Serious Men (26 page)
Ayyan stood in the porch of the Institute, facing the blackboard near the main stairway. He wrote the Thought For The Day:
If you want to understand India, don’t talk to Indians who speak in English — Salman Rushdie.
Adi was standing at a distance, near the lifts. He was in his favourite outfit – a blue half-sleeve shirt, white jeans and fake Nike. The Brahmins had summoned him. They had read the article in
The Times
and they had called Ayyan on his mobile. They wanted to see for themselves a Dalit genius, though they had put it differently. Ayyan could not resist the entertainment of watching those great minds mill around his boy, expressing their grand acknowledgement of his infant brilliance. Genius to genius, they would make it all seem. But he was certain that this was the last day of Adi’s genius. He had told his son last night on the tar-coated terrace of BDD, the game was now over. He would not be given clever things to say in the middle of the class any more, quiz questions would not magically land on his lap, articles about him would not appear in the papers.
Adi had nodded, a bit sadly, but he had understood. The game, his father made him repeat, was over.
Adi liked his father’s office, even though he found the word ‘Institute’ terrifying. The sea was so close here and only people with special passes could go to the black rocks. The garden was flat and green, and nothing happened there. Crows chased coloured birds in the sky. And everything was far from everything else. But what Adi liked the most was the lift. He loved the way the lights crept across the numbers. And he loved its hum, like an old man about to sneeze. His father said that the lift was a robot, which made him like the lift even more. He had been here many times. His father often brought him and his mother on Sundays. They sat on the rocks by the sea or walked around the building, or went up and down in the lifts. On Sundays the place was empty. But today was a working day. So it was full of people. That’s why he was silent in the lift though some people were smiling at him. They smelled very good. They smelled like the inside of a car. Not a taxi but a real car. He had been inside L. Srini’s car once. He liked the smell of a car.
They were on the third floor. The door opened and a lot of people waited outside to get in. He wanted to spend his entire life going up and down in the lift. But his father held his hand and they went down the longest corridor in the world. He had seen it before, on Sundays. He preferred the corridor dark and empty. Then it looked like a road in the comics. People on the corridor looked at him and smiled.
‘He is the guy, isn’t he? The genius,’ one man said.
Adi smiled. He liked being called a genius. It was different from being called special. All handicapped children were called special and he did not believe he was really handicapped. He could hear without the hearing-aid but only in the right ear. He was worried that if the game was over, as his father said, people would begin to call him special again. At the end of the corridor, his father stopped at a door on the left side that said ‘Deputy Director – Jana Nambodri’.
‘Ready?’ his father asked.
‘Ready,’ Adi said.
He saw Ayyan knock twice and then open the door. A man with a lot of white hair looked surprised to see them but he rose from his chair smiling. He was with three men who were younger and had black hair. They were all wearing jeans. They were standing now and smiling at him. He liked it when people looked only at him and nothing else in the room. They made him sit on the table though he wanted to sit on the chair.
‘Aditya Mani,’ someone declared to the room, without looking at him.
‘But that’s
my
name,’ Adi said, and the men laughed.
‘Tell me, Adi, why do you like prime numbers so much?’ the short man with white hair asked in English.
‘It’s unpredictable,’ Adi said.
‘What are the other numbers you like,’ the man asked.
Adi smiled coyly because that was what his father said he should do if he did not understand the question.
‘He is shy,’ his father said. ‘He doesn’t talk much at all.’
‘What do you want to be in the future, Adi?’
‘Scientist.’
‘Of course. But which field interests you the most?’
Adi smiled coyly.
‘You like maths or physics more?’
‘Physics.’
‘Physics,’ the men said happily, all at once.
Arvind Acharya was relishing the moment. He was imagining a giant balloon, twenty storeys high, soaring against a clear blue sky. The gondola that was carrying the four sealed samplers was such a meagre tip dangling at the bottom of the balloon. It was absurdly disproportionate, he thought, for the basket that was the very reason why the balloon existed, to be a few hundred times smaller than the balloon itself. It was not an aesthetic image. He had always loathed such disproportion. That’s why he had once despised the Zeppelins, and the sight of little white
women driving long sedans. The device and its purpose had to be in proportion. But then he wondered if it was a reasonable demand. The device was physical and so it had a size. The purpose was actually abstract and so could not be described by size. The little white woman was not the purpose of the sedan. The sampler in the balloon’s basket was not the purpose of the hot-air balloon. The purpose of the sedan was that the little woman had to go somewhere, say, to a funeral. The purpose of the balloon was to confirm that there were aliens in the sky. So where was the question of disproportion? Also, if the goal of the universe were to manufacture life, as he secretly believed, then the universe was a giant device containing unimaginably vast nebulae and star systems that caused unimaginably large-scale cataclysms to make minuscule pieces of life here and there. So, even in his own version of the truth, the device was physically disproportionate to its purpose.
It was inevitable that he would then wonder, not for the first time of course, if the universe needed a goal. But he liked the idea. A whole universe churning violently inside to create the seeds of what would eventually become a state of being: little disjointed minds that would look back at the sky and acknowledge that yes, it is there, there is a universe. Why must the universe do it? It had enough real estate to create large lifeless bodies. Why must it pack enormous amounts of energy in a type of electricity called consciousness? It was simpler for the universe to make a Jupiter than a frog, or even an ant. All this was leading to an unavoidable question, but he tried to delay it because its philosophical nature embarrassed him, and philosophers were such third-rate bastards. But he asked anyway – So, why is there life? What’s the whole game? It was the sort of moment that frustrated him and made him wish that someone had left the answer in his drawer on a neatly typed piece of paper, so that he could just read it and say, ‘Oh yes, I thought so,’ and go back home for a nice long nap.
