Serious Men

PART THREE. Basement Item

OPARNA GOSHMAULIK POUND it funny. That the curtain was blood-red, that it went up in somnolent folds, and that there was a silence of anticipation all around. All this drama at an event where the guest lecturer had promised to speak on the ‘Interpretations of Quantum Mechanics’. Even the lights were dimming now. The Talks had begun. It was an annual event in honour of departing research scholars, the Institute’s version of a convocation ceremony but without the black gowns or the precondition that the scholars should now get out into the real world.

The auditorium was full. There were silhouettes on the aisles. Scores of people were outside the doors, denied entry, denied the Interpretations of Quantum Mechanics. And they were disconsolate. She could hear their angry demands to be allowed to at least sit in the aisles. But then even the aisles were filled. This was a strange parallel world.

There was a deafening applause now. On the stage appeared an amicable white man, and Arvind Acharya. The two men sat on cane chairs in the centre of an illuminated circle. The sheer expanse of the stage was fit for ballet but the Institute allowed only lectures. A pretty girl, somewhat preoccupied with her long straight hair, arrived at the podium. ‘Look at my hair, look at my hair,’ Oparna thought she was going to say, but instead the girl said, ‘Science is an evolution of the human mind. It is the true history of mankind.’ After a few lines like this she said that the men on the stage needed no introduction and then she introduced them. The girl was not from the Institute and Oparna wondered where the men had found her. She remembered Jana Nambodri asking her if she could introduce the guests and hand out the bouquets too. ‘We need some beauty out there’, he had said. She had refused because she had felt like refusing him. Also, even though she understood the banality of men and the aesthetic improvements a woman would bring to an occasion like this, she was privately against women being used as ceremonial dolls. And, for reasons that were not clear to her then, she wanted to look at Acharya from a comfortable seat in the shelter of darkness.

His initial geniality had vanished. His red cheeks were now molten, his infant bald head shone under the lights and he was surveying the audience in dismay. Keeble rose from his cane chair and went to the podium. He drank two glasses of water. He was a tall slender man, elderly and pleasant. ‘It is a pleasure to speak to a gathering like this,’ he said, and then looking at Acharya, he added, ‘A bit intimidating too.’

A gentle hush of laughter went through the auditorium. Some laughed aloud late to show that they understood the joke. Keeble began his lecture. Oparna endured the Interpretations of Quantum Mechanics by observing what Acharya did throughout the speech. He would open his mouth in a trance or glare at the roof, or signal to someone for a glass of water, or a faint smirk would come to his face at something Keeble had said.

At one point, he was looking angrily at Keeble, and she felt nervous. She hoped he wouldn’t do anything stupid. Keeble was talking about Time and was coming to the perilous conclusion: ‘Though Stephen Hawking had misgivings about what he had said earlier, I am of the opinion that the arrow of Time moves both ways. In some conditions we would remember the future and not the past, and a ripple would cause a stone to fall. Time can be reversed.’

Acharya’s deep operatic voice exclaimed, ‘Not possible.’ He said it again, this time softly. ‘Not possible.’

Keeble looked a bit embarrassed, but the spontaneous gasp of the audience, then the laughter and the festive murmurs that ensued, diminished the shock. Also, there was no malice in the voice that had spoken. Acharya’s comment somehow invoked the spirit of science and everybody understood it that way.

‘We will talk about it later, Arvind,’ Keeble said jovially. ‘Maybe we can meet yesterday, if you have the time.’

When Acharya eventually rose to speak, and steered his trousers around his waist, Oparna laughed. A studious stranger sitting next to her looked at her curiously before returning his expectant eyes to the stage. Acharya walked like a tusker to the podium. Oparna felt the world around her quietening. There was then a silence that was eerie and total. It was broken by the squeal of the mike when he tapped it gently.

‘I like Henry Keeble very much and so it hurts me to say that the end of quantum physics is near,’ he said, his voice manly and powerful. Yet, innocent, rude and pure. ‘The Large Hadron Collider will confirm that many exotic particles do not actually exist and that many among us may have been talking rubbish for the last three decades. Maybe we cannot understand physics at the quantum level without understanding other things which are not considered physics today. Other things like …’ He paused. He appeared to decide if he must say it. He did not say it.

‘I believe it is time for a new kind of physics to arrive,’ he said. ‘Honestly, I don’t know what this new physics will look like. Anyway, I am too old for that revolution. Maybe someone in this auditorium will one day bring it to us. But this is not what I want to talk about today.

‘There are research students here who will be leaving us this year. They will be pursuing their interests in other universities. I came here, primarily, to tell you something. Go with the knowledge that man has just scratched the surface. It is a very impressive scratch and we must be proud. But there is a lot, a lot of things, to be done. I wish I were as old as you now, at this time. There is so much to do. But I have no tips on what you must do. In fact, I came here to say what you must never do. There is no pleasant way to say this, so let me say it the way I want to say it. Most of you will probably never really discover anything. You may not contribute anything to the great equations that describe the universe to the world. But you will have the good fortune of encountering people of exceptional intelligence. People who are much smarter than you. Never get in their way, never group together in disgruntled circles and play games. Respect talent, real talent. Worship it. Clever people will always be disliked. Don’t exploit that and crawl your way to the top. By the laws of probability most of you are mediocre. Accept it. The tragedy of mediocrity is that even mediocre people shake their heads and mull over how ‘standards are falling’. So don’t mull. Just know when you’ve to get out of the way. Most of you will be sideshows, extras in the grand unfolding of truth. That’s all right. Once you accept that and let the best brains do their jobs, you will have done your service to science and mankind.’

Oparna studied the faces in the auditorium. There was hurt and there was acceptance. She saw the light in their eyes, and it was a moment she knew she would always remember. They were under a spell, they were at the mercy of an ancient genius who was speaking his mind. The tension eased as Acharya changed course. He began to speak about the Balloon Mission and infected the audience with his conviction that microscopic aliens were falling on Earth all the time.

‘We will find them,’ he said.

Two days after The Talks, the work on the Balloon Mission intensified. The dormant machines and boxes and borrowed research hands in the basement sprang to life. And the lab in the bowels of the Institute became a hive of activity. It was now the most important place in the Institute, connected in spirit to the chamber of Acharya on the third floor. He began to arrive at the Institute before nine in the morning, bumbling down the corridors with more purpose than before, always with a comet tail of research assistants. One by one, Acharya’s old friends from different parts of the world descended for short durations to help. In the company of the old hands he relaxed a bit and appeared less preoccupied with his own contempt for the world. Oparna began to see him the way she guessed he once was.

His eyes, that usually cast an insurmountable distance, now looked with the connivance of fellowship. The friends who came his way, he hugged fiercely, and in the meetings, which had become some sort of a festive reunion, the old men recounted the memories of their golden days and their battles with people whom they often described in a derisive way as ‘normal’. Acharya was becoming easy to be with. In the middle of a discussion, when someone said the Balloon Mission needed a name, he did not consider it a frivolity. He understood, and was game. He even thought through a brief silence and said excitedly, ‘Superman.’ His bellowing laughter shook his paunch, and a button snapped. They discussed various names until they decided that they would just call it the Balloon Project, probably BP.

Acharya’s office had been transformed into a bustling place, and Ayyan Mani in the anteroom was no longer a medium. All sorts of people had the right to walk in. But after the initial impetus, and after the old friends had fulfilled their promises, they all went back to their countries. Acharya’s room returned to its calm. Ayyan slowly rebuilt the wall again between Acharya and the rest of the world, but his importance was somewhat diminished because the natural force of the events granted Oparna the undeniable right to open the sacred inner door whenever she pleased. Acharya began to spend most of his time with her, and they often worked together into the stillness of the night.

IT WAS PAST midnight, and they were probably the only people left in the Institute. The lone window in his room was shut, but the smell of the impending monsoon was in the air — a whiff of salt and wet earth that lulled the mind into sleep or into remembering old rains. Acharya was reading a long list of lab equipment that had to arrive. He finally took his eyes off the material to give them relief. He removed his glasses, leaned back on his enormous black chair and stretched. He looked at the girl who was sitting across the table from him. Her head was bent in intense concentration. Oparna was reading Elementary Descriptions of Non-culturable Bacteria. She was a reassuring sight, almost pleasing. There was this unremarkable happiness inside her. She laughed easily, and her laughter had a womanly tolerance about it, as though she had heard the joke before but still liked it. And when she chuckled, especially when the men had tried to find a name for the Balloon Project, she would cover her mouth with one hand and arch a bit. And there was this fragrance of lemon about her, a very expensive lemon. She was a few inches shorter than Lavanya, but somehow appeared tall. So firm and strong and agile, she was. Very tidy too. She was always producing tissues from her large olive-green bag.

Girl, he thought, and found it silly that he should think she was a girl because she obviously was a girl. Yet, if she died, mysteriously murdered probably, the newspapers would write, ‘A thirty-year-old woman was found dead in suspicious circumstances.’ They never described a thirty-year-old as a girl. He wondered why. Even she would die one day, and he felt sad it should be so. There was so much life in her, and so much beauty. She had a startling face, which he could not see right now. He looked apologetically at the reasonable mounds of her breasts. Her long fingers were toying with a thin gold chain around her long young neck. He strained to see her feet. But he could not see them from that angle. He liked the way her slender toes rested on her thin slippers. Her toenails were always red, and her fingernails pink. He concentrated on her head, which was still bent. Her thick real black hair was stretched to full tension and tied back in a severe pony-tail. He found it funny.

‘If I strum your head, there will be music,’ he said.

Oparna looked up. When their eyes met, he did not know why he felt he should not look at her. ‘Just an observation,’ he told his paperweight.

‘Sorry, you said something?’

‘I said nothing. Nothing important, actually.’

She smiled and went back to Elementary Descriptions of Non-culturable Bacteria. But she was not reading. She had not been reading for some time. You must strum then, she wanted to say. Unknowingly, her finger circled a curl that was falling on her cheek. She knew he had been looking. And her heart was pounding, her throat felt cold. She quietly conceded that she was all messed up and there was no hope for her. So many cute men in this country nowadays, all beginning to wear good narrow shoes too, and here she was hoping that a giant astronomer whose shirt buttons actually rotated in the strain of his stomach would look at her more carefully and find something more he could do with her hair. But he did have a very beautiful face and pure luminous eyes that sometimes stared like a child’s. She knew how insane a man could make her, and she feared that. But what could she do?

An hour later, they stepped into the anteroom together. (Ayyan had left a long time ago.) They went down the corridor which was now completely deserted. They went in a silence that made them feel like accomplices.

