Serious Men (35 page)

One of the peons filled a jug. He stared at the other peon and at Ayyan in the fellowship of the moment. He opened the lid of the jug and spat into it.

Later in the evening, as Acharya was dozing somewhere near the lawn, Ayyan knelt beside him and said, ‘Sir, do you want some office space?’

Acharya opened his eyes and looked confused.

‘Do you want an office, Sir?’ Ayyan asked again.

Acharya followed him. They went down to the basement. The stark white walls and the hum of subterranean machines brought back to Acharya the memories of nocturnal love. Somehow it was always night here. It felt like night. He saw in his mind the face of Oparna, and the way she used to look at him. He remembered the way she used to sit, her melancholic smoking, and her insolence that seemed then to be the right of every naked woman. He felt a nervous anticipation in his stomach as if she would appear at the end of the walk, waiting for him on the cold floor in the fragrance of lemon.

The board that said ‘Astrobiology’ was still there, but the lab door was locked. Ayyan took out a key from his pocket.

‘How do you have the key?’ Acharya asked in a whisper because he was still in the fragile delusion that Oparna was inside and that this dark man was an accomplice of love.

‘Keys are easy to find, Sir,’ Ayyan said. He opened the door and switched on the lights.

‘You’re going to get into trouble for this,’ Acharya said.

‘Yes,’ Ayyan said.

‘Why are you doing this, Ayyan? Jana is a very mean man. He is the practical sort.’

‘So am I,’ Ayyan said.

Acharya looked around the lab for the memories of a girl. But there was no life here. The air had no smell. The equipment on the main desk was shrouded in its covering. The chairs were in a
perpetual wait. The phone was still there, on the same wooden stool. Everything was as he remembered. Like the abandoned rooms of the dead.

Ayyan turned on the computer and inspected the air-conditioning vents. ‘There is internet,’ he said. He held the phone receiver to his ear. ‘This is still working. I’ll give you a number you can call if you need anything.’ And he left.

Acharya sank to the floor holding a knee. He leaned his back on the wall and stretched his legs. In the desolation of the lab, he saw the face of Oparna and heard her say this and that. And he remembered a love so light, like the sack of that eloping girl from another time whom he had seen as a boy from the footbridge over the railway tracks. He wondered how the life of that girl had turned out. Maybe she lived happily with her man and recounted her elopement to her grandchildren with delirious exaggerations. He would confirm all her lies, if she so wished.

I
T WAS TRUE
that Administration had the mystery of God in the Institute, but very few realized that on the second floor there was, in fact, a board that said ‘Administration’. The mystical department was a maze of wooden partitions where laypeople looked soberly at their computer screens, silently sustaining the pursuit of truth in the higher floors. At one end of the room, the maze became more intricate and the cubicles became smaller and numerous. This was the Accounts Department which Ayyan Mani always remembered for the striking ugliness of its women, and the old bonds of friendship he shared with its mostly Malayalee men.

He saw Unny at the end of a narrow way that ran between the cubicles. He was kicking the base of an enormous printer.

‘The great man comes to the abode of the poor,’ Unny said, throwing a glance at Ayyan. He kicked the printer one more time. ‘One day, someone will make a printer that works,’ he said. ‘A lot of paper is jammed inside.’

Ayyan kicked the printer a few times.

‘Forget it,’ Unny said. ‘How is the boy genius?’

‘He is all right. Now he wants to know if underwear is important in life,’ Ayyan said.

‘That’s strange, even my son asked me that. Come, let’s go to my desk.’

‘I’m in a hurry,’ Ayyan said. ‘Your Malayalee chief wants something urgently.’

‘Who? Nambodri? What does he want?’

‘He said he wants some copies from the payment files of Aryabhata Tutorials. Do you know what that means?’

Unny nodded and went to an open steel shelf that was stuffed with files. As he was searching, he asked, ‘Adi is studying hard for the test?’

Ayyan did not show his impatience, but he wanted to finish the job quickly, and as discreetly as possible.

