Serious Men

PART FIVE. Aliens Used Aliens To Make Curd

THE SCHOLARS OP the Institute, too, agreed that news travelled fast. But this evening there was a dispute over how fast. Ayyan Mani was at a corner table of the canteen when the argument broke out between two middle-aged mathematicians who were in a large group. They were near the window that opened to the undulating backyard and ancient solitary trees. In the sedative sea breeze and the hush of the calm sea, the debate unfolded as part banter and part science. It slowly escalated into a serious quarrel. One of the mathematicians angrily ordered a paper plate and appeared to scribble a long string of formulae to suggest that if various probabilities were known, it would be possible to calculate how fast a piece of news, like say the death of a colleague, would travel. The other mathematician angrily ordered another paper plate and wrote down something to show that even if various probabilities were known, the speed of news can never be predicted. Velocity was a function of distance, he said. Though news did travel, he said, it did not travel through a physical space, and so where was the question of speed? The first mathematician shook his head many times and said that there was a ‘nonlinear’ distance involved, and thus news indeed travelled through physical space. Ayyan did not fully understand what they meant by probabilities or nonlinear distance. But he did not have the heart to leave the canteen. After about an hour, both the mathematicians amicably agreed on the third paper plate that bad news travelled faster than good news. That, Ayyan already knew.

He was reminded of the episode a month later, one tense December afternoon, as he sat among his phones waiting for all hell to break loose. But nothing happened. Two hours had passed since the Press Officer had declared, in a release which was faxed to every newspaper and television channel: ‘A stunning breakthrough has been achieved.’ That morning, Oparna Goshmaulik had emerged from the isolation of her basement lab along with two American scientists who were supervising the analysis of the cryogenic sampler. She was holding a bundle of papers in her hand: a collection of handwritten material bound together by a cord. On the last page she had concluded, somewhat inappropriately in thin unremarkable handwriting, ‘The results prove without dispute that living cells have been found at the altitude of 41 kilometres. Spores of rod-like bacillus and engyodontium albus de hoog, a fungus, have been found.’

In the first week of November, Arvind Acharya’s mammoth balloon had flown over Hyderabad carrying four samplers to capture air. Three of the samplers were sent to labs in Boston and Cardiff. The last sampler had arrived at the Institute in a Toyota Innova. Oparna’s team of research hands and the two American scientists, old friends of Acharya, had since studied the sampler. They were completely cut off from the rest of the Institute, and there had been no word from them until this morning. They had walked silently down the third-floor corridor, and without waiting for Ayyan’s rituals of passage, they had gone inside Acharya’s room. It would be recounted later, several times, that when Acharya heard the news he shut his eyes, and did not open them for so long that the visitors left without a word, smiling.

It was now confirmed. There were beings that were falling from the sky. Acharya had become the first man to discover aliens. And the theory that all life on Earth first arrived as microscopic living organisms from space had found support. The line between what was alien and what was terrestrial was now forever blurred. When Acharya came out of his trance, he summoned the Press Officer, a portly hectic man who frequently wiped his forehead with a kerchief.

Ayyan Mani heard the entire dictation on his spy-phone.

‘We have been living with aliens,’ Acharya told the Press Officer, who first thought he was being scolded. ‘It is probable that all these years,’ Acharya had then said happily, ‘aliens used aliens to make curd.’

Five minutes later, Ayyan had seen the Press Officer almost run out. He returned with a printed release, headed (in large capital letters), ‘EXTRATERRESTRIAL LIFE FOUND’. Acharya reprimanded him for the hysteria of the huge fonts, but the rest of the release was approved.

It was around two in the afternoon when Ayyan began to get calls from the exceptional faculty of the Institute asking for more information. Phones began to ring in almost every room, especially the sanctified third floor where the senior scientists worked. The news began to travel. Old men pressed the phone receivers to their hairy ears and raised their eyebrows in incorruptible fascination as they heard from their peers what Acharya had discovered. The younger scientists fired questions at their informers to crosscheck their disbelief. Then the many doors on the long finite corridors of the Institute opened. Scientists walked from their nooks to the office of Arvind Acharya. They went without invitation because it was a tradition here that an appointment need not be sought to congratulate a scientist.

They went to Acharya not in friendship, not in the secret mourning of someone’s good fortune, not even with the foresight of sycophancy. They went as scientists. They wanted to celebrate a moment in time — a rare moment in time — when man was about to learn something more about his little world. That there were living things in the cold reaches of the stratosphere; that they were coming down from space not going up from Earth. That we were not alone, we were never alone. For the first time in the history of rationality, the nature of alien life was going to be explained. So they went to hold the large chubby hand of a difficult man, an arrogant man, who more than everything else, was now a discoverer.

