Serious Men (20 page)

He walked out through the anteroom that Ayyan had long deserted. Its ghostly phones rang and fax machines belched. There was not a soul in the corridor. It lay in front like a supernatural bridge to autumnal love. He heard the lift heave and echo as it descended to the basement. He walked beside the stark white walls, feeling the anxiety of violating a young body that was right there at the end of this narrow corridor. He felt a mad rage against her for pushing him from the fortress of stature that others had built for him over the decades into a miserable hell where other old men like him crawled on their stomachs and begged young women for a mere look of affection. But what truly infuriated him was the painful suspicion that it was now, in this late age, that true love had come to him.

Until a few weeks ago, he was in the peace of consigning love as that brief juvenile excitement he once felt for Lavanya in the freshness of marriage. It was an easy painless thing. There was no pursuit, no battle. She was there in the morning, she was there in the evening, and on some nights of her choosing she became naked. Love, he had always thought, was arranged. He was certain that alcoholic poets had overrated its misery. But now, he felt its agony and the insane fear of rejection.

He flung open the door of the lab. It was almost dark. Oparna was sitting on the floor at the foot of the main working desk that filled half the room. She had turned off all the lights except a single inadequate bulb directly above the desk. It cast giant shadows of microscopes and other optical devices, and they appeared to lie in wait, like curious voyeurs. She was in her long top of forced modesty and blue jeans. Her hair was tied back. He walked to her side, and stood with his knee brushing against her shoulder.

‘Why are you doing this to me?’ he asked.

She did not reply. He lifted her by her arms and kissed her, or bit her (he would not remember). They fell on the floor in a heap, and they kissed and licked and wrestled. He tore her top and dismantled her jeans. She fought, not sure yet if she was resisting or assisting. When he took away all her clothes, she stopped fighting. She turned away from him in a sting of shame, her face on the floor, an elbow shielding it from this wild man, proud breasts reaching for a place to rest, her bronze back rising and falling like the roll of a sand-dune in the twilight, her long firm legs lying languid.

He tugged at her shoulder to make her face him. He wanted to see her arrogant face now tamed and helpless, but she held on tenaciously to the foot of the main desk and dug her face further into her elbow. He held her hair in his fist and tried to see the face that had destroyed his peace. She had no more strength left in her to resist. Her hand left the foot of the desk, her shoulders obeyed and she turned to him, defeated and deranged. Her hair was now wild, the terrified hair-band had rolled away long ago. She shut her eyes as he suffocated her with a long violent kiss. He tried to hold her legs, but they were now glistening in sweat and his hands slipped. That made her laugh. But her demented laughter soon become wails as he finally managed to prise open her legs and plunder her with an inhuman strength. But it was a brief attack. In less than a minute, he fell on her breasts and rolled down on the floor panting and laughing.

He did not know such pleasurable violence was permitted outside the myth of pornography. The amused smile of the young Lavanya, that look of a patient zen master condoning the imperfection of an apprentice, was what he had thought the face of woman’s love to be. But what had happened just now was different.

Oparna was looking at him, breathing hard, lying on her mauled breasts. She and Acharya stared at each other as if they both knew they were going to die and had accepted this death. It was a long time before either spoke.

‘What have we done?’ she said, with a smile.

‘What have we done?’ Acharya repeated, more seriously than her. ‘What now?’

‘What now? You can’t steal a woman’s line. That’s not allowed.’

‘It’s a woman’s line?’

‘Of course. Anyway, it’s too early to say it.’ She rolled to his side and put her head on his chest. He felt her finger probe his navel. ‘You have such a big navel,’ she said, ‘It’s very deep too. And there is a lot of lint.’ She showed him what she had scooped out.

‘Your wife is away?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You seem to be very experienced.’

‘In what?’ Somehow it was a question that had only uncomfortable answers.

‘How many lovers have you had?’ he asked.

She looked at the ceiling, toying with her hair. ‘Is it true that we follow the decimal system because we have ten fingers?’

‘Most of us have eight fingers.’

