Serious Men (8 page)
The voice of Arvind Acharya cut through the air as though only silence had preceded it. ‘Your IQ is 140?’ he asked. There was a nervous laughter because no one was sure if he was capable of humour. Nambodri nodded with a sporting smile. Acharya fell silent again.
Ayyan watched patiently as the scientists discussed other issues. When they ran out of topics, a thoughtful silence descended. Acharya was about to rise when Nambodri said, ‘There is something else, Arvind.’ The way he said it, Ayyan’s heart began to beat faster. He knew things were about to get unpleasant. Finally.
Nambodri’s narrow eyes swept across the room and rested again on Acharya. ‘The Balloon Mission is not the only thing that is important in the Institute, it is not the only thing that should happen here,’ Nambodri said. His voice quivered at first, but it became increasingly more confident.
Oparna felt the stabs of cold stares. She wanted to hide. The silence in the room deepened.
‘There are other experiments, other things people want to do,’ Nambodri said. ‘Many of us in this room, especially the radio astronomers, are disturbed by your stand against the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. You have constantly refused to let The Giant Ear be used for the search for advanced civilizations. You have publicly stated that Seti is not science. Many of us in this room believe that you are being totally autocratic and unfair. I want to put the discontent on the table.’
‘You have,’ Acharya said. ‘Now I’ve better things to do.’
Nambodri said, with a resolute face, ‘I agree that the search for intelligent life is a bit fashionable, but it is important for such things to exist.’
‘It is not,’ Acharya screamed. ‘Look at how much money is being poured into this kind of shit. Millions on some rover that is supposed to search for water on Mars. Tell me why are we searching for water in space? Why should all life in the universe be dependent on water? There are Tamilians who can live without water. We spend millions and millions on such moronic missions. But there are not enough funds to find a way to predict earthquakes. Because earthquakes are not fashionable.’
He stood up, steering his trousers round his waist. Others began to rise. All eyes were on Nambodri who was still sitting. Obviously, there was something else.
‘Arvind,’ he said, ‘We are left with no other option but to involve the Ministry to resolve the issue.’
A silence fell that was not like other silences. Ayyan was ecstatic. This was turning out to be a lot of fun. Oparna, who would have normally laughed at the intensity of men, felt a chill run through her. The stillness around the oval desk was the stillness of an aspiring rebellion. Only silence could resolve it and she prayed for Acharya to be still, to be quiet.
Nothing showed on his face. He walked slowly around the desk towards Nambodri, but then – as if he had decided against assault – he walked behind his old friend to where he was standing before.
‘Why are you orbiting?’ Nambodri asked.
Ayyan understood the insult. It was in the league of other incomprehensible subtleties of the Institute. Usually, a lesser body like the Moon orbited a more important object like the Earth. Acharya left the room without a word.
T
HAT MORNING
, A
RVIND
Acharya was lost in the unreasonable joy of trying to solve an old intractable problem. Did Time move continuously, like a smooth line, or did it move in minuscule jumps, like a dotted line? He was standing on the narrow balcony nine floors above the ground and glaring at the Arabian Sea. The summer air was still. A crow on the wooden railing began to hop sideways towards him.
He was wearing a blue tracksuit that had a white tick mark embroidered at the hip, as if he approved of something. It had been sent by his daughter in California who wanted him to go on morning walks. Such things that came through DHL, he now grudgingly conceded as love. Some days, when he was not contemplating a difficult problem, he remembered Shruti fondly as the little girl who on a distant afternoon had looked up nervously and asked if maths was important in life. He had lied, ‘No.’ He might have liked to see her more often than when she decided to visit. Probably, he stood in the tracksuit every morning not to succumb to the indignity of exercise but because it was touched by his girl and dispatched in a packet on which she had written his name in her beautiful handwriting. Yet he never really craved to see her. The success of an old man lies in not wishing for company.
The sun was growing harsh. His eyes, which were the colour of light black tea, softened a little. He smiled too. The excitement of the Time problem was making him hold the railing and rock gently. That was when a steel tumbler with the unmistakable fragrance of Madras filter coffee was shoved towards his
chest. His surprise was so operatic it drove away the crow. The strands of abstract geometry and physics collapsed. What remained was the question that had woken him up at dawn, as it did on many dawns.
His wife for forty-two years, and forever his email password, held the cup calmly in one hand as she watered a dying creeper with another. She looked tall and lean even in the oversized T-shirt and pyjamas. Her clear skin was stretched taut over a bony face and she had large dancer’s eyes that men mistook as curious: the kind of woman about whom young girls would say, ‘She must have been beautiful once.’ Her dyed hair was short and thinning. Once, it was rich and flowing and she used to tie it up in majestic arrogance before a fight. She moved in a smooth delicate way, as if there were liquid gel in the joints of her bones. And she was as womanly when she nudged him again with her elbow, ordering him without uttering a word to take the steel cup, unmindful of the fact that she had delayed one of the answers science sought the most from one of the few men it could ask. He looked at her in disgust, but she was not wearing her glasses.
Lavanya Acharya yawned and pointed to a duster on the wire above and asked him to get it. His height was so useful. But when her mother had first met him with a silver plate full of moist fruits, she had said with a sad chuckle, ‘This boy is taller than a Gandhi statue.’ Acharya pulled down the dust cloth from the wire and gave it to his wife, muttering to himself that he had no peace in his own house. He then continued to glare at the sea.
She studied him fondly. He was dressed like a football coach, and just as furious.
‘You wear these things every morning, and then just stand. Why don’t you go for a nice long walk?’ she said.
A twitch appeared on his face. He didn’t turn.
