and opportunistic saris that made stenos comment unhappily on the foolishness of wearing the costume in the rains, terminated the near anonymity that she was beginning to enjoy. She knew that, but above everything else, she wanted to be a silly girl weaving mischief around her man.

Acharya continued to ignore her. Sometimes, he would go all the way to the basement lab to ignore her. He would inspect the equipment, speak to the dozen research assistants there and ask questions. Oparna would wait for him to approach her and pass her by without a word. And she would whisper to him, ‘Can I call you, Arvind?’, or ‘You look so hot today’, or something else. This game went on, as the rains became the season, and the roads began to look so black and clean, people now a slow procession of umbrellas, the air so cool and sedative. Then one day Oparna went missing.

She did not come to him, and when he went to the basement to ignore her there was no sign of her. He waited till noon and asked Ayyan to call her. ‘Don’t forget to tell her that I called to find out if there was any communication from ISRO, nothing else,’ he said. But Ayyan knew that it was the desperation of love. He tried her mobile the whole afternoon, but it just rang. Acharya would call him every ten minutes and ask, ‘Where is she?’ And Ayyan would tell him, ‘It’s just ringing, Sir.’ Then, to trouble him, he would say, ‘I hope she is all right.’

‘Try her landline,’ Acharya said.

‘We don’t have that number, Sir. I’ll keep trying.’

Acharya began to pace the floor in his room. He thought she was hurt and angry, and had gone away forever. He also feared that she had died. And he felt the melancholy of the rains that reminded him of the departure of many friends who had left without a word, all courteous men otherwise. He started calling her himself from his direct line. He did not have a mobile, or he would have even endured the imbecility of texting. As the evening wore on, he became almost demented at the thought of her. He imagined her with a young man, an old flame who
always pursued her but whom she had ignored, now getting lucky because she was spurned by an old fool. He kept calling her and waited angrily, holding the receiver to his ear as her ringtone sang, ‘Baby Can I Hold You?’

Twenty floors above the sea, Oparna stood in her room staring through a wide open window. The thin purple curtains flapped wildly in the wind. She was in blue jeans and a T-shirt with a jovial amoeba embroidered on it. She was holding her mobile in her hand, and she was smiling. The smile became an insane chuckle every time the phone rang. She stood that way as the evening turned dark and the million windows in the monstrous buildings outside became illuminated. Then, as though a mystic cue had appeared in the starless sky, she reached for her car keys.

Ayyan Mani had left for the day and the anteroom was deserted. Orphaned phones on his table rang intermittently. Oparna stood outside the inner door for a moment before she opened it. Acharya was sitting with his elbows on the table, chin cradled in his palms. He did not move as she walked in and stood in the middle of the room. She heard the door shut behind her. ‘It’s OK, I am here now,’ she said.

‘Where were you?’ he asked calmly.

She sat in a chair across the desk and returned his stare. ‘Are you angry with me, Arvind?’ she said. ‘Do you want to hurt me?’

They looked at each other through the heaviness of a silence that they somehow comprehended as a tired acceptance of love.

‘Arvind, I came here to say that you should not search for me tomorrow. I won’t be here. At ten in the night, come down to the basement. There won’t be anyone there. Just me and you. Do you understand what I’m saying?’

‘Yes.’

She left a blue envelope on the table. It was sealed and scented. ‘These are my pictures,’ she said. ‘I got them for you. Keep them safe. Not all men are allowed to see me like this.’

He took the envelope with great care, as if it were a piece of bread that had drowned in tea. He opened the second drawer of his desk and put it with the recent readings of interstellar dust-clouds.

‘Tomorrow at ten,’ she said, and went to the door. He looked at her back, the firmness of her shoulders, the imprint of her bra strap, so strained by tension, the succulent buttocks that were hoisted by high heels.

‘Were you looking at me?’ she asked from the door, her face lit by a shy smile.

It was around midnight when Acharya finally rose from the huge leather chair. He felt as if he had cried the whole day. His throat was dry and his eyes hurt. And there was peace in his lungs. He went down the long corridor of the third floor in the spell of a silence so perfect. The enchantment of this silence and the mystical way in which the deserted corridor lay in front of him, foreground approaching, the far end receding, made him walk faster. He enjoyed this eerie spectacle. But he felt a sudden pain in his left knee, and he slowed down. He turned back to see if the spectre of Oparna was lurking somewhere, watching his ache.

He wondered what it was that made a person old. This body that he was carrying right now, the aches in its joints and the weakness of its flesh, was not what he felt inside. An old man was in every way a young man but in the guise of a body that would look ugly and undignified if it tried to do what the young did. The elegance of age, like sanity, was an expectation people had of him. But at that moment, as he was walking down the corridor, he could not feel the antiquity that others had thrust upon him. He felt as if he were just another man accepting the affections of a woman. Just another young man. It was important to be young. Only the young can love, because the imbecility of youth is the only spectrum of love. He could see it so clearly now. Like every ray of light with a wavelength of 700 nanometres is always red, everyone who is in love is young.

At the porch, in the hush of the sea and the fragrance of wet earth, he stood looking at the rains. A guard came running to him with an umbrella. He was a tiny man, about a foot shorter than Acharya. He held the umbrella high, hoping that the monster would have the grace to hold it in his own hand. But Acharya walked in a trance as the guard, exhausted already by the effort of stretching his hand so high, got fully drenched.

He let himself into his flat, changed and went to sleep in the fumes of Lavanya’s herbal remedies. He slept well that night. He dreamt of a beautiful girl. The sound of her silver anklets filled the spectral spaces of his reverie. Her face, somehow naked, looked at him in an amused way as if she were the master and he a no-talent apprentice. It was the face of Lavanya from another time.

He woke at dawn and sat on the bed like a mammoth infant, refusing to look at the figure of his wife lying next to him. The clarity of last night when he had walked down the deserted corridor and granted himself the spirit of youth in a body paralysed by illusory age, was now gone. He felt afraid because he knew his descent into the basement at ten that night was an inevitability. He went to the bathroom to stare at his naked body. It was, in a way, from an angle, if you looked carefully, a beautiful face. Twinkling eyes, affluent skin, succulent royal lips, not much hair on the head of course, but a lot of face. He had a cold bath, and furtively shampooed his crotch. He went back to the bedroom with light steps and gingerly opened the cupboard. He wanted to leave before Lavanya woke up. He did not want to see her that morning.