Acharya walked with her to her silver-grey Baleno that lay on the side of the driveway. She got in with an expression that she was sure was the face of indifference. As she drove away, he waved, and he realized from the confused face of the night security at the guard post that he was waving long after she had vanished through the black gates. He went home wondering if Oparna had smiled at him through the rear-view mirror.

It was strange, the way she had got into her car without a word. She was probably angry because he had made a personal comment. He wanted to call her and ask if she was angry, but that, he knew, would be very silly. He turned the key, and opened the door of his home carefully so that Lavanya would not be disturbed, and felt his way from the dark hall to the bedroom. He could see the figure of Lavanya lying on her bed with her hand on her forehead. And the odours of Kerala’s curative oils reached him.

Oparna drove down the Marine Drive with the windows open. The road was empty and against the lemon-yellow street lights she could see a gentle drizzle swaying in the wind. She was thinking of Acharya’s eyes.

At the gates of a high-rise building in Breach Candy, a security guard let her in, his small-town eyes showing faint contempt for a girl who returned home so late. When the lift door closed and became a mirror, Oparna studied it carefully. Her hair was dishevelled, and her long top looked so terrible that she felt like some sort of activist.

When she let herself into her flat she did not know why she became so furtive, as if she had done something delightfully wrong. She tiptoed towards her parents’ bedroom and peeped through the door. They were snoring. Father had a longer hiss. She went to her room, which was in a faint purple glow, its flimsy curtains flying in the wind. She felt shy as she undressed. And smiled to herself when she tried to read.

She lay awake for much of the night, thinking of his infant face and innocent rage. And how easily he understood the world of microbes. Just a silly crush, she thought — it would go away in the morning.

So it is with all sudden lovers who believed that their torments would vanish in the morning, but inevitably it is already morning when such a convenient consolation comes to them.

She was woken by her mother who usually had an ulterior motive when she did that. After ensuring that she had disturbed her daughter’s sleep, she came back with a cup of tea and said, ‘An alliance has come.’ Oparna’s eyes which had just opened shut tight. ‘The boy is not in software,’ her mother said encouragingly, and added, with an edge in her voice, ‘Now don’t say you are a lesbian.’

IN THE ‘FINITE’ corridor of the Institute, four astronomers were huddled together, questioning whether twin-star systems were indeed the norm in the universe. They were then distracted by the distant sound of heels. They fell silent and looked in the direction of the prospect.

Oparna appeared. Her hair flying, face glowing, in a sky-blue shirt that for the first time introduced them to the real shape of her breasts, their study in the coming days destined to be called topology. She was wearing a long black denim skirt which had a flower, or something similar, embroidered around the thigh. She passed by them with an innocent smile. They stared at her back. The sound of the heels faded and died. They knew that here as the Doppler Effect.

‘Birthday?’ asked Ayyan Mani.

‘Yours?’ Oparna enquired.

‘No. Is it yours?’

‘I don’t think so,’ she said. ‘Is there anyone with him?’

‘No.’

She pushed open the heavy door that once used to terrify her. She knew what she had to do. She could be a woman and wait for him to collapse, but she could not endure the game that she now realized she had been unknowingly playing for many months. Acharya lifted his enormous head and for a moment he looked as though he had found the Unified Theory by mistake. He looked down and appeared to study some material on the table. She sat on the chair facing him, crossed her legs, arched her body and looked at him fondly. He looked into her eyes and tried to understand her special glow.

He toyed with the paperweight and spoke of how the cryogenic sampler was still stuck in America. ‘We need to get the Ministry involved,’ he told the paperweight.

Ayyan Mani knew something had changed. He could see Oparna had arrived at a decision. And there was a force in her that morning, a calm arrogance that beautiful women usually had. He recognized it as her real face. The shadow she had pretended to be in this kingdom of men, in her long shapeless top and jeans, that subdued acceptance of all situations, he always knew was just a farce. He lifted his intrusive phone receiver and listened.

‘Contamination is a serious problem,’ Acharya was saying. ‘We have to ensure that there is no way the sampler can be contaminated before or after the mission. If it’s so difficult for the cryosampler to be a hundred per cent sterilized, imagine how vulnerable spaceships are to contamination. When we landed on the Moon or sent the rovers to Mars, we left Earth microbes there.’

‘Are you trying not to look at me?’ Oparna asked.

The insubordination of women, he would understand in time, is often a consequence of infatuation, but that morning her question registered as an anomaly. He answered nervously, feeling an unfamiliar excitement in his stomach, ‘What do you mean by that, Oparna?’

‘You can look at me as long as you want.’

‘I don’t understand your behaviour. It’s strange.’

‘Did you sleep last night?’ she asked.

‘How is that important?’

‘To the Cosmic Ancestry Theory? No it’s not important. Just felt like asking. Should everything always be important?’

‘No.’

‘I could not sleep,’ she said.

‘So?’

‘Because of you.’

‘I don’t understand what you are trying to say.’

Acharya’s mind went to a distant day in his childhood when he had seen, for the first time, a fish die. The final frantic palpitations of the fish was the condition of his heart right now. He toyed with the paperweight and through the silence that Oparna granted he heard faraway phones, stray horns, even crows and some orphan sounds he could not recognize. The silence approached a point after which it would cease to be part of the conversation and become a deafening diabolic force. But he did not offer to speak. Oparna got up to leave. The demented mirth of mischief and insolence had left her face. She walked to the door and looked at him with an affection that was at once hopeful and melancholic. Like light was both particle and wave.

After she left, in the sudden desolation of the room, he tried to understand the tumult inside himself. He could feel a strange nameless fear, but he was euphoric too. The mascot of real joy he had always imagined was a simple human smile, but now he suspected that a smile was actually very frivolous. The face of true deep joy had to be an impassive grimness.

He did not understand what had happened to her. She was wooing a fat old man. She must be ovulating. Men appeared attractive to women during that time, he had read. This would pass. Then he realized that he was afraid that it might pass.

His ascetic power of concentration deserted him. He tried to tear himself away from the haunting visions of her face. He forced himself to think of the Big Bang’s devotees, because their thoughts usually built a mad rage within him. But in the place of the old malice was love and pardon for all, and Oparna’s face, like a giant background spirit, appreciating his maturity. He tried to read Topolov’s Superman, but he wondered what she would think if she saw him with the violent underground comic. No matter what he tried to do, he realized, the face of Oparna ultimately appeared. In every frame she was there, like R.K. Laxman’s Common Man. He tried desperately to search for a distraction to abolish this distraction, but nothing could cure his fever.

Acharya decided to wander. He walked down the quiet lane from the Institute, through Navy Nagar and all the way to the Marine Drive. He stood on the broad promenade and looked at the turbulent sea. The sky had turned grey, the wind was strong and it tasted of salt. At a distance, down the curve of the promenade, the sea lashed against the wave breakers and exploded into mists.

He could see the monsoon on the bleak horizon. It was coming like a grey fog. On the road, there was a sort of panic in the evening traffic, as though there had been a morbid warning and everybody was fleeing. The wind became stronger and it blew visible dust, leaves, old newspapers and a forlorn blue kerchief. Then, the monsoon arrived. First as a drizzle. Some evening walkers switched from the haste of exercise to the very distinct haste of running for cover. Old women unfurled their umbrellas with a wisdom that did not have a clear face. It struck him, how complete, how final, an umbrella actually was. As a technology, it would not evolve any further.

The rains became a torrent now. Distant buildings across the bay were no longer visible. He saw an old man jog to a bus shelter, dribbling his swollen testicles on his frail thighs, like a footballer during a warm-up. The young, who had come for the rains, howled. They stood still in the rains. Some of them were compelled to spread their hands in a cinematic gesture because they felt odd just standing. Young girls worried if their blouses had become transparent. But they took the rains on their uplifted faces. They giggled and skipped and ran, as if they were in a sanitary-towel commercial.

Then, the rains were gone. The clouds cleared. A new light descended on the Marine Drive that made everything glow. Acharya thought his vision had improved. The evening walkers returned. Old couples were reunited. They went carefully on the wet tiles, wise in the knowledge that they had now reached an age when a slip could lead to death. They went slowly, four frail hands holding a single umbrella that was bending in the breeze. They must have been thinking of old monsoons, many monsoons. When they were young and strong, and the rains never seemed so grey.

When he reached home, fully soaked, his white full-sleeve shirt now transparent, his trousers resting precariously below his hips and held in place only by the grip of wetness, Lavanya put her hand on her head. ‘Who are you?’ she said. ‘Archimedes?’ As she dried him with a towel that felt very warm, he stared at her. She was so frail, the skin on her forehead so tired, her dyed hair scanty. He counted thirteen lines on her neck. What must a man do?

In the days that followed, he tried to ignore Oparna. That, he thought, was a solution. He would not summon her until she came to him without being invited, and though he felt a nervous excitement in his stomach every time he saw her, he would talk to her about the weather conditions over the launch facility in Hyderabad, or the optimum size of the balloon, or something like that. And she would just stare at him. ‘We need to lock the sourcing of the laminar air-flow cabinet,’ he would say. ‘We need to lock many things,’ she would tell him. And he would say, ‘I got a letter today. Cardiff has agreed to be part of the mission.’ And she would take mock offence and leave his room.

Every night, he stood on the narrow balcony, nine floors above the ground, lost in the intoxication of Oparna, his reveries mistaken by his wife as his incurable affliction with the pursuit of truth. Lavanya did get confused when he once laughed in his sleep. Occasionally, she even found him looking at himself intently in the mirror. And yesterday morning, once again, he had taken vegetable stock from the freezer thinking it was ice. He had done that before, but this time he gulped down the juice and did not notice that anything was amiss.

Lavanya, though irreparably influenced by her mother to suspect men because they were unstable people, would have never guessed that the Big Bang’s Old Foe could be lost in the thoughts of a girl who was born after man had landed on the Moon.

In the Institute, Oparna was now a carnival. Her hair was called ‘dynamic’ by the scientists because it was different almost every day. Her long floral skirts and tight blouses, her fitted jeans, and opportunistic saris that made stenos comment unhappily on the foolishness of wearing the costume in the rains, terminated the near anonymity that she was beginning to enjoy. She knew that, but above everything else, she wanted to be a silly girl weaving mischief around her man.

Acharya continued to ignore her. Sometimes, he would go all the way to the basement lab to ignore her. He would inspect the equipment, speak to the dozen research assistants there and ask questions. Oparna would wait for him to approach her and pass her by without a word. And she would whisper to him, ‘Can I call you, Arvind?’, or ‘You look so hot today’, or something else. This game went on, as the rains became the season, and the roads began to look so black and clean, people now a slow procession of umbrellas, the air so cool and sedative. Then one day Oparna went missing.