‘Oh, and yes, I didn’t tell you,’ she said with sudden excitement, ‘Remember Lolo? Her husband died last night. Heart attack.’
Acharya abandoned the problem of Time. The news of death, any death, interested him these days. Especially the widowhood of her friends and cousins. These women began to grow healthier after the departure of their men. Their lugubrious eyes filled with life and their skin began to glow.
Lavanya pointed to the ceiling again. This time she asked him to bring down a suspended shrub. She was always doing that to him. Sometimes he complained that every time she saw him she imagined that she wanted something from a height. Yet she herself was tall, especially for a Tamil woman. Five foot nine. When she was twelve, her mother had made her walk one hour every day inside their silent labyrinthine house in Sivagangai with a wooden chest on her head because the family physician had said that the exercise would control her alarming height. But by the time she was eighteen, she had grown to unmarriageable levels. The elite of Sivagangai observed her sadly because tall Brahmin boys were rare then. The only tall types were loitering residues of the British, chiefly old enduring white men who were known to cohabit with servant maids, or Anglo-Indian boys who were terrible at studies and worse, good at sports. The entire family of Lavanya would rather consume Senthil Rat Poison than marry her off to a white man or to the ‘coffee’ as Anglo-Indians were then called. But the elders need not have worried so much. Somehow, they found a twenty-two-year-old boy from a very good family, who too had the deformity of height. He had graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology, but was still studying something inscrutable in the Annamalai University in Madras. Whatever it was that he was studying did not appear to ensure a government job. But Lavanya’s condition made them overlook all the faults of Arvind Acharya. It was a marriage that was ordained not by the frivolity of love, or even its naïve expectation, but by the more reliable bond of equal handicap.
Acharya was now distracted by the excitement of the impending Balloon Mission. He looked up at the clear blue sky. Somewhere
there, not very high actually, he knew there were millions of microscopic aliens in a gentle descent. He was going to find them. The glare returned, the morning burned in his eyes, and he was slipping into a pleasurable trance once again. Then he felt something cold touch his legs. He almost jumped. The maid was crouched like a giant frog and mopping the floor. She looked at him with fear and suspicion. She always did. The day she had joined the household, she was shaken by the sound of death that came from his room. It was the voice of Luciano Pavarotti.
Acharya used to listen to the angelic tenor every morning. Pavarotti was his ethereal accomplice in his incurable quest to solve the remaining mysteries of the universe. But Lavanya decided to ban the music in the mornings after she realized that it was terrifying not just the maid but also the cook. He resisted and even began to increase the volume until Lavanya proved that the days he played Pavarotti, the dosas looked baffled and tasted raw. ‘Women are sensitive,’ she had told him, ‘and women cook your food.’
The maid scrubbed the floor near his feet and threw another glance at him. The way she looked at him, he was certain that she suspected he was Pavarotti. ‘Move,’ Lavanya said, ‘she has to clean.’
As he walked around the maid carefully he muttered, ‘All that happens in this house is cleaning.’ He went to the kitchen without knowing why. There the cook was squatting on the sink and doing the dishes because she was too tiny to reach the tap. She turned and looked at him with one eye. It was all so terrible. So ugly.
He marched to Shruti’s abandoned bedroom. It was now used to store the useless gifts that the young kept sending them in the moronic benevolence of keeping in touch. Lavanya saved all the presents and recycled them as wedding gifts.
He went to the huge bookshelf that covered one half of the wall. There was a delicate promise of peace here. But he saw the shadow of Lavanya approach. ‘Arvind,’ she said with a smile that she had initially wanted to hide, ‘Are you going to just walk
inside the house? You are supposed to walk outside, you know.’ He did not say anything. He studied the spines of the books. Then he heard her shriek.
‘They haven’t gone,’ she screamed. The way she said ‘they’, he knew she was talking about cockroaches. Lavanya and cockroaches had a special relationship. On the second day of marriage she had confessed that she had the ability to hear them. She was inspecting the floor carefully now, holding a rolled copy of a postdoctoral thesis on Large Molecular Structures in Interstellar Gas.
‘Just last week we had sprayed the whole kitchen. I thought they were gone. But they have all moved in here.’ She went on about the indestructibility of the insects and the inevitability of calling pest control even though, she admitted, it seemed like a very American thing to do. ‘What do we do, Arvind? These things don’t die. What do we do?’
He inhaled a lot of air and looked at her. ‘Lavanya,’ he said, certain that this was really going to annoy her, ‘Like in maths …’
‘What?’
‘Just because there is a problem, it does not mean there is always a solution.’
She tilted her face. And looked at him with a menacing exasperation. He returned the stare. It struck him how rarely he looked at her any more, and how old she actually appeared this close. This was an old woman standing in front of him, whose hair, without the deception of dye, would be the colour of cobwebs. Her face was still beautiful, but the skin on her neck had become loose. In each other’s eyes, probably, they had been diminished by age and disfigured by familiarity. Or was it the other way around? He could smell in her the vapours of all the oils from Kerala that she rubbed on her skin every night like a wrestler. That smell to him was the smell of death. His grandfather used to smell that way, and he used to tell all his grandchildren when they applied the odious oil on his wrinkled body that it was the lubricant old people needed to go smoothly down the tunnel of afterlife, into the body of a newborn. And the kids would then have nightmares about the crooked old men who had entered
them when they were babies. The smell, strangely, also reminded him of the importance of digestion. His grandfather, in the aroma of ayurvedic oils that somehow made him appear wise, told the youth of the household every day that the secret of longevity lay in ensuring efficient digestion of food. ‘Always’, he used to say, ‘listen to your arse.’