Unny screamed to someone across the room, ‘Where is the Aryabhata file?’ That made Ayyan nervous. He looked around the room for any suspicious faces. ‘It’s in the petty cash shelf,’ a woman’s voice said.

Unny went to the adjacent shelf, muttering how disorganized the place was.

‘Tell me, Ayyan,’ he said, standing on a stool and tapping the spines of files with his index finger. ‘How did Adi become so bright? Do you feed him something we don’t know about?’

‘He was born a bit strange,’ Ayyan said.

‘There it is,’ Unny yelped, and pulled out a thin file. He went through it with a confused expression and handed it to his friend. ‘I’ve always wondered what exactly is this Aryabhata Tutorials,’ Unny said.

‘Only God knows what it is,’ Ayyan said, trying to look as if he had no interest in the file, but his hands were trembling.

‘It is a separate company owned by the Institute,’ Unny said. ‘Why would the Institute own a tutorial? And where is this place? What does this tutorial do? I don’t understand. I’ve not seen a single board in the city that says Aryabhata Tutorials. I don’t know a single student who goes there. It’s very strange, you know.’

Ayyan leafed through the file. His heart was pounding, but he tried to look relaxed, even bored. He photocopied three bills and gave the file back.

Unny went through the file again and shook his head. ‘These last twenty years, Aryabhata Tutorials has made payments only to printers. Nothing else. It only makes payments and it pays only printers. It does not earn.’

‘God knows what these guys do,’ Ayyan said. ‘I never understood them anyway. I will see you in the canteen soon?’

Ayyan went to his desk and collected the late courier mail and
the faxes, opened the inner door and walked in. As usual, the astronomers were sitting on the sofas by the window. Some of them stared unpleasantly at him. Eyes followed him as he went to Nambodri’s vacant table in the far corner. Normally, they did not register his presence but that had changed after their last encounter. He pretended to sort the courier mail and the faxes on Nambodri’s desk. His left hand slowly reached for the small gap between the table top and drawer compartment where he usually left his mobile phone. He put the phone in his pocket and walked out.

He went down the corridor of the third floor and as he walked he took out the copies of the three bills he had made in the Accounts Department. He dialled the number on the first bill. A woman’s voice came on the line. Ayyan said, ‘I am calling from Aryabhata Tutorials. I want to know when we can expect the consignment?’

The woman’s voice asked, ‘You said you are from Aryabhata Tutorials?’

‘Yes.’

‘Hold on,’ she said.

A man’s voice came on the line. ‘Who is speaking?’

‘Murthy,’ Ayyan said.

‘Which job are you talking about?’

‘There was only one.’

‘But the sample papers were sent a month ago,’ the man’s voice said with concern.

Ayyan disconnected the line and called the second number, and then the third. The other two printers too said that the consignments had been dispatched a month ago. Ayyan had feared this. He was too late.

The question-paper of the Institute’s Joint Entrance Test was a jewel and it was guarded not through the frailties of a written code, nor the dangerous inconsistencies of loyalty, but by the force of tradition. Its annual creation was a highly secretive process known to very few. Ayyan was not supposed to be among
those few. He had learnt its rudiments over the years, listening carefully to the walls and piecing together bits of information.

Every year, five professors and the Director met discreetly over three weeks to create the questions of the entrance exam. They never used the computer. They always wrote down the questions by hand in a single notebook. They made three question-papers and gave them to three different printers. Every year, one of the professors in the JET panel went personally to the printers, posing as a representative of Aryabhata Tutorials. So, even the printers did not know what they were printing. They probably thought that they were printing the study material of one of the thousands of tutorials in the city. Sometime before the entrance exam, the Director would choose one of the three printed versions of the question-paper.

