Serious Men (31 page)

The trial lasted only a day. After the departure of Oparna, postdoctoral students who were part of the Balloon Mission walked in nervously and walked out without taking the case forward. The jury set aside the sampler scandal and decided to hear the
complaints of thirteen scientists who said that they were mentally tortured by Acharya. This was Nambodri’s masterstroke.

The evidence against Acharya was always going to be thin. And the revenge of a woman, Nambodri knew, could not be fully depended on. But he had full faith in the revenge of men and their natural brutality that would land death-blows on a venerated and arrogant person when he was down. The war of the mediocre, in the world according to Nambodri, was a battle that raged in every office. And it was a battle that they always won in the end. It was the right of simple people to survive in their little nooks and do their little things. But the geniuses did not let them. They came with their grand plans and high standards and the proud inability to offer false compliments. Even in the Institute of fantastic pursuits, where there was an imagined regard for absolute brilliance because that lent a glow to all, this rebellion had always been brewing. It was subdued, but it was there. Worse, the old man had won Oparna, the infatuation of all. So it was not only the foes of Acharya who despised him but also, secretly, his many fans. That, Nambodri knew, was the nature of men.

String theorists arrived and told the jury how they were humiliated by Acharya for their mathematical structure of the universe, for heading nowhere with the Theory of Everything and for the crime of believing in the Big Bang. Radio astronomers complained that Acharya had unfairly denied them the science of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, and that they were not allowed to attend Seti seminars because he wanted to siphon every rupee into the Balloon Mission. Others who did not have specific complaints said that it was ridiculous that the administrative head of the Institute was so pompous and eccentric. Outside the room, on the corridors, in the library, in the canteen, and on the pathways that ran through the undulating lawns, there were passionate debates on whether Acharya was indeed a fraud. The community had to choose between the entertainment of believing that he was guilty and the dull nobility of having faith in his character. It was the sort of day when a man needed goodwill more than genius. By evening, the word
spread with the decisive force of common truth that Acharya had owned up to the jury, that he had confessed. The origin of the news, everybody attributed to the other.

At the closed gates of the Institute, the guards stood amused. The crowd of reporters was swelling. Television crews were landing and the line of OB vans on the narrow lane outside stretched for a hundred metres. A few hours ago Arvind Acharya had walked out through the gates, cutting through the reporters like a silent ship. They had chased him and asked their questions, but he told them nothing. Now they waited in the hope that something big was about to be announced. The invisible machines of Jana Nambodri’s public relations genius sent a steady supply of mineral water to the gates, and bits of information through scientists who would be quoted later as reliable sources and people-in-the-know.

The murmurs outside the gates grew louder when they saw Basu and Nambodri walk towards them. The guards opened the gates. The reporters rushed in and swirled around the two. Basu touched his newly combed hair. Nambodri stood with a wise smile and nodded to acknowledge some of the reporters he knew by name. His role for the evening was that of a silent and reluctant incumbent forced to take the reins of power in the midst of the Institute’s disgrace. The Press Officer arrived and raised both his hands.

‘Questions later,’ he screamed.

Basu showed his palms to the journalists and asked them to calm down. ‘I’ve an announcement to make,’ he said, and that brought about a hush. ‘The internal inquiry is over. Dr Arvind Acharya has confessed that he ordered Dr Oparna Goshmaulik to falsify the research in an attempt to fraudulently prove that he had discovered life at the altitude of forty-one kilometres above the Earth.’

There was a precarious silence for a moment which collapsed in a roar of questions.

‘And, and,’ Basu said, trying to reclaim the attention, ‘I regret to say that we have found other instances of unacceptable
conduct. He misused the funds of the Institute to feed his ambitious Balloon Mission. His general behaviour has, for long, humiliated the brilliant minds that work here. It has also come to our notice that he used the basement for some activities that we are too ashamed to disclose. It was unbecoming of the Director of the Institute of Theory and Research, an institute of excellence, to use the premises for such activities. In the light of these extraordinary circumstances, Arvind Acharya has been suspended until further notice. Dr Jana Nambodri, one of the founding fathers of radio astronomy in this country, has been elevated as the acting Director.’