When they began to trickle into the waiting-room, the moving honesty of the silent concourse gave Ayyan gooseflesh. He accepted for the very first time that there was, in fact, such a thing called the pursuit of truth and that these men, despite all their faults, held this pursuit very close to their hearts. That day, just for that day, he conceded that there were things far more important in the universe than the grievances of an unfortunate clerk. He kept Acharya’s door open. It did not have a doorstopper, so he shoved a glossy newspaper supplement that spoke of hair-care, meditation and relationships under the crack beneath the door. He went to a corner of the waiting-room and stood in a funereal silence as the men went in to whisper compliments, or to give a pen in appreciation, or to just stand beside him. From where Ayyan was standing he could see Acharya. He looked happy and graceful, as he stood by the large sea window with the old guard and the young. Jana Nambodri too arrived eventually, though his office was the closest to the Director’s. He went into the open chamber and said, ‘Something in me dies when a friend does well.’ And they hugged.

Later in the evening, the Press Officer sombrely surveyed the ground-floor media-briefing room. There were about twenty journalists. Photographers were taking up positions near the dais. Large men at the back were setting up their cameras. The Press Officer searched the faces of the journalists. He knew most of them. They were seasoned science reporters. He looked with concern at some young fresh faces. He asked their names and said sternly, but with the occasional servile smile, ‘Please read the release very carefully. Everything you need to know is in it. I hope you are aware that the Director is extremely short-tempered.’

A photographer came to him and asked if the aliens could be photographed.

‘No, no,’ the Press Officer yelped. ‘They are microbes, they are microbes. And right now we are not in a position to release their visuals.’ He looked worried now. ‘Listen, don’t ask him anything directly. Ask me. And be very careful when you take pictures of Dr Acharya.’

‘Careful, meaning?’

‘Don’t get too close. Don’t use flash. Just make sure he is not annoyed, OK? I don’t know what will make him go mad.’

The memories of what had happened when Stephen Hawking had last visited Bombay were vivid in his mind. A horde of photographers had surrounded the crippled physicist. Hawking’s delicate face could not take the explosion of flashes all around. He had looked frightened in his wheelchair, unable even to beg them to stop. Acharya had come to his rescue, charging towards the photographers with clenched fists. ‘He deserved better treatment,’ he later said, ‘even though he is an ambassador of the Big Bang.’

The Press Officer inspected the dais. There were four chairs. He asked a peon to remove one of them. And he said aloud, hands on hip, ‘Dr Arvind Acharya and the team will arrive any moment. I want briefly to tell you what this is all about though I am sure you are aware of it. Everything is there in the printed material I have given you. Please read it carefully. Four weeks ago, the Institute of Theory and Research, under the direct supervision of Dr Acharya, sent a hot-air balloon from our Hyderabad launch facility. The balloon went up with four samplers. Samplers are sterilized steel devices that are opened by remote control at a particular altitude. The samplers captured air at the altitude of forty-one kilometres. The objective of the balloon mission was to see if there is any life forty-one kilometres above the Earth. At this height, if there is life, it would mean that it is coming down, not going up. Out of the four samplers, two have been sent to Cardiff and one to Boston. They are being studied there right now, even as I speak. We studied one sampler right here in our Astrobiology lab. And we have discovered a rod-like bacillus and a fungus. This is an astonishing discovery because this is the first time anyone has even come close to discovering aliens. Also, this reopens the debate on whether some diseases which appear suddenly, like SARS, are actually extraterrestrial in nature. And of course, it makes us question whether all life on Earth, too, originally came from space.’

He wiped his forehead. His face did not suggest that mankind was at a significant junction. He was more concerned with the little matter of the press conference proceeding smoothly without any mishap.

‘There they are,’ he yelped.

Acharya walked in with his two American friends who were as tall as he was.

‘Where is Oparna?’ Acharya asked the Press Officer, who whispered, ‘She did not want to come, Sir. She wanted to be low-profile. She insisted, Sir. I tried.’

Acharya took the centre chair on the dais. He was flanked by the two white men.

‘Dr Arvind Acharya,’ the Press Officer said grandly, adding, more softly, ‘Dr Michael White is to his right and Dr Simon Gore is to his left. They are astrobiologists from Princeton. They assisted our research and independently supervised the analysis of the contents of the sampler. I leave the floor to the scientists.’ He went to a corner of the room and studied the journalists with a harrowed face. (He hated journalists.)

‘I’m sure you have been briefed,’ Acharya told the audience. ‘I’ve nothing more to add except this. Oparna Goshmaulik was the project coordinator. She was involved in the project before the launch and she was in charge of the analysis of the sampler. Unfortunately she could not make it today. Now, you may ask questions.’