She looked confused, but then her face lit up in comprehension. ‘Eight fingers and two thumbs?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Why do you want to know about the decimal system?’

‘I was counting my men,’ she said, ‘and eight fingers and two thumbs were not enough.’ She lifted her head to see his face. ‘Does it annoy you that I have slept with so many men?’

‘Yes. And I hate them,’ he said.

‘And that’s a nice thing to say to a woman,’ she said.

She looked at him fondly. He was like a cuddly giant seal. His eyes, usually bright and furious, now stared in the diffused glow of affection or gratitude. They lay together on the floor in silence for over an hour. Then something crossed her mind.

‘At The Talks,’ she said, ‘you remember the speech you gave at The Talks?’

‘You were there?’

‘Yes. I was there to letch at you. You said something then.
You said, “Maybe we cannot understand physics at the quantum level without understanding other things which are not considered physics today. Other things like…” Then you stopped. I thought you wanted to say something, but did not think it was right to say it.’

‘Was it that obvious?’

‘What did you want to say?’

He became thoughtful and distant. She set her chin on his chest and tried to understand his face. Beautiful lips, she thought, full and somehow smug. As if they would accept the kiss of a woman as a deserved right. She was offended by this. She should have made him suffer more before yielding. He must not think she was his right, like a Nobel or something.

‘Tell me,’ she said.

‘There are things that a man like me cannot say in public,’ he said. ‘There are things that physics does not accept as its own. That’s why I could not say it then.’

‘You can tell me. A man can tell a naked woman anything.’

He did not speak for what seemed like a long time. She waited.

‘I have not told anyone this,’ she heard him say. And he fell silent again. He found it odd that he must say this now, in the dampness of a nudity that was somehow comical, and say it to a woman he did not know beyond the temporal anguish of love.

‘Physics has to go,’ he said, like a dying revolutionary wishing freedom for his real estate. That disappointed her even though she knew what he had to say was going to be, of course, about physics. She had hoped it would be about something else.

‘Nobody is admitting it, but physics is stuck, physics has to change,’ he said. ‘The current laws are not enough. It needs something else. It has to accept something. Bombarding particles in a nine-billion-dollar collider is useless. It has to accept that. And more. It has to accept that life and consciousness are a hidden part of what we are trying to study. I cannot say something like this in public because it is a privilege given only to scientists who have gone mad.’

What he had in his mind was so simple and clear, but when asked, for the first time, to express it through the inadequacies of language it seemed so difficult and even plebian.

‘I believe the universe has a plot, a purpose,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what the game is, but something is there.’ Then he said abruptly, clumsily, ‘Have you heard of Libet?’ That surprised her. Never would she have associated Acharya with the name of Libet.

Benjamin Libet was a part of male exotica, like time travel and antimatter. His name was usually invoked at the confluence of beer and philosophy, when stranded men asked deeply, ‘Who are we?’

Oparna sat up. ‘Libet?’ she said, and giggled.

‘Yes, Libet.’

‘When was he active? Sixties, seventies?’ she asked.

‘Seventies, eighties.’

‘He was with the physiology department, wasn’t he, of the University of California?’

‘You seem to know him pretty well,’ Acharya said.

‘Some things stick,’ she said. ‘He probed the human consciousness or something like that? And claimed to have proved that Free Will does not exist. But how can anybody prove something like that?’

‘He fixed electrodes on the scalps of volunteers,’ Acharya said, in a deep, solemn way, ‘and he asked them to perform ordinary tasks like lifting a finger or pressing a button. He then showed that moments before they believed they had made the conscious decision to perform a task, their brains had already started the neural process to achieve the action. This implies that when a man lifts his finger, he is merely in the illusion of having made the decision. In reality, the event is preordained. If Libet is right, then there is an interpretation that people may not want to accept. That every action on Earth, the turn of a head, the bark of a dog, the fall of a flower, is a predestined inevitability. Like a scene in a film.’

Oparna wanted to say ‘crap’. But there was something about the way he was gazing at the ceiling, with his eyes soft and
intoxicated by a distant memory. She told herself that she would be a woman, she would be understanding. That was her perpetual weakness, anyway. To see the point of the men she loved.