The door opened and he was annoyed to see his secretary. For some reason, he was more annoyed at the sight of him
today than ever before. Such a terrible apparition Ayyan Mani was. So fresh, so eager, so much of an insider in this world. So hopelessly obsessed with living. Always busy, always up to something. Acharya found it funny that he must think a man was an insider in this world, because he did not know the function of an outsider. But he knew there were the insiders and there were the outsiders. He asked himself where he himself truly belonged.
‘Sir,’ Ayyan said, for the third time.
‘Yes.’
‘I’ve brought my son.’
Adi had by then appeared at the door, and he was looking curiously at Acharya from behind his father’s back. A pleasant smile appeared on Acharya’s face and that surprised even Ayyan. After the end of the Oparna affair, Acharya had become more moody and introspective than ever. Some days, he rocked in his chair excitedly for no apparent reason, but on the whole he had simply withdrawn into himself. He was once again the mammoth ghost that was either arriving or departing.
‘There you are,’ Acharya said. ‘Come in.’
Adi did not move. He opened his mouth wide, put out his tongue and gave a silly laugh.
‘Put your tongue, in Adi,’ Ayyan said sternly. ‘And come in.’
The boy walked in gingerly. Acharya stood up and went to the white couches in the far corner.
‘Let’s sit here,’ he said.
Adi, now more confident, sat facing him across the small centrepiece where the glass jar that was once an accomplice in illicit love now lay bearing fresh orchids. The boy looked at his father and tapped the couch asking him to sit. But Ayyan did not move.
‘Sit down,’ Acharya said impatiently. And for the very first time Ayyan Mani sat in the chamber of the Director.
Acharya studied the boy carefully and said, ‘He is wearing it in the other ear.’
‘What, Sir?’ Ayyan asked.
‘In the picture that they carried in the paper today, he was
wearing the hearing-aid in the right ear. But now he is wearing it in the left ear.’
‘Oh, that,’ Ayyan said with a chuckle. ‘By mistake, they flipped the picture in the paper, Sir.’
Acharya did not suspect anything. He was merely struck by the visual anomaly. He did not pursue the matter further. He was more interested in the boy. ‘He seems completely normal. Is this how geniuses are made these days?’
‘He is just an ordinary boy who is fooling around, Sir,’ Ayyan said.
‘I am a genius,’ the boy said defiantly.
‘You must be,’ Acharya said. ‘Tell me, Aditya, how do you remember so many prime numbers?’
‘They are unpredictable.’
‘Adi,’ his father said, with an edge in his voice, ‘he is asking how you remember the first thousand prime numbers.’
‘I hear it in my head.’
‘You do?’ Acharya said with a look of amusement. ‘You like prime numbers?’
‘Yes. They are unpredictable.’
‘They are, they are. But I always found prime numbers ugly. When I was your age I used to love even numbers. Do you like even numbers more than odd numbers?’
Adi shrugged.
‘You should say “yes” or “no”, Adi,’ his father said. ‘Don’t just sit there and make a face.’
‘What do you want to become, Adi?’ Acharya asked.
‘I want to join the Institute of Theory and Research.’
‘You should then. Maybe you should take our entrance test,’ Acharya said jovially.
‘OK,’ said Adi.
‘Ten thousand students from all over the country take the test. But only one hundred pass. Do you want to take it?’
‘OK.’
‘Grow up fast then.’
Acharya’s keen twinkling eyes then surveyed the boy through
a comfortable silence that to him was always a form of conversation. Adi turned nervously towards his father and raised his eyebrows. Acharya’s eyes then slowly became lost and distant. ‘Of all human deformities,’ he said softly, ‘genius is the most useful.’
T
HE SCHOLARS OP
the Institute, too, agreed that news travelled fast. But this evening there was a dispute over how fast. Ayyan Mani was at a corner table of the canteen when the argument broke out between two middle-aged mathematicians who were in a large group. They were near the window that opened to the undulating backyard and ancient solitary trees. In the sedative sea breeze and the hush of the calm sea, the debate unfolded as part banter and part science. It slowly escalated into a serious quarrel. One of the mathematicians angrily ordered a paper plate and appeared to scribble a long string of formulae to suggest that if various probabilities were known, it would be possible to calculate how fast a piece of news, like say the death of a colleague, would travel. The other mathematician angrily ordered another paper plate and wrote down something to show that even if various probabilities were known, the speed of news can never be predicted. Velocity was a function of distance, he said. Though news did travel, he said, it did not travel through a physical space, and so where was the question of speed? The first mathematician shook his head many times and said that there was a ‘nonlinear’ distance involved, and thus news indeed travelled through physical space. Ayyan did not fully understand what they meant by probabilities or nonlinear distance. But he did not have the heart to leave the canteen. After about an hour, both the mathematicians amicably agreed on the third paper plate that bad news travelled faster than good news. That, Ayyan already knew.
He was reminded of the episode a month later, one tense
December afternoon, as he sat among his phones waiting for all hell to break loose. But nothing happened. Two hours had passed since the Press Officer had declared, in a release which was faxed to every newspaper and television channel: ‘A stunning breakthrough has been achieved.’ That morning, Oparna Goshmaulik had emerged from the isolation of her basement lab along with two American scientists who were supervising the analysis of the cryogenic sampler. She was holding a bundle of papers in her hand: a collection of handwritten material bound together by a cord. On the last page she had concluded, somewhat inappropriately in thin unremarkable handwriting, ‘The results prove without dispute that living cells have been found at the altitude of 41 kilometres. Spores of rod-like bacillus and engyodontium albus de hoog, a fungus, have been found.’