In the coming days, Acharya would fervently deny that he had confessed to contaminating the sampler, but his disclaimer was lost in his silence over what Oparna meant to him and whether he had indeed used the basement as a love-nest. The uncontrollable force of public perception would, inevitably, decree that a man who could seduce a woman almost half his age in a basement lab was probably involved in other nefarious activities. Even his powerful friends who were once flattered to serve him when he deigned to call for their help, now distanced themselves from him. Some would not take his calls; others said that he should fight his battles (probably till eternity) in court. Scientific bodies that had once begged him to endorse them with his name would tell him, with formal regret, that his association was not necessary any more. Friends and fans would write to him from all corners of the world affirming their faith in him, but even in those letters he would see the strength of old boyish love and not the conviction that he was innocent.

After the declaration at the gates, Nambodri and Basu went to the third floor. As they walked down the long corridor, doors opened. Some scientists nodded in appreciation. Many stared bleakly. An old wizard of Number Theory handed an envelope to Nambodri and said he was quitting. But the mood was somewhat festive. As the two men walked, a swarm of speechless
scientists began to follow. And this swarm grew until they stood outside the door that said Director. Basu opened the door and in a ritual that had no tradition, he extended his hand graciously asking Nambodri to walk in first. The applause shook the furtive labour of Ayyan Mani.

Ayyan was trying to stick together the shreds of Acharya’s letter to Basu. He believed it might have a use in the future. He hid the almost-repaired note in the drawer as the crowd entered the anteroom, like the Pathans who followed John Simpson during the BBC’s liberation of Kabul. Basu opened the inner door and the swarm moved in. Ayyan followed them inside to watch the rare physical gaiety of the Brahmins. He planted himself in a corner.

Basu stood at the desk and said amidst laughter and applause, ‘All yours.’

Nambodri sat in the huge black leather chair and said in a deep voice, ‘There was no Big Bang. There never was.’ And everyone laughed.

He spotted Ayyan, who quickly laughed in a belated appreciation of a joke he was not expected to understand. ‘Would you like to work with me, Sir?’ Nambodri asked.

‘It’ll be my honour, Sir,’ Ayyan said.

‘How is your son, the genius?’

‘He keeps talking about you, Sir,’ Ayyan said. ‘He loved the posters in your room.’

Those framed film posters would soon move in a procession in the feeble hands of dark peons. From the office of the Deputy Director they would pass the corner fiefdom of Ayyan and vanish through a door that was now stripped of the gold-plated mascot of the old world – Arvind Acharya. The blank textured walls of what used to be Acharya’s office were now adorned with the visuals of
ET, Men in Black, Superman, Mars Attacks,
and a blowup of an introspective Carl Sagan captured before he began to die.

Acharya had left everything behind except Oparna’s photographs, some journals, his collection of
Topolov’s Superman,
and
the piece of meteorite that he used as paperweight. Nambodri threw most of his things out and altered the look of the room. He shifted the snow-white sofas to the window and arranged the desk in the corner that was diagonal to the door. The only time Ayyan had seen Acharya on the sofa was when he had met Adi. But the new regime was run from the sofas, and in the boisterous chatter of radio astronomers who spent the whole day against the backdrop of the Arabian Sea, plotting their future. They did not have to wait with Ayyan any more in the anteroom, and it was inevitable that they would throw a glance of simple triumph at the man every time they bypassed his clerical authority and went straight in to meet the new Director.

One evening in the changed world, Professor Jal rushed in barefoot and almost sprinted through the inner door. He stood by the window and told Nambodri’s happy caucus, ‘Look outside.’ The astronomers came to where he was standing, and looked. On the tarred driveway that meandered to the sea went Arvind Acharya. His trousers lay precariously at the lower waist, one sleeve of his shirt was folded and the other was not. He stumbled on a small pothole and one of the bathroom slippers came off. He flipped it over with his foot and slipped into it. He appeared to contemplate his feet for a moment. Then he resumed his slow, laborious walk. Scores of still figures looked from the other windows and from the lawns. But Acharya went on his way unseeing, his head slightly bent. He opened the wooden beach gate and went down to the black rocks. He sat there long after the figures behind the many windows vanished, one after the other.

He began to arrive every day. He would wander around the lawns or sit on the sea rocks. The guards did not know how to stop him. He would look at them like an infant, and they would silently open the gates. Late in the evening, they would open the gates again for him to leave. He would cross the road without looking and vanish into the Professors’ Quarters.