She did not come to him, and when he went to the basement to ignore her there was no sign of her. He waited till noon and asked Ayyan to call her. ‘Don’t forget to tell her that I called to find out if there was any communication from ISRO, nothing else,’ he said. But Ayyan knew that it was the desperation of love. He tried her mobile the whole afternoon, but it just rang. Acharya would call him every ten minutes and ask, ‘Where is she?’ And Ayyan would tell him, ‘It’s just ringing, Sir.’ Then, to trouble him, he would say, ‘I hope she is all right.’

‘Try her landline,’ Acharya said.

‘We don’t have that number, Sir. I’ll keep trying.’

Acharya began to pace the floor in his room. He thought she was hurt and angry, and had gone away forever. He also feared that she had died. And he felt the melancholy of the rains that reminded him of the departure of many friends who had left without a word, all courteous men otherwise. He started calling her himself from his direct line. He did not have a mobile, or he would have even endured the imbecility of texting. As the evening wore on, he became almost demented at the thought of her. He imagined her with a young man, an old flame who always pursued her but whom she had ignored, now getting lucky because she was spurned by an old fool. He kept calling her and waited angrily, holding the receiver to his ear as her ringtone sang, ‘Baby Can I Hold You?’

Twenty floors above the sea, Oparna stood in her room staring through a wide open window. The thin purple curtains flapped wildly in the wind. She was in blue jeans and a T-shirt with a jovial amoeba embroidered on it. She was holding her mobile in her hand, and she was smiling. The smile became an insane chuckle every time the phone rang. She stood that way as the evening turned dark and the million windows in the monstrous buildings outside became illuminated. Then, as though a mystic cue had appeared in the starless sky, she reached for her car keys.

Ayyan Mani had left for the day and the anteroom was deserted. Orphaned phones on his table rang intermittently. Oparna stood outside the inner door for a moment before she opened it. Acharya was sitting with his elbows on the table, chin cradled in his palms. He did not move as she walked in and stood in the middle of the room. She heard the door shut behind her. ‘It’s OK, I am here now,’ she said.

‘Where were you?’ he asked calmly.

She sat in a chair across the desk and returned his stare. ‘Are you angry with me, Arvind?’ she said. ‘Do you want to hurt me?’

They looked at each other through the heaviness of a silence that they somehow comprehended as a tired acceptance of love.

‘Arvind, I came here to say that you should not search for me tomorrow. I won’t be here. At ten in the night, come down to the basement. There won’t be anyone there. Just me and you. Do you understand what I’m saying?’

‘Yes.’

She left a blue envelope on the table. It was sealed and scented. ‘These are my pictures,’ she said. ‘I got them for you. Keep them safe. Not all men are allowed to see me like this.’

He took the envelope with great care, as if it were a piece of bread that had drowned in tea. He opened the second drawer of his desk and put it with the recent readings of interstellar dust-clouds.

‘Tomorrow at ten,’ she said, and went to the door. He looked at her back, the firmness of her shoulders, the imprint of her bra strap, so strained by tension, the succulent buttocks that were hoisted by high heels.

‘Were you looking at me?’ she asked from the door, her face lit by a shy smile.

It was around midnight when Acharya finally rose from the huge leather chair. He felt as if he had cried the whole day. His throat was dry and his eyes hurt. And there was peace in his lungs. He went down the long corridor of the third floor in the spell of a silence so perfect. The enchantment of this silence and the mystical way in which the deserted corridor lay in front of him, foreground approaching, the far end receding, made him walk faster. He enjoyed this eerie spectacle. But he felt a sudden pain in his left knee, and he slowed down. He turned back to see if the spectre of Oparna was lurking somewhere, watching his ache.

He wondered what it was that made a person old. This body that he was carrying right now, the aches in its joints and the weakness of its flesh, was not what he felt inside. An old man was in every way a young man but in the guise of a body that would look ugly and undignified if it tried to do what the young did. The elegance of age, like sanity, was an expectation people had of him. But at that moment, as he was walking down the corridor, he could not feel the antiquity that others had thrust upon him. He felt as if he were just another man accepting the affections of a woman. Just another young man. It was important to be young. Only the young can love, because the imbecility of youth is the only spectrum of love. He could see it so clearly now. Like every ray of light with a wavelength of 700 nanometres is always red, everyone who is in love is young.

At the porch, in the hush of the sea and the fragrance of wet earth, he stood looking at the rains. A guard came running to him with an umbrella. He was a tiny man, about a foot shorter than Acharya. He held the umbrella high, hoping that the monster would have the grace to hold it in his own hand. But Acharya walked in a trance as the guard, exhausted already by the effort of stretching his hand so high, got fully drenched.

He let himself into his flat, changed and went to sleep in the fumes of Lavanya’s herbal remedies. He slept well that night. He dreamt of a beautiful girl. The sound of her silver anklets filled the spectral spaces of his reverie. Her face, somehow naked, looked at him in an amused way as if she were the master and he a no-talent apprentice. It was the face of Lavanya from another time.

He woke at dawn and sat on the bed like a mammoth infant, refusing to look at the figure of his wife lying next to him. The clarity of last night when he had walked down the deserted corridor and granted himself the spirit of youth in a body paralysed by illusory age, was now gone. He felt afraid because he knew his descent into the basement at ten that night was an inevitability. He went to the bathroom to stare at his naked body. It was, in a way, from an angle, if you looked carefully, a beautiful face. Twinkling eyes, affluent skin, succulent royal lips, not much hair on the head of course, but a lot of face. He had a cold bath, and furtively shampooed his crotch. He went back to the bedroom with light steps and gingerly opened the cupboard. He wanted to leave before Lavanya woke up. He did not want to see her that morning.

It was seven when he reached the office. He sat in his chair and heard the ghostly sounds of a world that was suddenly alien. The desolation of morning was so different from the desolation of night. Strange birds sang, distant objects fell loudly and echoed, and there were faint tremors of laughter. Even the smell was unfamiliar. There was this odour of wet rugs and wood. He was about to open the window when he heard boys shouting and singing in the anteroom. Four cleaning boys burst into his room in a private festivity. Their happy faces fell when they saw him. They fled in shock, but one of them came back with a transparent bucket and started mopping the floor, throwing discreet glances at the giant. Acharya stared at the boy. Once, their eyes met and held each other for a few seconds. He didn’t know the Institute had cleaners.

Slowly, the morning unfolded and the world become familiar. Ayyan Mani walked in, neat and tidy, smelling like a room freshener, his thick black hair oiled and combed into an unflappable mass.

‘Coffee,’ Acharya said.

The whole day, he sat in his room, avoiding calls and dismissing visitors. He wanted the world to spare him, just for a day, but he was under siege. The forces of little men were outside his door. They infiltrated first as ominous telephone calls, and then they sent their dark messenger with clear white eyes who seemed to know something, who had a disturbing smile at the edges of his lips. Ayyan kept walking in and saying, ‘They have come, Sir,’ or ‘They have been waiting, Sir.’ By noon, Acharya yielded.

The Balloon Mission had proceeded into a frenetic stage and there were people on the black sofa outside whom he could not avoid. He called them in reluctantly and conducted meetings that collapsed into long silences when he stared blankly at the visitors, not knowing that a question had been put, a clarification sought, an opinion expected. By evening, the siege eased and he tried to find respite in Topolov’s Superman. But he could not concentrate. He opened the table drawer and looked at the blue envelope that Oparna had left last night. He had not opened it. ‘These are my pictures,’ she had said. ‘Not every man is allowed to see me like this.’ To open the envelope was to accept the affair, and the thought of Lavanya tortured him.

THREE HOURS BEFORE his confirmed appointment with love in the basement, it was inevitable that Arvind Acharya’s mind would wonder if Time flowed continuously, like a smooth line, or in tiny jumps like a dotted line. In the crisis of being seduced by a disturbing woman with real black hair, he needed the distraction of a problem that he knew he would not solve in three hours. But he could not take his mind away from the thoughts of touching the forbidden body of Oparna that would lie in wait for him beside microscopes and transilluminators (and, probably, perfumed candles which were not part of the Astrobiology department). But he also felt a morbid sorrow. For his wife of four decades who was at that moment, possibly, in the habitual melancholy of folding clothes. He had never felt this kind of sorrow before. He found it strange that the grief was not in his heart but somewhere in the stomach. And it was a dark, hollow kind of feeling. As if Lavanya had died, leaving him widowed in a pleasurable world. It was not a stab of conscience. It was, in fact, the emptiness of enjoying something all by himself without bringing her to share it. Without her presence, even the pleasure of adultery was not complete. And that was absurd. He could not bear it any more. This gloom in his stomach that hung just above an unexpected joyous swelling.

He got up from his chair and steered his trousers. The air in the room had become too still. But he forgot why he had risen. He stood rooted near his chair and contemplated the acoustics in the basement, and why men married, and the exalted place of fidelity on a dwarf planet that went around a mediocre main-sequence star somewhere in the outer arm of just another whirlpool galaxy. Eventually, he opened the window and breathed the first rush of sea breeze. It was dark outside, but he could hear the sea. It was violent. And there was something about the wind that portended the mother of all rains. He heard the door open behind him.

‘I wanted to see you,’ said the voice of Jana Nambodri, somewhat meekly. He was subdued these days after the defeat of the mutiny and the humiliation of being pardoned.

Acharya was about to turn and face the intrusion when he realized, just in time, that the youthful swelling caused by the thoughts of Oparna had yet to be tamed.

‘Jana,’ he said, without leaving the window, ‘Come tomorrow.’

Nambodri had already walked into the room when he heard this. He stood there a bit confused, but went away without trying to understand.

When the door shut, Acharya went hastily to his chair and for a fleeting moment, he felt like a gaping radio telescope. He sat behind the reassuring expanse of his desk and waited for time, whatever it might be, to pass. He tried to squeeze the erection with his massive thighs, suffocate its blood flow and release the tension. It might have been unprecedented, he suspected, for a man of advanced age to kill such a serendipitous unmedicated vigour, the pursuit of which, even among the young, was a billion-dollar industry. He briefly remembered Nicolaus Copernicus, at a moment in history, throttling his own heliocentric theory and conceding to the Vatican that the Earth was indeed the centre of the universe.

