Serious Men (32 page)

Beneath the solitary palm when he had prescribed to himself the simplicity of death, he was certain that he had arrived at an obvious solution. His mind was dead, his spirit was dead, and they were beseeching from another world to relieve the body too. But now he understood what had happened to him since the day of the trial. He understood why he did not feel anything after they consigned him to the short blacklist of fraudulent scientists. The truth was, as always, simpler than he thought. What they had killed was not his mind, or spirit, or other things that might not exist at all. What they had killed was his stature. The great Arvind Acharya, the Nobel laureate who did not win a Nobel. The Big Bang’s Old Foe. The lone discoverer of aliens. That being had
been slain. And the confusing numbness of death inside him was actually the paradise of relief. All his life he had tried to hide the torments of one paranormal boyhood experience. He had hidden them behind the manly grandness of science. His cerebral deformity which others called genius had made it easy for him to understand the mathematical pursuit of truth and it had quickly shrouded him in an inescapable glory when he was very young. He was entrapped in a fame that he feared he would lose if he tried to explain that every single action in the world was preordained, or if he attempted to investigate the purpose of life. Now that he was stripped of his reputation, he was free. He could now become the prophet of a new form of science that would not try to understand the universe through particles and forces but through the great game of life.

The decision of a woman in the market to buy cabbage instead of brinjal, the decision of a man at a junction to turn left instead of right: what if these events were as preordained as the birth of a star and its inevitable death? If the flutter of a butterfly or the shudder of a flower in the breeze was preordained aeons ago, he would now find a way to understand it. There would be no shame in that. Because every man grants others the power to shame him, and Arvind Acharya decided to withdraw that privilege from the world.

He walked into the hall, dusting his trousers. He sat with his elbows on the dining-table. Lavanya came with a tray. She watched him curiously. ‘Are you all right, Arvind?’ she asked.

He did not reply. He sipped his coffee and looked around the house as though it were the first time he was here.

At that moment, she was reminded of her mother’s prophecy, a day before her wedding, that he would go completely mad one day.

‘But he seems so happy,’ she had told her mother.

Her mother had stopped scrubbing the copper plate, and said, ‘It’s not only the sad who go mad, my child, it is also the happy.’

Acharya set the cup on the table and stood. He steered his trousers around his waist and walked out of the house. He began to see things in a way he had never seen them before. The corridor that led to the lift was grey and it had pieces of splintered tiles arranged in concentric circles. The liftman was dark and lost, and he had a mole at the edge of his lip and another one at the edge of his nose, and there was a strand of hair sticking out of both. That reminded him of Lavanya’s hypothesis many years ago that the cure for balding might be in the mysteries of melanin because the longest strand of hair on the limbs and the face, she said, always rose from the moles. The little girl who was playing in the driveway where she might have seen him fall, had he not tried to understand himself in time, was wearing a frock with fractal motifs. And she looked so beautiful that he hoped she would never ever hear the word ‘fractal’ in her life. There were four guards at the gates of the Institute and they were in ash-grey shirts and black trousers, and black caps with two red streaks that were parallel to each other. He looked at the fork of the pathway and the square lawn and the L-shaped main block and the people going about. He felt as if his vision had improved. Like that evening on the Marine Drive where he had once gone to escape Oparna’s love. The grey fog of rain had vanished and a strange light had filled the city.

He sat on the black rocks and told the sea his version of the universe. A group of young doctoral students were gathered at a distance. They threw cautious looks at him. It was a tradition here to accept that sometimes men spoke to themselves. But Acharya had never been known to seek his own phantoms. They stared at him for a while, then they resumed their animated discussion about supersymmetry, occasionally glancing at him.

The breeze brought him the rudiments of their debate. He listened, his head inclined. Then he went to them and stood with his hands in his deep trouser pockets. They looked at him nervously. One boy tried to infect others with the smile of contempt.