This was a fallen man, people said, who was in the misery of disgrace, but in reality Acharya was in the confusion of feeling
nothing at all. He felt no pain, no shame, no anger. His eyes were always transfixed, but at nothing. They had lost the power to see even memories. Lavanya tried to console him, but she did not know how she should reach out to a man who was on the far shores of a living death. She allowed herself the mild cruelty of not trying too hard to reclaim him because his disgrace had advertised her own defeat at the hands of a younger woman. Also, his suspension had diminished her authority among the ladies of the Quarters. Her power would have completely perished had it not been for her beauty and unusual height. But she was also a beneficiary of the sympathy of the wives because, in their perennial conviction that they were all victims of men, they had a special place in their hearts for a real one. Mrs Nambodri, now bearing the charming discomfort of being called Mrs Director by the peons and guards, had arrived last week at Lavanya’s door like a visiting stateswoman. And they spoke about the disparities between Vietnamese Buddha heads and Thai.

Lavanya was certain that her husband would soon rescue himself from the trance of his new abnormality and return to the old. She was more concerned about her daughter. Shruti did not talk to her father any more. She had called him a month ago to say that he must be brave, but when she read about the affair on a website, she first asked her mother if it was true, and did not speak to him after that.

Shruti’s anger did not affect him. He was grateful to anyone who would offer him silence. But every day, he tried to understand what had happened to him. He wandered inside the Institute in that confusion. Old friends smiled at him. He would look at them with feeble eyes and nod. Young postdoctoral students called him names. He would nod at them too. Sometimes on the pathways, he would stop walking and just gape at his feet.

One Monday all this changed, for no reason at all.

He was sitting under a solitary palm in the backyard of the Institute when he thought of something that made him so happy that he felt his life and its many memories return to him. He had
been briefly estranged from himself, but now he was all right. He got up and walked briskly towards home.

Acharya let himself in. Lavanya was asleep on the couch with
Digging to America
on her lap. He stood beside her and looked at her tired face. Her eyelids quivered and opened. She was surprised to see him standing like that.

‘I want to talk to you,’ he said.

‘Talk then,’ she said, sitting up. She was relieved to hear him speak finally.

‘Lavanya,’ he said, ‘you may not know this, but I’ve thought of you every single day of my life, and my life was very good because of you. Does that make sense to you? What I just said, does that make sense you to?’

She looked worried. ‘Are you all right, Arvind?’ she asked.

‘I also have a confession to make,’ he said. ‘During a Cosmic Ancestry seminar, I said, “Ladies and Gentlemen, it’s my deepest belief that all life on Earth came from outer space, not just my wife.

Lavanya burst out laughing. ‘It’s OK,’ she said, standing up. She tried to understand what could have happened to him, but she was too amused to solve the mystery. ‘Sit down, I will get you a cup of coffee,’ she said.

Acharya went to the balcony. He looked at the concrete driveway, nine floors below, and calculated that it would take him no more than two seconds to hit the driveway. He inspected the wooden railing and hoped it would take his weight. He did not want to break it. That would be inelegant. The suspended shrubs were too far back to get in the way. Two shirts hung from the clothes wire and they looked like orphans, already. He sat on the railing and slowly rose on his feet. He balanced himself with his hands in the air. He felt a bit ridiculous, and it struck him how unaesthetic the process of suicide actually was.

As he stood perched to jump, it was inevitable that he would think of his whole life. ‘It was easy,’ he summarized. He wondered why he did not feel the intensity of death, the final ache of the very end of memories, and the indestructible peace of
liberation. Instead, his mind was filled with too many thoughts that reminded him of his old desperation to live every moment. He was thinking of the frustrating problem of gravity at the moment of death, standing on a railing nine floors above the ground. He was even embarrassed on behalf of humanity for not solving the elementary question – What exactly is gravity? It was shameful that man did not know what gravity actually was. How pathetic. And he felt a wild rancour towards theoretical physicists who said that gravity was made up of gravitons. What rubbish. He wanted to understand why there was life, what was the true nature of Time, and he wanted to comprehend the beautiful absurdity of infinity which was the only real evidence mankind had to prove that maths was fundamentally moronic. There was so much to do, he thought, on either side of the wooden railing. Then he felt an inglorious fear. That, he recognized, was not the trivial fear of falling. But it was the memory of the devious friends of Lavanya, and how their faces began to glow after the death of their husbands. He wondered if Lavanya, too, would find happiness in the relief of widowhood, choosing to love him more as an enhanced memory in a photo frame than as a giant living slob. He felt an intense bitterness that only a husband can feel for his wife. And in a moment of pristine jealousy he wanted to deny her the pleasure that she might derive at his expense. He slipped on the railing, but found his balance in time.