‘A long time ago I worked with him very briefly, just for a few weeks,’ Acharya said, without taking his eyes off the ceiling. ‘I helped him in his experiments.’

Oparna was surprised, but first she had to make a scientific objection: ‘Libet’s equipment was obviously primitive. There could have been an error.’

Acharya had heard these objections a thousand times, but there was something he knew which made him certain that Libet had stumbled upon a mystery that lay at the very heart of science. Oparna saw in his eyes an opaqueness, a grim unchangeable faith that would have normally exasperated her, but now, in the darkened lab, it almost convinced her that Libet was probably not so bad.

‘What were you doing with Libet, anyway?’ she asked. ‘Weren’t you busy demolishing the Big Bang then?’

‘When I heard what he was trying to do, I got curious,’ he said. He looked at her. ‘Oparna,’ he said, ‘when I told you that I have not told anyone this, I was not referring to my connection with Libet. It’s something else.’

She pulled herself closer to him. ‘What is it then?’ she asked.

‘Something happened when I was about nine years old,’ he said. He tried to sit up, but the floor was slippery in his sweat. She helped him, and he sat resting his back against the foot of the main desk. ‘I was walking with my family to the circus. The car wouldn’t start that day, and father said that since the circus tent was just a kilometre from home we should walk. There were a lot of us on the road. We were a big family. My mother had a box of groundnuts and she kept putting a heap into my palm. Suddenly, my mind went blank and I saw clearly a dwarf in a red T-shirt and white shorts. He was sitting on an elephant. A blue bird flew over his head. Then he fell off the elephant and was trampled. I saw this in my mind. My mother was walking by my side. I told her what I had seen. She smiled at me and ruffled my
hair. “Don’t worry,” she said. When we entered the tent, I saw it was packed but the front seats were reserved for us. Everybody looked at us as we walked through the aisle and sat on the best seats. I sat between my parents. I wanted to feel safe because I knew what was going to happen.

‘In the middle of the show an elephant walked on to the stage with a dwarf in a red T-shirt and shorts sitting on top of it. I looked at my mother. She was looking at me as though I were playing a trick on her. She was trying to figure out how I could have known. She pinched my thigh and whispered, “You sneaked in here yesterday? Tell me, I won’t tell your father.” A small blue bird appeared from nowhere and flew in a panic over the audience. Everybody howled because it was so beautiful. It flew over the head of the dwarf and disappeared through a small hole in the roof. The dwarf then fell off the elephant. The elephant had not shaken him off. It was calm. It was not afraid, nor had it gone mad. As though part of the show, the elephant then walked over the dwarf. It put its leg on his chest. I saw the dwarf’s head rise for an instant and then fall. He died there on the floor. There was a commotion and everybody tried to run out. I remember my mother’s face. She looked at me in fright. When we returned home she told my father about what I had told her. He didn’t believe her or me. Then, somehow, the incident was forgotten. My mind never went blank like that again. I have never seen the future again. But something in me changed that day. And I have remained the same after that.’

Acharya’s mind, in the trance of recounting an event from his childhood, stayed in that distant time. He remembered other images. The steam trains that bellowed beneath the footbridge, the stiffness of his starched shirt, his mother’s safety-pin that sometimes held the fly of his shorts, the dragonflies in the paddy-fields to whose tails the boys tied a thread and used them as live kites. How the girls disapproved of this. And how they cried when the boys told them that soon it would be the fate of butterflies too. The final journeys of the dead, their noses stuffed with cotton, their faces yellow, the seriousness of the mourners
on whose shoulders went the bed of the corpse or the decorated chair in which the dead sometimes sat so comically. The sunlit courtyard of his childhood home, its clean chessboard floors, the huge immovable doors and those carved wooden pillars that were more ancient than ghosts. And the narrow enchanted lane outside which ran through the shadows of other huge benevolent homes that could only be inherited now and never built. On their tiled roofs peacocks that had no masters used to stand still. Once, that was his life. And it all came back to him.