‘Don’t look at me like that, son,’ Acharya told him. ‘When I
was your age I was so smart that if you wanted to kiss my arse you would’ve had to take an entrance exam.’

That made the other boys laugh. Acharya laughed too. And he told them what he thought of supersymmetry. They listened, rooted to the ground. They asked him questions and he answered with deeper questions and an excited banter began to flow. His audience began to grow.

He started arriving every day, like a wandering bard. By the sea rocks, on the pathways and in the undulating backyard, students and scientists milled around him, and listened to the tales of his life, the day he met the Pope and how he was banned forever from the Vatican for whispering abuse in the pontiff’s ear, the hilarious insanities of great minds, their private chauvinism and how they believed wives were conspiracies, the temper of Fred Hoyle, the encounters with Hawking who was a cunning man, the impending shocks that would emerge from the Large Hadron Collider, and the bleak future of theoretical physics. The swarm around him began to grow with every passing day and their banter beneath the skies became a sudden culture.

It was a sight that Jana Nambodri caught every evening from his new window. And this evening, as he surveyed the resurrection with a face that was always a mask, he held his mobile to the ear and asked when the formal dismissal of Acharya could be arranged. He put the phone away and stared with such meditative forbearance that his mutant ears, which could gather even the voices of thought, did not hear the door open.

Ayyan Mani stood in the relief of finally catching this man alone. For several days he had been waiting for a quiet moment like this, but Nambodri was always surrounded by his inner circle of liberated radio astronomers.

‘Sir,’ Ayyan said, enjoying the startled jerk of his new master. ‘I wanted to have a word with you, Sir.’

Nambodri nodded without turning.

‘That day Oparna Goshmaulik had come here, Sir.’

‘Which day?’ Nambodri asked, now looking at Ayyan.

‘The day when everybody started talking about what Dr Acharya had done. She came here and told him why she contaminated the sampler. The door was not shut properly, Sir. So I heard everything.’

‘Why wasn’t the door shut?’

‘Her hairclip had fallen on the floor when she was entering and that jammed the door, Sir. She didn’t know that.’

‘She contaminated the sampler of her own free will? Arvind didn’t ask her to do it?’

‘Yes, Sir.’

‘She said that?’ Nambodri asked, sitting on the sofa.

‘Yes, Sir.’

‘And you heard it?’

‘Yes, Sir.’

‘Why did she contaminate the sampler?’

‘Love problem, Sir.’

‘Why are you telling me this, Ayyan?’ Nambodri asked, collecting a newspaper from the centrepiece, and turning its pages casually. Ayyan interpreted this as a calculated move to make him feel that it was not a big issue. He knew the tactics of the Brahmins. They called it management.

‘I’m telling you this because I think you should know, Sir. What I am trying to tell you, Sir, is that even if I was called by the inquiry committee I would not have told them what I’d heard. I thought, for the good of all, the man has to go. I wanted you to be here in this room, Sir.’

Nambodri pointed to the sofa that was facing him and Ayyan sat down feeling strangely impertinent. Nambodri threw the paper away and asked with dead eyes, ‘What do you want, Ayyan?’

‘Nothing, Sir.’

Nambodri studied the floor. ‘I am so touched by your gesture,’ he said. ‘A personal secretary’s deposition would have meant nothing to the inquiry committee. We were interested only in the statements of scientists. But still, I am deeply moved.’

‘Shall I get you some coffee, Sir?’ Ayyan asked cheerfully,
standing up. Nambodri shook his head. Ayyan went to the door. ‘Dr Acharya was a good man, Sir,’ he said from the doorway, ‘but sometimes he was very rude.’ He walked back into the room and said, ‘I will give you an example. My son loves the Institute. He talks about it every day. He wants to take the JET, Sir. He is only eleven but he says he will crack the entrance test. He is mad, my son. I asked Dr Acharya if Adi can sit for the entrance exam. He asked me to get out. He said the entrance exam is not a game. I thought that was very unfair.’