But Acharya’s problem did not subside. It protruded in a sort of sculptural defiance. Complicating the situation was a sudden urge in him to urinate. He did not have a private bathroom. He had dismissed past proposals by Administration because of the disruption that the creation of a washroom would have caused. He cursed himself for not having foresight. Now, he had to go halfway down the long, busy corridor. He grabbed The Times of India that was lying on the desk and went out reading, the paper unfolded to its full length.

Ayyan Mani looked at the giant figure walking away from him, and he wondered if the delirium of love could really make someone behave so strangely. Acharya went to the washroom that was called ‘Scientists’. There he kept The Times carefully on the hand dryer because he feared he might need it on the way back. There were five urinals on the blue-tiled wall and three senior astronomers were standing side-by-side, each separated from the other by a free pot. Acharya stood in between two of them. An insane wish came to him then to startle them, for boyish fun. He put his hands around the nape of his neck, elbows pointed up, as though he were stretching, and stood that way. His brisk manly spurt shot above the urinal. One by one, the other men turned to see the spectacle. Acharya always humbled them, but never like this.

He resumed the wait in his room, patiently rearranging objects on his desk. He reached for the drawer where he had hidden the perfumed envelope of Oparna. He no longer had the strength to resist the offer of love in the basement. So he thought he might as well open the envelope. Two black-and-white photographs slipped out. A little girl was in a bathtub. She must have been four years old.

At five minutes to ten he walked out of his room. Like an elephant, as always. He was disappointed to see people in the corridor. He was hoping that the Institute would be deserted because of the rains and, well, the pursuit of truth could bloody well wait some days. The lift was packed and he stood in its grim silence with his head bent. When the lift door opened at the ground floor, nobody moved because he was closest to the door and he was standing still, blocking half the way. They waited for him to step out, but he did not move. They went around him, like a stream around a boulder. The lift emptied, and that comforted him. He pressed the button that said B.

The basement labyrinths, flanked by stark white walls, lay in the drone of invisible ethereal motors. At the dead end of a narrow corridor was the lab. He thought of what she must be wearing, how she must be sitting, what plans she had. In a preordained darkness, was she waiting as an unmoving silhouette? The swelling that had long subsided grew again and was now leading him down the path, like the proboscis of a foolish rover on Mars that was right now searching for water and beasts.

As the lab door approached him, the grief in his stomach grew. The wraith of Lavanya appeared. He pictured her folding clothes, with an accusatory face. He saw the distant days of their life when she used to walk like a doe. And how her long thick hair used to tickle his nose during the interminable flights over the Atlantic. And the way her head would rest on his shoulder as she slept like a child. He thought of the first beautiful months of their marriage. And their love that they never ever called love. Because it was not necessary to name it then.

He could see those days so clearly now, a whole lost age. How beautiful she had looked as a bride. He was still a student then. After their wedding in Sivagangai, when the time came for him to take her to Madras, he would always remember, a silent crowd of lachrymose relatives had shadowed them to the station. As he stood nervously waiting for the train to arrive, one of Lavanya’s aunts said, ‘Is he taking his new bride to his hostel room?’ And the weeping entourage used the ruse of tears to laugh heartily.

Lavanya, in the isolation of her new home in Madras, began writing long morose letters to her mother. He had read the first without her knowledge. ‘He wants to find out why things fall,’ she said in the letter. He was researching gravity in the Annamalai University and his wife found it ridiculous that it was a whole subject. ‘But he is a useful man,’ she wrote. ‘He can put rice sacks in the loft without standing on a stool. And he is so calm and obedient that I keep asking him to do things just for fun. I know I should respect him but I find him so funny. Yesterday, at the temple, I tried to fall at his feet; he jumped in the air. He has western ideas.’

They could never hold hands in the street because those times were different. But how much they had wanted to. Not merely for love, but to heal. In the by-lanes of Madras, shopkeepers, taxi drivers and pedestrians laughed at them mercilessly. The couple was so tall, especially for that time, and most Tamilians so tiny and genetically predisposed to believing something is wrong with the others, that Acharya and Lavanya when taken together were always a sight. Mothers with crying babies stood at the iron gates of their houses and pointed at them. That always silenced the babies. Gangs of eunuchs sang to Acharya, and they sang that if he liked Lavanya he would like them too. Urchins ran behind them screaming, ‘LIC, LIC’ (the fourteen-storeyed Life Insurance Corporation building was the tallest in the city then, and it was to remain so for many years to come).

Under the influence of an uncle whose asthmatic speech lent him a certain intensity, Acharya decided to quit his studies and join the Indian space programme that had been birthed in secrecy in a small town called Thumba in Kerala. But he soon realized how impoverished the Indian government was, and how the whole space ambition was just a pathetic attempt of a miserable nation to find respect in a world that had moved ahead. On unpaved roads that ran between tall palms, he had to carry rocket parts on a bicycle from a clandestine shed to a launch-site. Life was so simple at the time that one day Acharya even brought a rocket-cone home to show his wife. She wrote their names on it and without detection it was later fixed on a rocket, which was among the several of the first generation that failed and crashed into the sea. The simplicity of it all, and the red boiled rice of Kerala, disillusioned Acharya. After just a few months with the space programme, he went to Princeton to study cosmology, taking Lavanya with him. He would eventually become obsessed with gravitation. ‘It attracts him,’ his father would often say in a joke that relatives never fully understood.

For many years now Acharya had accepted that he had gone past the age of love. But here he was, almost at the door of Oparna Goshmaulik who could have got any man with the mere lowering of her gaze (or whatever the language was these days). He could not wait to touch her and hold so close her bare body and take in her citric smell that he had once pitied as the odour of youth. He was at the door now. His hand was on the silver knob. He waited for a moment. Then he turned back and walked away.

He took the stairway up, to the porch, went down the pathways that circumvented the main lawn, and towards the gate where the guards stood up smartly and saluted him. He crossed the road without looking and entered the Professors’ Quarters. In the lift, two senior scientists were with him. They smiled politely. He wondered if they could smell Oparna on him. And would Lavanya tell from his eyes that he had held the silver knob of a door that would have ended something between them, whatever that something was. As he walked from the lift towards his flat, he did not understand why his heart was thumping. In an importune moment of clarity he guessed that there must have been species in the prehistoric days whose hearts were so loud that they echoed in the forests, and whose blood flowed through their veins with the hush of rivulets washing over pebbles. Life then must have been a concert. But all that visceral sound would have given them away to their predators. So the species that made it through the ages were the ones whose hearts were not loud enough to hear and whose blood flowed in silence.

As he held the knob on the door of his home he thought of what Oparna was doing at that moment. Just then the door was flung open violently. Lavanya stood there with tears in her eyes and a box of tissues in her hand. ‘Where were you?’ she said.

He walked in and shut the door so that they could settle the matter in a discreet way.

‘I was trying your phone,’ she said and wiped her nose. ‘Anju is dead, Arvind.’

‘What?’ he asked.

‘Anju is dead,’ she repeated.

Lavanya’s frail shoulders shook and she began to weep. She looked incomplete, like the handless urchin he had once seen walking on a tense rope. She needed his hand around her, but he felt too dirty to touch her. He let her cry alone.

‘I just checked,’ she said, almost inaudibly, ‘There is a flight to Madras in two hours. I have to go.’

‘Do you want me to go with you?’

‘I know you don’t want to come.’

‘I will come.’

‘No. It’s all right. She was dying anyway. I am crying because it seems right to cry. I am OK otherwise.’

‘I will go with you.’

‘Actually, I want to go alone. It’s like a holiday for me.’

‘Holiday?’

‘Yes. I am such a sick woman.’

They took a taxi to the airport because Lavanya said he should not drive in the rains, and the black-and-yellow taxi was anyway the same ancient Fiat they had. He had insisted on driving but, as always in these matters, she prevailed.

‘You don’t know this, but you cannot see very well,’ she told him, when they had squeezed themselves into the back seat.

‘I can see very well,’ he said.

‘I will be thinking in the plane how you are going to get back. Today I feel everybody around me is going to die.’

‘When are you back?’

‘Ten days,’ she said, ‘Maybe more. There will be ceremonies. And I want a break.’

‘From what?’

‘From you,’ she said.

The windows of the taxi were rolled up because of the rains. It was hot inside and there was the smell of damp cotton.

Acharya felt invisible creatures biting his buttocks. He moved in a jive as if to crush them angrily, and that made Lavanya chuckle. ‘What?’ he asked, thinking that she had gone mad with sorrow.

‘Nothing,’ she said. They travelled in silence for a while. Then he reached out and held her hand. As though it were a mystical martial art technique, her languid head fell on his shoulder.

The concourse that led to the departure terminal was a gentle gradient. Acharya walked up like a benevolent genie carrying a suitcase that appeared small in his hand. He felt odd holding a single suitcase. It had the austerity of elopement.

As a boy, he had once gone with friends to count the steam trains from a footbridge. He had seen a pair of fleeing lovers on the narrow-gauge track running towards the railway platform, fearing that the world was chasing them. The man was holding a black briefcase and the girl was carrying a small cloth bag. For many years after that, even now on this rainy night, in a corner of his mind Acharya associated love with lightness, and marriage with extra luggage. Usually, when he and Lavanya arrived at the airport, he was pushing an overloaded trolley like the hotel housekeeping arriving at a door. There was another reason why he felt odd as he walked up the gradient. This was the first time he was sending Lavanya off. Normally it was she who sent him off. Or, she travelled with him, and that was always an event. She never let him take shoulder-bags. Suitcases it had to be. ‘Clothes don’t get crumpled that way,’ she would say. He secretly admired her logic, and even conceded that she was right, but a bag to him was a symbol of nomadic freedom, an imperfection that said the journey was not important, the destination inconsequential. A suitcase, on the other hand, was a sign of grand departures and self-important arrivals. It was a confession, like the shirt of a dandy, that life was important. Once, when he had told Lavanya this, she screamed, ‘My god what a poet, you travel business class don’t you?’

They reached the glass doors of the terminal where three guards were checking the tickets of passengers in the middle of bad-mouthing a senior who was not present. Acharya fumbled for Lavanya’s ticket in his pockets. He had just purchased it from the counter. He was pleased when he found it and gave his wife a wide grin. She looked at him with worry. How was he was going to take care of himself?

‘Open the door for the maids,’ she said. ‘I have Meenu’s mobile. I will call her every day.’

‘Who is Meenu?’

Lavanya looked exasperated. ‘She is our cook.’

He pulled up the tow handle of the suitcase and gave it to her with a deep, grim face, as though it was a lifetime achievement award. She dragged the suitcase, sniffling, holding a kerchief to her nose which was now red. Before she entered the terminal she turned to look at her husband. He waved at her. A young couple behind her mistook her tears for the romantic distress of separation. They gave the seniors an exaggerated look of approval. ‘So cute,’ the girl said.