Ayyan had just learnt from the printers that the question-papers had been delivered. They were somewhere in the Institute, he was certain. The entrance exam was eight weeks away and he believed he had enough time to find out where the papers were stored. Three versions of a question-paper meant for ten thousand candidates, he calculated, would require at least three big cartons. Such a delivery could not have gone unnoticed. He began to wander around the various floors and identify rooms that were mysteriously locked. He found three. They were not sealed. Just locked. And keys were never a problem. But a search in those rooms yielded nothing. He enquired of the guards if they had seen anything, and asked his army of peons if they had ever been sent to a press to collect a consignment, or if they had seen the improbable sight of huge cartons being brought in personally by a professor. But they could not help him.

For two weeks, Ayyan spent the nights searching almost every room in the Institute for the question-papers. The Accounts Department, he learnt, had a safety vault but it was not big enough for even a single carton. It confused him that a massive consignment of three huge cartons could be so invisible. As the days went by, he realized that only one man could help him.

I
N THE RELENTLESS
night of the basement, Arvind Acharya became infatuated with his own shadow. He wandered through the space feeling the entertainment of being a one-dimensional ghost. He arranged the table lamps on the main desk in different ways to see himself on the walls and on the floor in disproportionate sizes. Most of the time he could not take his eyes off his shadow because he was enchanted by the thought that these illusionary images had the same memories and the same theories as he did. And the same wife. The shadows even asked him deeply why they should not be granted the status of real creatures since reality anyway was merely the perception of the eye. So he granted them that. He multiplied himself through his shadows and sat among them in the peace of knowing that there were at least some men who were exactly like him, who understood him and who even loved him.

He was preoccupied by the joy of a liberation he could not name but he was also tormented by a pubescent love. It was a love that was far more terrifying than what he had felt for Oparna. Because it was dedicated to his wife who had abandoned him five days ago.

Lavanya had told him that she could survive him so far because he had always tried his best not to appear mad, even though he was. But now, she could not bear his unreasonable joy at nothing at all, and the way he spoke to objects as though they had asked a question. She said his perpetual happiness made her feel that she was not required. He had asked her if the truth was that she was just embarrassed by him. She had held his hand and said,
‘Why would a woman be embarrassed by you? You are too beautiful, Arvind. It’s just that I can’t handle what you’ve become. It hurts me even though I know you are very happy.’ Then she gave clear instructions to the maids, packed her things in a suitcase, and left for Chennai to be with her interminable family.

So Acharya began to spend all his time in the basement. And he metamorphosed from a sudden cult on the pathways into a subterranean legend. It was not just the scholars of the Institute who began to seek him out but also scientists and students from other such places. They sat on the floor, or on the tables and chairs, and they talked about the philosophical future of physics, the ceaseless descent of eternal aliens, Stephen Hawking’s claim that the question
why
there was life in the universe would soon be answered, and about a lot of other things.

One evening in this basement world that was filled with over forty scientists and students, a strange figure walked in nervously.

‘I’m from the security department,’ the man told Acharya, casting glances at the others. ‘This is to inform you that a decision has been taken regarding your illegal stay in the Institute. You’ve been asked to vacate the premises immediately and stop using the basement as your office.’

‘But I like it here,’ Acharya said.

‘These are the orders from the management, Sir.’

A man in the audience who was a senior scientist from the Institute asked the informer to be reasonable.

The informer said helplessly, ‘I do not own the Institute, Sir. I am only informing him about a decision taken at the highest level.’

The congregation became silent and gloomy, and it slowly dissolved. Some reassured Acharya that they would think of a way to help him; others shook hands with him sombrely. When the last of the visitors, a scrawny boy with a shoulder bag strung on his back, was about to leave, Acharya commanded: ‘Boy, get me some clothes and a lot of chocolates. And a lot of bananas.’

*

For twelve days after that evening, Acharya did not stir from the basement. He feared that if he left the lab even for a walk on the lawns, someone would lock the door and he would be thrown out of the Institute. Visitors now began to arrive in greater numbers than before, bearing food and clothes. And soap. It became a spontaneous basement rebellion. Nambodri was flooded with polite calls to reconsider his decision. But he did not relent. In his calculation, the ill-feeling against him would be forgotten once Acharya vanished not only from the Institute but also, after his dismissal was formalized, from the Professors’ Quarters.