Serious Men (29 page)

The memory of Oparna too was no longer an open wound. To each other, he believed they had become endearing scars that in solitary moments would open the magical windows of remembrance. That was how he wanted her to remember their brief love. And this hope was reaffirmed when she walked into his room that Wednesday with such tranquillity and with the other deceptions of woman’s amnesia.

‘I called you to discuss the bad news from Boston,’ he said, rocking himself in the chair consciously to reassure her that it was not a tragic matter and that she should not be disappointed. ‘I believe you got a copy too?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Sad, isn’t it.’

Boston University had confirmed that it had finished studying the sampler and had found no sign of life in it.

‘There are still two samplers and Cardiff will be getting back soon,’ he said cheerfully.

‘Let’s hope there is something interesting in them,’ she said, looking at her fingernails.

‘Let’s hope,’ he said, and looked at her fondly. ‘I was thinking, Oparna, Astrobiology has to be made one of the main streams in the Institute. What do you say?’

She said, in a somewhat lifeless way, that it was a good idea.

He mistook her response for the boredom that so often fills researchers after the excitement of a big project. The hired hands in her lab had been asked to leave, most of the equipment was shrouded in protective covers, and she was left alone in the basement once again with ghostly peons, and the uncertain wait for another worthy assignment.

‘You will be part of the faculty then?’ he asked pleasantly.

‘I don’t know,’ she said, and looked away.

That introduced a silence which ended with Oparna asking if there was anything else he wanted to discuss. When she was at the door, she turned to look at him for a passing moment. Just for an instant, he thought, they were once again in that abstract doorway of love where they did not know if they were reuniting or growing apart.

Their next meeting, three weeks later, was more grim. It was in the company of the Press Officer who wiped his forehead out of habit, even though he was not sweating. Cardiff too had said that the study of the two samplers was complete and no form of life had been detected. Acharya looked sombrely at Oparna, and then at the Press Officer, who straightened his back.

‘We have a moral obligation to go public with this news,’ Acharya said. ‘We have to state clearly that two external labs have detected nothing in the samplers.’

After the Press Officer left hurriedly to type out the release, Acharya and Oparna maintained a deep thoughtful silence that both of them understood as a form of professional conversation and not as the discomfort of defeated lovers.

Finally he said, ‘Considering the fact that Cardiff and Boston have not detected anything while we have, it is natural for people to question whether the sampler that was studied here was accidentally contaminated in the lab. I know such a thing could not have happened under your watch. But we must reassure people that our lab maintains the highest standards.’

Oparna nodded, but he could see that her mind was drifting.

He leaned forward and asked her with affection, ‘I hope you are not disappointed with the news from Cardiff?’

‘I am not,’ she said.

‘I am,’ he said. ‘But this is just the beginning. We are going to send many, many balloons up there. And all those things that are falling down, we are going to trap them in our samplers and show beyond any dispute that there are aliens among us.’

Oparna rose from her chair and went around the desk to his side. She held his face with her two warm hands and kissed him on his forehead. She had the peace of a mourner. There was something morbid about her face. It looked as if he had died and she was bidding him farewell. He felt a stab of such a cold fright that he thought of Lavanya, and wanted to complain to her that he was dead.

M
ANY YEARS LATER,
several scientists would still recall that Tuesday morning with the minute details of where they were and what they were doing when they first heard the news, like the word of an assassination freezes the memory of a whole generation.

Jana Nambodri was with his usual company of radio astronomers when the phone rang. He held the receiver to his ear, and after making the first perfunctory noises he listened speechless. The radio astronomers, greatly dispirited after the failed mutiny to erect Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence as an autonomous department, gathered in Nambodri’s office more often than before with lament masquerading as hopeful conspiracy. That morning, there were six of them, including Nambodri, in the room.

It was the portly professor called Jal, with a Gorbachev bird-dropping stain on his bald head, who first noticed that Nambodri’s hand was trembling. Jal nudged others to look at their ringleader. Nambodri’s left hand, which was holding the receiver, was shaking, and his right was drawing concentric circles on a discarded envelope. He finally said into the phone, ‘This is … I don’t know what to say … This is unbelievable.’ He put the phone down and stared blankly.

‘What’s happened?’ Jal asked.

‘I can’t tell you,’ Nambodri said. ‘You’ve had a bypass.’

‘Tell me, Jana. What happened?’

Nambodri, whose mind had not fully returned from the phone call and the train of thought it had inspired, banged the table with his fist, and winced.

‘Stupid girl. Stupid girl,’ he said. Then he stormed out of his room, into the long corridor. Halfway down, he turned and looked at the door that said ‘Director’. Even to the unpoetic mind of Nambodri, the austere wooden door was beginning to resemble the lid of a coffin.

Ayyan Mani looked at the courier letter on his table that the morose peon had dropped, as he always did, like a grievance from his heart. It was an unremarkable courier letter from the Ministry of Defence, and Ayyan knew he was going to open it. He looked furtively to his right, in the direction of Acharya’s door, and to the left where the main entrance was. The letter was from Basu.

Only after he had read the letter twice did Ayyan realize that he was standing. A corner of the letter was quivering in the
breeze of the air conditioner. It was as if the note were shaking in the first tremors of the news. He sat down and repaired the letter with the supply of official envelopes he had in the bottom drawer. He tried to recall when he had last felt this familiar fear in his heart which was a cruel mix of sorrow and anticipation. As he entered Acharya’s room, Ayyan recognized the fear. Many years ago, when he had to wake up the aged father of a friend to inform him that his only son had drowned in Aksa, he had felt this way, as if his heart were turning into ice. He put the letter on Acharya’s desk.