Lavanya disappeared somewhere behind the X-ray machines. When Acharya turned to leave he felt the same way he used to feel as a boy when he dropped letters in the postbox. There was this sense of an unremarkable relief mixed with a nagging suspicion that he had lost something he was holding.

It was two in the morning when Acharya reached home. He had expected the gloom of its vast tidy rooms, and the haunting silence of loneliness that was somehow different from the silence of togetherness. He went to the bedroom and played Pavarotti at full volume through the night. Just once he turned the volume down — when he called Lavanya on her mobile to ask if she had arrived safely. She was surprised to get his call. Against the background noise of her loud relatives, she screamed, maybe to show off that her husband cared, ‘Yes, I’ve arrived.’

When the sun rose he was standing in the balcony, and the house was still in the turbulence of Pavarotti’s wails. At the end of an aria, in its transient baffling silence, Acharya heard the doorbell. He opened the door and found the maid. She tried to enter, but Pavarotti’s sudden murderous pitch rose and it shook her. Before she could recover, he slammed the door in her face. When the cook arrived, he did not open the door.

The whole morning he stood on the balcony, missing the interruption of Lavanya and her inopportune Madras filter coffee, and her unreasonable taunts as to why he was not walking when he was wearing Nike shoes. To impress her, in case she called him later in the day, he put on his tracksuit, wore the shoes with pump action (or something like that), and stepped out. He wanted to stroll down the inner lanes of Navy Nagar, but returned in ten minutes, unable to bear the sight of grown-up sailors going to work in white shorts, their hairy legs pedalling cycles or riding motorbikes. And there was something about people wearing white in the monsoon that he found rather foolish. He did not feel like going back home. So he walked inside the Quarters and discovered that its clear blue pool was actually used in the mornings.

A portion of the pool was cordoned off for fat women who were dancing in some kind of ludicrous aerobic activity. There were eight of them and their nervous eyes drifted from the female instructor to his dismayed glare. Close to where he was standing, he saw a little girl trying to swim without floats. She was scared and she told everyone who swam close to her, ‘I am your friend, no?’ She reminded him of Shruti, and he tried to meet her eyes to smile. But he was distracted by a woman in the pool who was trying to teach her mother how to swim.

‘Mama, you’re afraid. I can feel the fear in your stomach,’ she was telling the old woman, with the severity of daughter’s love. ‘I want you to bring your fear up to the ribs,’ she said, placing her hand on her mother’s stomach and moving it up gently. ‘Bring it up further to your throat … Now I can feel your fear. It’s in the throat, Mama. Spit it out, spit it out.’

The shrunken ancient mother, in a costume that would have branded her a whore in her youth, blew uncomfortably into her daughter’s hand, and she surveyed the pool sheepishly.

‘I have robbed you of your fear,’ her daughter said. ‘Now swim.’

At the far end of the pool, Acharya saw a large man in swimming trunks. He had breasts. And near him, waiting to dive, there were more fat women. Apparently the young did not swim any more.

Oparna was on his mind all the while, like a foreboding. Later that morning, when he went to work and she appeared before him, he did not know what he must say to her. She looked more stunning than ever, even though she had resumed the austerity of the long shapeless top. The smell of young flesh returned to haunt his nervous peace and he was reminded again how, incredibly, she had granted him the right to be her lover. Their eyes met only for an instant. Then she sorted loose sheets of paper in her hands, and he rearranged things on his table. He asked her to sit down. She sat. They looked at each other again, this time for longer.

‘I am sorry,’ Acharya said, ‘I could not see you last night.’

‘There is some progress with the cryosampler,’ she said, and gave him a print-out of an email. And that was how she was in the days that followed. Something in her was dead. He could see it in her eyes.

The way she used to look at him, with the glow of new love, was now replaced by the silent hurt of betrayal and humiliation. She made him sad, but he also longed for this sorrow to arrive in his room as often as possible in that ascetic uniform of long top and jeans, the cassock of her platonic detachment. She spoke to him only about work, and she looked so strong and resolute in her martyrdom that he did not find cues to speak about himself or to blame the forces of virtue that stole him away from the basement.

But he found excuses to be with her. He asked Ayyan to send her to his room on flimsy pretexts. And she came every time he summoned her. Some days, when he thought that he had summoned her too many times, and feared that she might leave the Institute, unable to bear the sight of him, he called group meetings with scientists and research assistants. His eyes would sweep across the assembly, and rest casually on her. She never looked him in the eye, but every time his carefully constructed perfunctory gaze fell on her he was certain that she knew he was looking. Her mask of detachment would slip a little: she would stare harder at the floor, or she would inhale unknowingly. So he devised a new way of looking at her.

He realized that if he adjusted the position of the cylindrical glass jar in which Lavanya’s ethereal agents still filled orchids every morning, he could see Oparna’s reflection. The vase was bought by Lavanya years ago as part of her failed attempt to make his office look beautiful. Now it was an accomplice in his furtive love. It had a reasonable refractive index, it seemed, and so her face was not too distorted. And this was how he would look at her during the long group meetings. Sometimes, he noticed in the jar, she would look at his face in a fond way and turn away when she perceived the threat of being found out. This device consoled him until one afternoon when he saw Oparna’s reflection staring at him and then at the vase. She had somehow figured out the technique. He got up in the middle of the meeting, even as someone was talking to him about the optimum dimensions of the balloon, and carried the vase to the far end of the room. He put it on the centrepiece that lay in the middle of the interfacing white sofas. He rejoined the perplexed group with an innocent face and threw a casual glance at Oparna for appreciation, but she was looking at the floor.

Acharya was miserable the whole week. All day, he would try to work, try to survive the unrelenting influence of Oparna, and go home to hunger and wakefulness. He realized that his home was entirely the colony of his wife. He was running short of shirts and trousers. Underwear that was usually laid out on the morning bed for him like a buffet, now became rare. He could not find anything. So Lavanya, in the middle of sombre funeral prayers, or while serving food to the mourners, would get calls on her mobile and she would whisper, ‘the nail-clipper is in the leopard-skin box … the box is inside a bag with polka dots in the second drawer of the nightstand on my side of the bed … I cannot explain what a polka dot is right now … yes, lots of dots on the bag … I don’t know why they are called polka dots and not dots … don’t forget to put the nail-clipper back in the box … dry yourself after your bath … And why haven’t you been opening the door for the maids?’

Despite his condition, Acharya was aware that the Balloon Mission was entering a crucial phase. The problems in equipment procurement were slowly being solved. His friends in Nasa were helping to release equipment that the American government had blacklisted after the Pokhran nuclear tests. Despite the torments of love and its weird distractions that expanded time, he worked hard on the many finer aspects of the Mission. He was talking to government servants, scientists and weathermen, redrawing the design of gadgetry, scrutinizing the physics at the altitude of forty-one kilometres and commanding everything in him to ensure that the lab in the Institute was worthy of testing the samplers at the end of the Mission. But he had lost his peace. And the privileges of high thought, and his isolation that had once guarded him from the trivialities of life. The beast of genius inside him was now fatally infected by what he diagnosed as common infatuation, but through a minute crack in the fog of misery his mind could still see the beauty in the conviction that alien microbes were always falling from the heavens and they had once seeded life on Earth.

The thoughts of the origin of life sometimes diminished his longing for of Oparna. Microbe to microbe — that was all there was to life and death. Love was insignificant — a devious evolutionary device. Nothing more. These thoughts comforted him, but only briefly. Ultimately, he realized, Oparna was the unavoidable inspiration behind his renewed attempts to keep the Balloon Mission on target. She was deeply involved in the project, the very heart of the core team. It was the most important time in her professional life. That was why, despite the discomfort of unrequited love, she was not leaving the Institute. Any serious snag in the project would disappoint her, and as a consequence, embarrass him. So he ordained in his mind, come what may, the balloon would go up and come down, and the air sampler would be analysed. This resolve made him work like a madman. He slogged in the glory of an old incurable faith in the extraterrestrial origin of life, in the fear of losing Oparna forever, in the torturous certainty that he had no choice but to lose her eventually, in the confusion of what exactly a wife means to a man, in the bitter aftertaste of the terrible food Ayyan Mani brought him and in the deathly fatigue of insomnia. Finally, eight days after Lavanya had left to mourn her sister, something in him snapped.

He pushed everything that was on his table to the floor and rose from his chair. He did not know what time it was and he did not care. He knew Oparna was in the basement. She had to be there.

He walked out through the anteroom that Ayyan had long deserted. Its ghostly phones rang and fax machines belched. There was not a soul in the corridor. It lay in front like a supernatural bridge to autumnal love. He heard the lift heave and echo as it descended to the basement. He walked beside the stark white walls, feeling the anxiety of violating a young body that was right there at the end of this narrow corridor. He felt a mad rage against her for pushing him from the fortress of stature that others had built for him over the decades into a miserable hell where other old men like him crawled on their stomachs and begged young women for a mere look of affection. But what truly infuriated him was the painful suspicion that it was now, in this late age, that true love had come to him.

Until a few weeks ago, he was in the peace of consigning love as that brief juvenile excitement he once felt for Lavanya in the freshness of marriage. It was an easy painless thing. There was no pursuit, no battle. She was there in the morning, she was there in the evening, and on some nights of her choosing she became naked. Love, he had always thought, was arranged. He was certain that alcoholic poets had overrated its misery. But now, he felt its agony and the insane fear of rejection.

He flung open the door of the lab. It was almost dark. Oparna was sitting on the floor at the foot of the main working desk that filled half the room. She had turned off all the lights except a single inadequate bulb directly above the desk. It cast giant shadows of microscopes and other optical devices, and they appeared to lie in wait, like curious voyeurs. She was in her long top of forced modesty and blue jeans. Her hair was tied back. He walked to her side, and stood with his knee brushing against her shoulder.

‘Why are you doing this to me?’ he asked.

She did not reply. He lifted her by her arms and kissed her, or bit her (he would not remember). They fell on the floor in a heap, and they kissed and licked and wrestled. He tore her top and dismantled her jeans. She fought, not sure yet if she was resisting or assisting. When he took away all her clothes, she stopped fighting. She turned away from him in a sting of shame, her face on the floor, an elbow shielding it from this wild man, proud breasts reaching for a place to rest, her bronze back rising and falling like the roll of a sand-dune in the twilight, her long firm legs lying languid.