‘Your son wants to take our entrance test?’

‘Yes, Sir. People call him a genius, but I know he doesn’t have a chance to make it.’

‘He does not have a chance,’ Nambodri said.

‘I know, Sir. But Sir, do you think, you’ll let the boy take the test?’

Nambodri’s eyes studied his secretary with a mix of cunning and new respect. ‘Ayyan, how many people know about it?’ he asked.

‘About what, Sir?’

‘About what Oparna had told Arvind.’

‘No one, Sir.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘No one. Except me, Sir.’

The news of Adi’s application to the Institute of Theory and Research was covered in the English papers with a happy photograph of Jana Nambodri accepting a form from the boy. Two television channels interviewed them in the Director’s chamber.

‘He is a genius, so I thought, why not give him a chance?’ Nambodri explained.

‘I’ll pass,’ Adi said.

It was a fitting end to a great game. But three days later, the Marathi papers would tell this story with the picture of a man whose arrival on the scene unnerved Ayyan Mani. The game, he feared, had now gone too far.

PART SIX
One Last Shot

N
OT EVERYBODY IN
the crowd knew what they were waiting for, but they stood in a festive murmur outside one of the many exits of the BDD chawl. Some people asked what was going to happen. Many did not bother to ask. Excited boys ran through the assembly, and little girls played a conspiratorial game among themselves, all hopping on one leg. At the head of the crowd was Ayyan Mani, and a man bearing a massive rose garland that could break the neck of the beneficiary.

On the pavement by the side of the road was planted a banner two storeys high. Even in the blow-up the celebrity appeared stunted. He stood in a safari suit, his palms joined in greeting. His face was a light pink because poster artists did not have the freedom to paint his face black. His little mop of hair was spread thinly over an almost flat scalp. And his thick moustache had sharp edges. Just above his head was an English introduction in large font – DYNAMIC PERSONALITY. A thinner line that followed said he was the honourable Minister S. Waman. It seemed appropriate that it was at Waman’s black shoes the author took credit, in Marathi and in diplomatically chosen small font — ‘Hoarding Presented By P. Bikaji’. Bikaji was the man who was holding the massive garland. His white kurta had become transparent in his own sweat and he was almost trembling under the weight of the garland.

‘When he comes,’ he told Ayyan, ‘I will give him the garland first and then you speak.’

‘Why do you want to waste your time?’ Ayyan said. ‘He is not even going to look at you.

Someone screamed, ‘He is here.’ The crowd surged into the road. A pilot jeep screeched to a halt and behind it stopped a light-blue Mercedes, which was quickly surrounded by people. From the jeep, four bodyguards with machine guns ran to the Mercedes. (They guarded the minister at all times from the danger of being considered unworthy of such security.) They had to jostle and push to open the door of the car.

Waman, in a starched white kurta, emerged with joined palms.

Bikaji shouted, ‘The Leader of the Masses,’ which was repeated by the crowd.

Then they heard Bikaji scream, ‘Motherfucker,’ because an intrusive friend was now sharing the burden of the garland.

‘I am just helping,’ the friend said, offended.

Bikaji pushed him away angrily and advanced to the leader to garland him before others tried to benefit from his roses. Waman held the garland over his shoulder until a bodyguard extricated him.

‘I made that banner for you,’ Bikaji said, pointing to the illegal hoarding on the pavement.

‘Nice, good,’ Waman said, and asked, ‘Where is the boy’s father?’

Men began to yell, ‘Ayyan, Ayyan.’

Ayyan emerged from the crowd, held the hand of the minister with both his hands, and then touched his chest.

‘Let’s go,’ the minister said.

Ayyan and Waman walked down the broken, cobbled ways of the chawls with at least three hundred people following them. Photographers ran in front to take their pictures, and in-between the shots they jogged backwards. The minister looked around at the rows of grey identical buildings.