There was a silence for a few seconds. Then a man asked, ‘What exactly has been found?’

Acharya shot a glance at the Press Officer, but answered patiently: ‘A rod-like bacillus and a fungus called engyodontium albus de hoog.’

‘Can you spell it?’

‘No.’

There was a brief silence which was broken by the squeaky voice of the Press Officer. ‘The exact spelling is in the printed material I’ve given all of you. If you can’t find it I will give it to you after the conference.’

A woman asked, ‘Dr Acharya, why have you concluded that this living matter has come from space?’

‘I have not concluded this. It is a reasonable guess supported by several facts. For example, it is difficult to see how the living matter got there because until now it was believed that bacteria and fungi do not exist at such heights. The chances of bacteria living at such heights due to space debris of defunct satellites are very, very small.’

‘Maybe the sampler somehow got contaminated in the lab?’ someone asked.

‘All precautions were taken to secure the samplers,’ Acharya said. ‘The bacteria and fungus we have discovered are very rare and difficult to culture in a lab environment.’

‘If these organisms really came from outer space,’ a voice asked, ‘how did they survive the extreme temperatures?’

‘In the spore form, microbes not only survive extreme conditions but are almost immortal. It is believed that in the hibernated state they can even live for millions of years.’

‘Dr Acharya, where do you think these microbes come from?’

‘I don’t know,’ he answered with a chuckle. He looked at his two friends and they smiled too.

‘Dr Acharya,’ someone asked, ‘what about the other three samplers?’

‘They are being studied in Cardiff and Boston. The results will be out in two or three months. Their processes are slightly different and so will take more time. We hope to find more interesting stuff in those samplers. In fact, we hope to find organisms that have no history on Earth.’

In the back lanes of the academic world the news of Acharya’s discovery was greeted with joy, and with the inadvertent compliments of scepticism. But in the real world of regular people, for which science pretended to toil, the event went across the day like an invisible epoch. Between the news of the stockmarket upsurge and Islamic terror and a man stabbing his lover twenty-two times, The Times hurriedly summarized an epic scientific labour. Rather as an epitaph tells the story of a whole life in the hyphen between two dates.

AYYAN MANI PELT a soporific gloom in his heart that reminded him of the widows of the BDD chawls who sat in the doorways, their cataract eyes baffled at the sheer length of time. These days, there was an excruciating stillness in his world too.

From behind the phones and heaps of transient mail, he stared at the ancient black sofa. Its leather was tired and creased. There was a gentle depression in the seat as though a small invisible man had been waiting there forever to meet Acharya and show him the physics of invisibility. The faint hum of the air conditioner made the room seem more silent than silence itself could have done. A fax arrived. One of the phones on his glass table rang for a moment and stopped abruptly. Voices outside grew and receded. A still lizard, high up on the stark white wall, looked back, needlessly stunned.

Ayyan felt like a character in an art film. Nothing happens for a while, and nothing happens again, and then it is over. There was no goal any more in his life, no plot, no fear. It was a consequence of choosing to be a good father. He had put an end to the myth of Adi’s genius. It had to end before the boy went mad. The game had gone too far. In the place of its nervous excitement was now the ordinariness of the familiar flow of life, the preordained calm of a discarded garland floating in the sewage.

Every morning he woke up in the attic, and went to stand in the glow of the morning light, among people and buckets that inched towards the chlorine toilets. He then bathed by the kitchen in the fragrance of tea and soap, and went to work in a melancholy train, stranded inside an unmoving mass of bleak, yawning strangers. All that to come here and bear the austere grandness of the Brahmins and their marvellous incomprehension of the universe, and take phone calls for a man who did not want to be disturbed. And finally to go home in the shadows of rows and rows of large grey tenements and eat in the company of a half-deaf boy who had lost all his ill-gotten glory, and a woman whose only hope was in the delusion of her son’s mythical genius. Then, in the morning, to wake up in the attic, again.

This, Ayyan accepted, was life. It was, in a way, a fortunate life. It would go on and on like this. And one day, very soon in fact, Adi would be an adolescent. An adolescent son of a clerk. A miserable thing to be in this country. He would have to forget all his dreams and tell himself that what he wanted to do was engineering. It’s the only hope, everyone would tell him. Engineering, Adi would realize, is every mother’s advice to her son, a father’s irrevocable decision, a boy’s first foreboding of life. A certainty, like death, that was long decided in the cradle. Sooner or later, he would have to call it his ambition. And to attain it, he would compete with thousands and thousands of boys like him in the only human activity for which Indians had a special talent. Objective-type entrance exams. Very few tests in the world would be tougher than these. So, in the enchanting years of early youth, when the mind is wild, and the limbs are strong, he would not run free by the sea or try to squeeze the growing breasts of wary girls. Instead he would sit like an ascetic in a one-room home and master something called quantitative ability. ‘If three natural numbers are randomly selected from one to hundred then what is the probability that all three are divisible by both two and three?’