He tugged at her shoulder to make her face him. He wanted to see her arrogant face now tamed and helpless, but she held on tenaciously to the foot of the main desk and dug her face further into her elbow. He held her hair in his fist and tried to see the face that had destroyed his peace. She had no more strength left in her to resist. Her hand left the foot of the desk, her shoulders obeyed and she turned to him, defeated and deranged. Her hair was now wild, the terrified hair-band had rolled away long ago. She shut her eyes as he suffocated her with a long violent kiss. He tried to hold her legs, but they were now glistening in sweat and his hands slipped. That made her laugh. But her demented laughter soon become wails as he finally managed to prise open her legs and plunder her with an inhuman strength. But it was a brief attack. In less than a minute, he fell on her breasts and rolled down on the floor panting and laughing.

He did not know such pleasurable violence was permitted outside the myth of pornography. The amused smile of the young Lavanya, that look of a patient zen master condoning the imperfection of an apprentice, was what he had thought the face of woman’s love to be. But what had happened just now was different.

Oparna was looking at him, breathing hard, lying on her mauled breasts. She and Acharya stared at each other as if they both knew they were going to die and had accepted this death. It was a long time before either spoke.

‘What have we done?’ she said, with a smile.

‘What have we done?’ Acharya repeated, more seriously than her. ‘What now?’

‘What now? You can’t steal a woman’s line. That’s not allowed.’

‘It’s a woman’s line?’

‘Of course. Anyway, it’s too early to say it.’ She rolled to his side and put her head on his chest. He felt her finger probe his navel. ‘You have such a big navel,’ she said, ‘It’s very deep too. And there is a lot of lint.’ She showed him what she had scooped out.

‘Your wife is away?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You seem to be very experienced.’

‘In what?’ Somehow it was a question that had only uncomfortable answers.

‘How many lovers have you had?’ he asked.

She looked at the ceiling, toying with her hair. ‘Is it true that we follow the decimal system because we have ten fingers?’

‘Most of us have eight fingers.’

She looked confused, but then her face lit up in comprehension. ‘Eight fingers and two thumbs?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Why do you want to know about the decimal system?’

‘I was counting my men,’ she said, ‘and eight fingers and two thumbs were not enough.’ She lifted her head to see his face. ‘Does it annoy you that I have slept with so many men?’

‘Yes. And I hate them,’ he said.

‘And that’s a nice thing to say to a woman,’ she said.

She looked at him fondly. He was like a cuddly giant seal. His eyes, usually bright and furious, now stared in the diffused glow of affection or gratitude. They lay together on the floor in silence for over an hour. Then something crossed her mind.

‘At The Talks,’ she said, ‘you remember the speech you gave at The Talks?’

‘You were there?’

‘Yes. I was there to letch at you. You said something then. You said, “Maybe we cannot understand physics at the quantum level without understanding other things which are not considered physics today. Other things like…” Then you stopped. I thought you wanted to say something, but did not think it was right to say it.’

‘Was it that obvious?’

‘What did you want to say?’

He became thoughtful and distant. She set her chin on his chest and tried to understand his face. Beautiful lips, she thought, full and somehow smug. As if they would accept the kiss of a woman as a deserved right. She was offended by this. She should have made him suffer more before yielding. He must not think she was his right, like a Nobel or something.

‘Tell me,’ she said.

‘There are things that a man like me cannot say in public,’ he said. ‘There are things that physics does not accept as its own. That’s why I could not say it then.’

‘You can tell me. A man can tell a naked woman anything.’

He did not speak for what seemed like a long time. She waited.

‘I have not told anyone this,’ she heard him say. And he fell silent again. He found it odd that he must say this now, in the dampness of a nudity that was somehow comical, and say it to a woman he did not know beyond the temporal anguish of love.

‘Physics has to go,’ he said, like a dying revolutionary wishing freedom for his real estate. That disappointed her even though she knew what he had to say was going to be, of course, about physics. She had hoped it would be about something else.

‘Nobody is admitting it, but physics is stuck, physics has to change,’ he said. ‘The current laws are not enough. It needs something else. It has to accept something. Bombarding particles in a nine-billion-dollar collider is useless. It has to accept that. And more. It has to accept that life and consciousness are a hidden part of what we are trying to study. I cannot say something like this in public because it is a privilege given only to scientists who have gone mad.’

What he had in his mind was so simple and clear, but when asked, for the first time, to express it through the inadequacies of language it seemed so difficult and even plebian.

‘I believe the universe has a plot, a purpose,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what the game is, but something is there.’ Then he said abruptly, clumsily, ‘Have you heard of Libet?’ That surprised her. Never would she have associated Acharya with the name of Libet.

Benjamin Libet was a part of male exotica, like time travel and antimatter. His name was usually invoked at the confluence of beer and philosophy, when stranded men asked deeply, ‘Who are we?’

Oparna sat up. ‘Libet?’ she said, and giggled.

‘Yes, Libet.’

‘When was he active? Sixties, seventies?’ she asked.

‘Seventies, eighties.’

‘He was with the physiology department, wasn’t he, of the University of California?’

‘You seem to know him pretty well,’ Acharya said.

‘Some things stick,’ she said. ‘He probed the human consciousness or something like that? And claimed to have proved that Free Will does not exist. But how can anybody prove something like that?’

‘He fixed electrodes on the scalps of volunteers,’ Acharya said, in a deep, solemn way, ‘and he asked them to perform ordinary tasks like lifting a finger or pressing a button. He then showed that moments before they believed they had made the conscious decision to perform a task, their brains had already started the neural process to achieve the action. This implies that when a man lifts his finger, he is merely in the illusion of having made the decision. In reality, the event is preordained. If Libet is right, then there is an interpretation that people may not want to accept. That every action on Earth, the turn of a head, the bark of a dog, the fall of a flower, is a predestined inevitability. Like a scene in a film.’

Oparna wanted to say ‘crap’. But there was something about the way he was gazing at the ceiling, with his eyes soft and intoxicated by a distant memory. She told herself that she would be a woman, she would be understanding. That was her perpetual weakness, anyway. To see the point of the men she loved.

‘A long time ago I worked with him very briefly, just for a few weeks,’ Acharya said, without taking his eyes off the ceiling. ‘I helped him in his experiments.’

Oparna was surprised, but first she had to make a scientific objection: ‘Libet’s equipment was obviously primitive. There could have been an error.’

Acharya had heard these objections a thousand times, but there was something he knew which made him certain that Libet had stumbled upon a mystery that lay at the very heart of science. Oparna saw in his eyes an opaqueness, a grim unchangeable faith that would have normally exasperated her, but now, in the darkened lab, it almost convinced her that Libet was probably not so bad.

‘What were you doing with Libet, anyway?’ she asked. ‘Weren’t you busy demolishing the Big Bang then?’

‘When I heard what he was trying to do, I got curious,’ he said. He looked at her. ‘Oparna,’ he said, ‘when I told you that I have not told anyone this, I was not referring to my connection with Libet. It’s something else.’

She pulled herself closer to him. ‘What is it then?’ she asked.

‘Something happened when I was about nine years old,’ he said. He tried to sit up, but the floor was slippery in his sweat. She helped him, and he sat resting his back against the foot of the main desk. ‘I was walking with my family to the circus. The car wouldn’t start that day, and father said that since the circus tent was just a kilometre from home we should walk. There were a lot of us on the road. We were a big family. My mother had a box of groundnuts and she kept putting a heap into my palm. Suddenly, my mind went blank and I saw clearly a dwarf in a red T-shirt and white shorts. He was sitting on an elephant. A blue bird flew over his head. Then he fell off the elephant and was trampled. I saw this in my mind. My mother was walking by my side. I told her what I had seen. She smiled at me and ruffled my hair. “Don’t worry,” she said. When we entered the tent, I saw it was packed but the front seats were reserved for us. Everybody looked at us as we walked through the aisle and sat on the best seats. I sat between my parents. I wanted to feel safe because I knew what was going to happen.

‘In the middle of the show an elephant walked on to the stage with a dwarf in a red T-shirt and shorts sitting on top of it. I looked at my mother. She was looking at me as though I were playing a trick on her. She was trying to figure out how I could have known. She pinched my thigh and whispered, “You sneaked in here yesterday? Tell me, I won’t tell your father.” A small blue bird appeared from nowhere and flew in a panic over the audience. Everybody howled because it was so beautiful. It flew over the head of the dwarf and disappeared through a small hole in the roof. The dwarf then fell off the elephant. The elephant had not shaken him off. It was calm. It was not afraid, nor had it gone mad. As though part of the show, the elephant then walked over the dwarf. It put its leg on his chest. I saw the dwarf’s head rise for an instant and then fall. He died there on the floor. There was a commotion and everybody tried to run out. I remember my mother’s face. She looked at me in fright. When we returned home she told my father about what I had told her. He didn’t believe her or me. Then, somehow, the incident was forgotten. My mind never went blank like that again. I have never seen the future again. But something in me changed that day. And I have remained the same after that.’

Acharya’s mind, in the trance of recounting an event from his childhood, stayed in that distant time. He remembered other images. The steam trains that bellowed beneath the footbridge, the stiffness of his starched shirt, his mother’s safety-pin that sometimes held the fly of his shorts, the dragonflies in the paddy-fields to whose tails the boys tied a thread and used them as live kites. How the girls disapproved of this. And how they cried when the boys told them that soon it would be the fate of butterflies too. The final journeys of the dead, their noses stuffed with cotton, their faces yellow, the seriousness of the mourners on whose shoulders went the bed of the corpse or the decorated chair in which the dead sometimes sat so comically. The sunlit courtyard of his childhood home, its clean chessboard floors, the huge immovable doors and those carved wooden pillars that were more ancient than ghosts. And the narrow enchanted lane outside which ran through the shadows of other huge benevolent homes that could only be inherited now and never built. On their tiled roofs peacocks that had no masters used to stand still. Once, that was his life. And it all came back to him.

‘So God has just been playing an old film all this while?’ Oparna said. There was another question on the tip of her tongue, a more serious question, but she felt a little foolish articulating it. ‘Why do you think there is life?’ she asked, somewhat sheepishly. A naked woman sitting beside a naked man and asking, ‘What is the meaning of life?’ It was like a terrible moment from a porn film that aspired to be art. Yet she wanted to know what he had to say.

‘I have a hypothesis,’ he said, and the word ‘hypothesis’ made her arch forward and laugh, her loose hair falling over her face. He took it sportingly. He laughed too. ‘I have a hypothesis,’ he said again, and looked at her eagerly in the hope of making her laugh one more time. Then his grin slowly narrowed until it vanished entirely.