Acharya regarded the letter without interest. Then he returned to
Topolov’s Superman.

In the peace of the dormant equipment, shrouded in their plastic covers, Oparna sat on the main desk swinging her legs. She was staring at the phone. The murmurs of subterranean machines filled the room as the door opened. As it slowly shut, the haunting silence returned. Nambodri walked in delicately, like an explorer. He looked up at the ceiling and in other directions, and smiled. He stood by Oparna’s side and looked at her without a word. Unable to bear his phoney intensity any more, she turned to the phone and resumed her vigil.

‘Why are you doing this?’ he asked. She removed her hair–band, held it in her mouth, and tied her hair in a fiercer knot.

‘You must ask the man, don’t you think?’ she said.

‘The victim, are you?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’

‘He would never even think of doing something like this. Oparna, why don’t you tell me what this is all about?’

She began softly to hum a rhyme, probably a Bangla rhyme. She was suddenly scary.

‘I’ve heard some stories about you and him,’ Nambodri said. ‘Something happened? And this is some kind of a revenge? Woman scorned, or some rubbish like that?’

‘Why don’t you come later, Mr Runner-Up?’

That disturbed his poise but just for a moment. He told her, almost fondly, ‘You’re being stupid, Oparna. This is not the way
to do it. You’re almost there but you have to be careful. Acharya is not easy to destroy.’

He could see clearly, in the nonchalant way that she was sitting, the way she was swinging her legs, her nervous hum and her paranormal expectation of the phone to ring, an insanity that he might never have suspected before. He felt afraid, not only to be standing there in the deserted basement lab, but for the times when he had tried to flirt with her, because if she had granted him the possibilities, his fate would probably have been far worse than Acharya’s.

‘You must listen to me carefully, Oparna,’ he said.

She slouched a bit and yawned. ‘This is not the time for desperate mentors to come,’ she said. ‘What is done is done.’

Nambodri leaned on the desk and said, almost in a whisper, ‘Oparna, there is something you must understand. Even before you were born, Arvind Acharya was a name that floated once every year as a probable Nobel recipient. He is big. He is very big. Nobody is going to believe you. He has to just say he was framed and your game is over.’

‘There are people who’d like to believe me. I know that much,’ she said.

‘That’s true,’ Nambodri said thoughtfully. ‘But writing a letter to the Ministry is not the way to do it. You’ve got to understand. There are people who hate him but there are also very powerful people who love him. The game now could go either way. So you must go to the press right now. It has to be all over the papers before the internal inquiry even begins. People have to see this news, not hear it from their friends. Do you understand? It has to be news, not gossip. People believe news. You’ve got to go public with this story, Oparna.’

She looked at him innocently, almost like a child, and said, ‘But isn’t that unethical?’

Then the phone rang, and a fond smile appeared on her face.

Ayyan Mani said two soft ‘hellos’ to the dictaphone and played his voice back to check an instrument he had never held with so
much reverence before. It was, until this day, an enduring symbol of his plight, a reminder that he was nothing more than a large Indian recorder appended to a small Japanese one. But that morning, his unfailing instinct told him that this small silver thing was going to produce a treasure which he could somehow encash in the decisive war of the Brahmins that was now unavoidable. He did not have a plan, but he knew he would soon find one.

Oparna arrived without the discomforts of sanity. It was almost the same face that Ayyan had seen one morning, many months ago, when she had come with her hair untied and dressed in clothes that seemed to have a purpose. She had come to propose then. Now, there was a deep wound inside her and it showed on her face in a slanted smile. It was a misery that he recognized as a fate of love. He had seen this many times from very close, very close – that perilous distance from where the face of any woman would look ugly, and in the agony of being spurned must quickly choose to either kiss or spit. In the pale rooms of the lodgings where he used first to soften his aspiring wives with caresses, and then bid them a final farewell with a clear head – which is another form of cruelty in love – he had seen this face of Oparna. And that made him grin. At how he had escaped from the treacherous minefields of freedom unscathed, into the safety of marriage. While one of the most intelligent men alive was about to be mutilated.

Free love, Ayyan knew in his heart, is an enchanting place haunted by demented women. Here, every day men merely got away. And then, without warning, they were finished. The girl would come and say, like a martyr, that she was pregnant, or would remember that all the time she was being raped, or her husband would arrive with a butcher’s knife. Such things always happened in the country of free love. Ayyan Mani had fled in time from there into the open arms of a virgin. But Acharya had fled the other way.

Oparna found her man exactly the way she had imagined. Acharya was sunk in his massive black chair, his beautiful face
staring in blank confusion, like an infant’s. She sat across the table from him and smiled.

He asked in a voice that was without force or expectation, ‘Why, Oparna?’

She made an exasperated face as if she had hoped to talk about more interesting things.

‘What did you expect, Arvind?’ she said, almost with compassion. ‘You sleep with me till your wife comes back from her vacation and then ask me to get out of your life.’

‘I thought you understood,’ he said, and at that moment, when he said it, he conceded to himself that he didn’t know what he meant by that.

‘No, Arvind,’ she said, her words hurried and angry now. ‘I did not understand. And I’ve never understood it when men tell me “it was fun but now we have to get rid of you”.’