‘Through life, the universe saves itself the trouble of making whole star systems by concentrating vast amounts of energy as consciousness. Why make a Jupiter, when you can just create a frog.’

‘Jupiter and a frog have the same energy?’

‘I think so.’

‘That, Dr Arvind Acharya should never say in public.’

‘Of course not.’

She put her head on his shoulder. There was something healing about this closeness that reminded her of all her wounds. What this man had told her about his childhood and his interpretations of what it all meant should have shaken her. But somehow she imagined that only he could be a part of this spring-toy universe where everything unwound in an inescapable, preordained way. Absolute truth was a gloom that happened to other people. Like him. It suited him. She could imagine Arvind Acharya, in the long pursuit of truth, wading through star systems across the aeons, trying to crack the game of life. The universe comprehending itself through him more than it probably did in other men. Now, after covering the vast stretch of space and the interminable ages, here he was by her side as a tired journeyman, to stay at this fortuitous crossing just for a fleeting night and proceed again on his solitary quest. So lonely he seemed. And then she felt a strange fear. It was the fatigue of loving another ephemeral lover. She did not want this one to leave.

When she finally found her watch on the floor, it was three in the morning. ‘I have to go now,’ she said. And they groped for the pieces of clothing that were strewn all over the floor. She crawled on the floor and searched under the tables for her hair-band. ‘There you are,’ she said, when she found it under a chair. She pulled her hair back and secured it in the loop.

He observed her as she put on her bra, very deftly, he thought.

‘It is the ugliest word in English,’ he said, ‘Bra: it sounds terrible.’

‘Be more sensitive,’ she said. ‘Oprah Winfrey says that 85 per cent of the women in the world live in the constant discomfort of wearing the wrong-sized bra.’ And she said in a mock concern, mimicking someone he probably did not know. ‘Poor women. We have to survive men, succeed in our professional lives and maintain good homes, and do all that in the wrong-sized bra.’

‘This one seems to fit you well.’

‘No, no, no,’ she said, with a grimace. ‘It’s horrible. My ambition is to live in a decent country where a woman does not have to wear a bra.’

‘You should have stayed back in Stanford.’

‘But, you know, I cannot live without maids,’ she said.

He was now standing up, fully dressed. She was sitting on the floor looking accusingly at him, holding her torn top. He was embarrassed by her stern look.

‘How do I go home now?’ she asked.

Ten minutes later, they were walking down on the driveway where her Baleno was parked. She was wearing his massive anorak that came almost to her knees.

‘Do I look like a scarecrow?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ he said.

When she got into her car, he bent his head like a benevolent father. She rolled down the window.

‘I will see you tomorrow,’ he told her.

‘We have a lot of work to do,’ she said.

‘Yes. A lot of work to do.’

‘Tell me something,’ she said, turning on the ignition. ‘This search for life in the stratosphere, does it have anything to do with … you know … the missing link in physics and all that?’

‘No.’

The guards opened the gates for her car to pass. Long after it disappeared, Acharya was standing on the driveway feeling the cool breeze and listening to the roar of the sea. He was relieved to be alone. There was a sense of joy in his heart and a feeling that he had done something endearingly mischievous. He imagined Lavanya smiling at him disapprovingly. It started to drizzle, and he made his way towards the gates. The night security scrambled to salute. As he passed through the gates, he and a guard exchanged a long glance of mutual suspicion.

Acharya’s simple joy vanished when he reached home and turned on the lights of the hall. He felt dirty and cheap. He sat in the leather armchair, too scared to go to the bedroom. The clothes Lavanya had discarded in a hurry before shutting her suitcase still lay there on the bed. Her bottles of homeopathic tablets were on the nightstand. There was her treadmill too. Her things. They would be looking at him. So he slept in the hall, in the armchair, until he was awakened by the 7.45 alarm of his daughter. The alarm had an edge to it this morning. It was morbid. Like a little girl’s dismembered doll. The alarm was a voice from the other side of a fence, from where the severe wraiths of his wife and daughter looked at him with hurt and anger. But as the morning unfolded, he was filled with the anticipation of seeing Oparna again.

And that’s how he was in the days that followed. He would wake up in the despair of having murdered his wife and daughter, and then he would search impatiently for his clothes, to go and wait for Oparna.

In the common paranoia that afflicts lovers, Acharya and Oparna did not meet alone in his room any more, even when there was a professional need to meet. Eyes were watching, ears were listening. They feared the omnipotent gaze of Ayyan Mani and his smile that Oparna believed was replete with meaning. The scientists and research hands who were involved in the Balloon Mission began to feel that group meetings were suddenly frequent and long. In those meetings Acharya and Oparna would steal glances of forced grimness. They smiled with their eyes and spoke the language of love through dry enquiries. At night, she would wait for him in the abandoned basement and he would appear like a shadow.

This went on for a week, including a whole Sunday of love and dining in the dungeon. Oparna brought an electric toaster, bread, fruit and even blankets, and they lay huddled all day. On Tuesday, Lavanya called.

AYYAN MANI SET the phone receiver down with a diabolic smile. The fate of every love story, he knew very well, is in the rot of togetherness, or in the misery of separation. Lovers often choose the first with the same illusory wisdom that makes people choose to die later than now. And in the deceptions of new love, they not only forget that this insanity is transient but they also, hilariously, imagine that they are clandestine. Their nocturnal nudity, they believe they have camouflaged in office clothes. Their private bond, they have spread thin in public as careful distances. They infect each other with the fever in their eyes and they believe only they can diagnose it. But in reality, love is like forbidden wealth. Its glow cannot be hidden. Sooner or later everyone comes to know. And two people become spectacles in a show they do not know is running to full houses.

Ayyan was not certain if the Brahmins who contemplated the universe were aware of it yet, but the security guards and the peons and the sweepers knew that the Big Man was screwing the basement item. The spectral presence that the lovers had sensed outside the basement door was the spirit of Ayyan’s long reach. The whole week, he was told about the moans and whispers that came from the lab. The time Acharya went to the basement and when the two emerged, and how he crouched fondly at her car window and said goodbye. Now the time had come for this romance to be shaken, and he suspected it did not have the good fortune to survive. Lavanya Acharya had just called from Chennai.

‘Is he there?’ she asked.

‘No, Madam,’ Ayyan said, after a deliberate pause. The pause, he knew, annoyed her. She suspected that her husband avoided her sometimes at work.

‘Where is he?’

‘I don’t know where he is, Madam,’ Ayyan said. (Acharya was in his room at that moment.) ‘Can I take a message?’

‘Tell him I’m on the seven o’clock flight. I will be arriving before nine. Is it raining heavily?’

‘Very heavily.’

‘Are the roads flooded?’

‘The trains are running.’

‘And the roads?’

‘The traffic is moving.’

‘Tell him he doesn’t have to come to the airport,’ she said. ‘A friend is picking me up.’

Ayyan collected the late mails and fax messages, and walked into Acharya’s room. He was scribbling something on a notepad. Ayyan peeped to see what he was writing. It was a long string of maths rubbish. Numbers and symbols. Pursuit of truth, apparently.

‘Any instructions for me, Sir?’ he asked. Acharya shook his head.

‘I’ll leave then.’

Ayyan did not tell him about his wife’s call. She would be home in a few hours and would try to call him. But then he would be in the unreachable depths of the basement, naked with his mistress. He would go home before dawn in the stupor of love and see the terrifying image of his wife. Why would Ayyan want to tell him about the call?

That night, the lovers lay curled on a purple blanket, like two brackets. A bowl of seedless grapes was by their side. ‘Have you ever wondered about Junk DNA?’ Acharya asked.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘98 per cent of the human genome is junk and does nothing apparently. It makes no sense that junk genes exist.’

‘There must be a reason,’ he said, reaching for a grape. ‘I have a hypothesis.’ He thought she would giggle because she usually found it funny when he said ‘hypothesis’. But she was listening keenly. He said, ‘Life travels through the universe as microscopic spores riding on asteroids and they fall on different worlds. Depending on the conditions in those worlds, different segments of the genome become useful. On Earth, only a fraction is needed.’

‘Where do you think the spores are coming from?’ she asked.

He took another grape and said, ‘I don’t know everything.’

It was around two in the morning when he made his way home. It was raining hard and he went unmindful, like a happy drunk. His light-blue shirt stuck to his soft body; his trousers lay precariously at his lower waist. (He had left the belt in the basement.)

He put the key in the latch and turned the knob. The light was on in the hall. He shut the door and stood near the couch. He tried to understand why the light was on. Then he noticed the tidiness of the room. The curtains and the tablecloth had changed. The books he had left on the couch had vanished. He went to the bedroom with a sinking heart. He could see a sleeping figure shrouded in a blanket.

Lavanya was dreaming, and these days, she knew she was dreaming. She was walking through a rain forest. She had never been inside a rain forest, but it was so obviously a rain forest. Gigantic tree trunks, black and wet, stood like creatures. The floor was a bed of wild creepers. There was also a board that said ‘Rain Forest’. It was raining so heavily now that when she stretched her hand she could not see beyond the elbow. But she was not wet. Because she did not like getting wet. She was carrying a maroon shopping bag and she was searching for a shop that sold cashews. From the dense mist of rain a huge elephant head appeared. The rest of its body was hidden in the rain. It was a wise lovable elephant. ‘Arvind,’ she said, ‘what are you doing here?’ And she opened her eyes.

She saw his huge silhouette lurking beyond the other side of the bed. She reached for the switch above her nightstand. ‘You’re wet,’ she said, getting out of bed. She opened the dresser sleepily and took out a towel. ‘I don’t know why you like getting wet,’ she said, reaching for his head with the towel. ‘The house was a mess, Arvind. Are you really mad, or are you doing this to annoy me? It was filthy when I walked in. I am going to give the keys to the maids now.’ He did not move as she wiped his head and his face.

‘You can say you are happy to see me,’ she said.

‘I missed you.’

‘You are working late these days? Is it the balloon?’ she asked. Her shoulders ached, so she stopped drying him. ‘Now go to the bathroom and change. Put the wet clothes in the washing machine.’ When he left the room, she wondered what the smell was. It was sweet and it reminded her of something she had known a long time ago. But she could not recognize it. The smell of rain on a man’s body maybe?

He walked in dry and tidy, in a loose tracksuit, his chest bare. He lay on the bed and stared at the ceiling.

‘What is worrying you, Arvind? What has happened?’

‘Nothing.’

‘And what is this? You sprayed deo?’ she said with a chuckle. ‘Two weeks I am away and you become totally crazy?’

His chest was still moist and she dried it, muttering that he was making the bed wet. And unknowingly, she dug her finger into his navel. ‘There is no lint at all,’ she said. She went to the corner of the room to put the towel away. ‘How can you not have any lint at all in that well of a navel? Are you having an affair or something?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ he said.

Lavanya wondered if she should go to the balcony and put the towel on the wire, or if she should just put it on the floor for the time being. She was too sleepy to go to the balcony, but the floor was not the place for a towel. And, obviously, she did not want to put it on the dresser. The thought of a wet towel on polished wood was repulsive. Then she wondered why the word was hanging in the air like sorrow. ‘Yes,’ he had said. She turned to him slowly.

‘Her name is Oparna,’ he said. ‘She works with me.’

Lavanya collapsed slowly and sat on the edge of the bed. ‘This is not a hiccup cure, is it?’

‘You don’t have hiccups.’

‘I am confused,’ she said. ‘What did you say? What was it that you had said?’

She went to the nightstand and searched for her glasses, as though that would make her hear better. ‘What did you say, Arvind?’ she asked, putting her glasses on. She sat on the edge of the bed again.

‘Her name is Oparna,’ he said.

The rain outside the window was furious. They listened to it. She said, a bit dreamily, ‘I cannot believe this. You? You don’t know anything. You don’t even know if your nose is long or short.’

He did not understand the connection between his nose and the situation. But he realized that she was right. If someone asked him to describe his own nose, he wouldn’t know what to say.

‘How long has it been going on?’

‘After you left. Just before, actually. But, in a way, after you left.’

The silence returned and the rain appeared to grow even more violent. He looked at the ceiling. She stared at the dresser.

‘I am sorry,’ he said. ‘I feel as though I have murdered you.’

‘Is she young?’

‘Yes.’

‘Pretty?’

‘Yes.’

‘How young?’

‘As old as Shruti, I think.’

‘Did you bring her here?’

‘No.’

‘You slept with her?’

‘Yes.’

‘Where?’

‘In the basement of the Institute.’

‘That’s sick,’ she said. She began to fold the towel. ‘Do you love her?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know.’

Lavanya walked out of the bedroom. She heard him say something, but she would understand it only moments later — ‘But you’re still my email password.’

She sat on the couch in the hall, her legs tucked beneath her. I am tired of funerals, she thought, and she wondered who had died now. It did not feel as though he had died. She still felt his looming presence. The quiet turbulence of a man was very much there in her life. But certainly it felt as if someone had died. She sat there that way the whole night until she could hear the birds and see the first light of the morning in a small patch of sky that was visible through the suspended shrubs in the balcony. She recognized the wound now. It was fear that she was feeling. Fear at not feeling sad at all. It was shocking to imagine him having an affair. It was pathetic. But it did not make her feel sad and that’s what made her feel afraid. People usually feared the future, but this fear was about the past. She wondered why she didn’t care. Did she ever love this man enough? What was it that they had for over four decades? Another arrangement? But she also knew she loved him. He was some sort of a stranger now, but when she remembered him as a memory, she loved that memory very much. In fact, she wanted to go to him and run her hand on his bald head and tell him it was all right. She felt a heartbreaking compassion for him. She wanted him to be happy. As he was on that distant day when he was a boy groom and for some reason he had whispered to her eagerly, ‘Lavanya, you know, the Earth moves at forty kilometres a second.’

She saw a shadow in the passage that connected the hall to the kitchen. He was standing at the doorway of the bedroom. She could not see him but she could see his shadow. His head peeped out. He was surprised to see her on the couch. They looked at each other and turned away. After a few minutes, the shadow came to the hall and stood by her side. She did not look at him. He went to the dining-table and sat on a chair. Occasionally, he turned to look at her. At 7.45, the sound of Shruti’s alarm pierced through their silence. And both of them felt that they should hide.

He sat in the hall all morning toying with a spoon, or wrinkling the edges of the newspaper, or raising his legs for the maid to sweep the floor, and raising them once again when she came to mop. Lavanya went to the kitchen to be with the cook. It was the cook who brought him coffee that morning, and then breakfast. He drank the coffee and ate the breakfast without budging from the chair, as if he were encroaching and he would lose his home if he rose. Around noon, he went for a bath. He stayed at home the whole day. The cook did not come in the evenings. And Lavanya did not cook that night. So he fumbled through the fridge for food and heated whatever he could find.

And that’s how it was all week. He would wake up and sit silently on a chair, or stand in the balcony, and not utter a word. He would eat what was served on the table and when he realized that food was not coming to him, he would go to it.

On the morning of the third day of his exile, Lavanya was in the hall reading the paper. She realized that the maid was staring at her.

‘Phone,’ the maid said with a grimace.

Lavanya went back to reading. The phone on the steel double-helix stand near the television rang for a while and died. They had not been taking calls for the last three days. That morning, the phone was ringing relentlessly, and Lavanya knew why. It was the desperation of a bitch.

The phone rang again. Lavanya let it ring. Acharya looked at the phone just once and turned away sadly. She saw that. The day went by in the lull of the rains and the sedation of its cool breeze, and the unrelenting calm of a wound that was stirred every now and then by the phone. In the evening, when the phone rang one more time, Lavanya finally took the call. There was a silence at the other end.

‘Is that Oparna?’ Lavanya asked.

‘Yes,’ the voice said.

‘This is our home and we do not want to be disturbed. Don’t call again.’

She put the receiver down and pulled the cord out of the socket. She looked at her husband who was sitting at the dining-table. His back was bent and his head drooped to his left a bit. She felt an ache, as though she had denied an infant a simple joy. She served him dinner that night.

‘Can’t get good fish in the rains,’ she told him, wondering if crustaceans could be called fish. He had said something about it before.

On Monday morning, he left for work. On the walkway around the central lawn, he felt he was being watched. The soft sound of the sea was like the murmur of whispers. And two young men in jeans who passed him by appeared to look at him with a cautious respect that had nothing to do with his scientific stature.

Ayyan Mani rose in his customary half-stand. The edges of his lips, surely, were wrinkled in a knowing smile.

‘Ask Oparna to come in,’ Acharya said, as he went into his room.

Ayyan punched in the numbers, thinking of Acharya’s unreasonable tranquillity. It reminded him of the peace in his own chest a fortnight after his father’s death. It was the peace of a cruel relief at how easily a trauma had passed.

‘The Director has asked you to come up,’ he told Oparna. He heard the phone go dead immediately. He looked at the clock to mark the time. If she arrived in less than three minutes it would mean that at some point on the stairways or down the corridors she had been running. It was always entertaining, the misery of lovers. He held a receiver to his ear to check if he could hear the Director’s room clearly. He did not want to miss anything today.

She walked in less than three minutes after Ayyan had called her. But she pretended to be calm, almost lethargic. Ayyan pointed to the sofa. He wanted to study her face. It had been over a week since he saw her. She stood there in a sort of meek defiance. She wanted to head straight to the door, but she was not sure about her place any more. Ayyan could see that.

He dialled a number and frowned as if he could not get through. From behind the frown, he looked at her carefully. So this is how a liberated woman looks when she is heartbroken. Dark circles, defeat in the eyes, hair unhealthy. She would let a man do this to her. Oparna Goshmaulik would. Again and again. But there were many maids in BDD who would never let a man break their hearts. In fact, a growing number of girls in the chawls, especially the ones who were really poor, were choosing to remain unmarried so that they could live in peace. So Ayyan wondered what was so formidable about women like Oparna. More than the impoverished girls of the chawls whom they hoped to uplift, it was Oparna and her lemon-fragrant friends who were weak and dependent on men. They appeared to do many marvellous things, but what they wanted was a man. He thought of Acharya and Nambodri, and the alcoholics of BDD whose livers bled, and the silver sperms in the seaside homes that they inherited, who listened to ‘My Way’, and the pathetic evening faces in the gents’ compartment, and he shuddered at the thought of ever being in a situation where he would have to be dependent on the emotions and love of men. It was a terrifying thought, really.

‘Oparna is here,’ he told the phone, and pointed her to the inner door.

Arvind Acharya could not understand why this apparition always made him weak. The words he was forming in his mind, the morose declaration of separation, vanished. Like the careful notes of an orator blown away by a sudden gust. There she stood, so splendid in her long shapeless top and jeans. Her eyes, so breathtakingly tired, her face diffused and weak and adorable. He wanted to hold her and touch that mystical spot which made the heads of women fall on the shoulders of their men.

He was standing by the window. She walked over to him and held his hand. ‘Why didn’t you call me?’ she asked.

‘I didn’t feel like it, Oparna,’ he said.

‘You didn’t feel like it?’

‘That’s the truth.’

‘Just a call would have kept me from going mad.’

‘You’ll be all right.’

‘I don’t want to be all right.’

‘But that’s the best we can hope for each other.’

She could see in his eyes the finality of decision. She had seen it in other men. The end of a spell and their sudden remembrance of what they called conscience or freedom or family or work, or something else. And she felt tired now. Tired of the violence of love and separation. She reached for his hand again and locked her fingers in his. She looked at the floor and wept. She tried not to, but she wept. Her grip around his fingers grew fierce. She shut her eyes tight. He could barely make out what she said. ‘I am not some holiday you take when your wife is away’ (probably that was what she had said). She untangled her fingers from his and wiped her tears, like a child. Then she walked away.

She would return four times that day, against her better judgement, to plead with him, and each time she would go back in the humiliation of having begged for love. She would do that for another three days until Acharya would tell her, ‘This can’t go on. Either I should leave, or you should leave.’ She pushed the heap of mail from his desk. She looked demented. But Acharya was capable of far greater rage, and in the fury of the moment that drove away the pigeons outside the window, he screamed, ‘Get out, get out.’

Character, Ayyan Mani observed in the anteroom, is actually blood pressure.

Oparna did not visit the third floor for days after that. But one Wednesday she appeared. She went to Acharya and said, ‘I can accept this. It’s over, I know. Sorry I behaved like an idiot. I’m all right now.’

‘I am sorry,’ Acharya said wearily. ‘I am responsible for all this. But I don’t know what is the right thing to do now.’

‘Don’t worry about that,’ she said, ‘I am all right.’

‘You are?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Let’s finish the Mission. It means a lot to both of us. And then we shall see.’

‘And then we shall see,’ he said softly.

Her eyes slowly became luminous and she turned away and left the room. He stood there, feeling lonely, staring at the door that was still closing. He remembered the dwarf from another time who rode the elephant, his fate decided aeons before, like the birth of stars and the collision of worlds. Our stories, too, Oparna, were just meant to be. But this truth, there was something indecent about this truth.