He would have to answer this probably in thirty seconds in order to stand any chance against boys who were barely seven when they were fed iron capsules and sample-question papers for this very purpose; who had attended tuitions and memorized all the formulae in the world before they learnt how to masturbate; whose parents whispered into their ears every day of their lives the answer to the decisive question: ‘What do you want to become in life?’ Adi would have to fight them for a sliver of the future that men of God reviled without conviction as the ‘material world’, exactly the place that a father wishes for his son. Adi, despite the misfortunes of poverty, would somehow have to find a way to get into an engineering college. And then ensure that he did not spend a single day of his life as an engineer. Because everyone would tell him then that the real money was in MBA.

And so, even before the engineering course was over, he would start all over again, and prepare to battle thousands and thousands of boys like him in yet more entrance exams. When he finally made it and became a zombie who had entirely forgotten what he really wanted to do with his life, the light-skinned boys in the dormitory would look at him with a sad chuckle and whisper among themselves that he was a beneficiary of a 15 per cent reservation for the Dalits. ‘Lucky bastard,’ they would say.

Ayyan rose from his chair and considered his decision one more time. It was insane what he was about to ask Acharya, but it was less insane than life. One last game, he told himself. One final flutter in his one-room home before they all succumbed to the inevitability of a future he had just seen so clearly.

Acharya was sitting like an emperor, huge hands resting on the arms of his throne, eyes lost in the glow of celestial orbs that probably tilted gently at the honour of being invoked by such a mind.

‘Sir,’ Ayyan said.

Acharya nodded, staring at a vacant wall.

‘I wanted to ask you something.’

‘Ask fast.’

‘My son Adi has been talking a lot about you. Ever since he met you he has gone crazy. He has been talking about the Institute even in his sleep. He wants to get admission into the Institute.’

Acharya nodded faster now, growing impatient already. ‘You had told him that he should take the Joint Entrance Test,’ Ayyan said. ‘I know, Sir, it was just a joke but he has taken it very seriously. He says he wants to take the test.’

‘He should then,’ Acharya said.

‘This year, he wants to take it.’

‘In April?’

‘Yes, Sir.’

‘Are you crazy?’

‘I know it sounds like that, Sir. But he says he will pass the test.’

‘And what does he want to do after he passes the test?’

‘Maths, I think.’

‘He said that?’

‘Yes.’

‘Ayyan, are you seriously suggesting that I allow a ten-year-old boy to take the JET?’

‘He is eleven, Sir.’

‘It’s still crazy.’

‘It’s entirely your decision, Sir.’

‘He might be an exceptional boy, Ayyan, but ten thousand not-very-dumb graduates take the test. Only a hundred make it.’

‘I know, Sir. I just thought I would ask. I also know that, according to the rules, a candidate has to be at least a graduate to qualify for the exam.’

‘Forget the rules. It’s just that I find it ridiculous that a boy of eleven should be allowed to take the test.’

‘I thought I would ask because he is so keen.’

‘No way,’ Acharya said, a bit amused now at the thought of a little boy having a shot at the Institute’s entrance exam. ‘The Joint Entrance Test is not some joke meant to entertain a boy,’ he said.

‘I know what you mean, Sir.’

‘And what’s wrong with the coffee these days? It tastes chemical.’

‘I will ask the peons to be careful, Sir.’

As Ayyan was about to leave, Acharya said, ‘Wait.’ He toyed with the meteorite paperweight and appeared to consult his reasonable conscience. He asked, in a soft voice, ‘The boy will be disappointed?’

‘That’s all right, Sir.’

‘That, of course, is all right with me too. What I asked was, will he be upset?’

‘A bit, Sir, but that’s all right.’

‘I’ll write a letter to him personally explaining why he cannot take the test. I will write to him saying that he is too young to take the test. OK?’

‘Thank you so much, Sir.’

‘So don’t break the bad news to him now,’ Acharya said in a soft conspiratorial tone, ‘Wait until I give you the letter. You understand?’

‘Yes, Sir.’

Ayyan went back to his desk and exhaled. He had thought that the maverick mind of Acharya might see the charm in a little boy asking for a chance, but the absurdity of his request had just sunk in and he felt a bit foolish. In fact, Ayyan did not really want Adi to take the test. The boy, obviously, would not have the faintest hope of passing it. What he wanted was the news of the juvenile being allowed to attempt one of the toughest tests in the country to travel for a day in the newspapers, and probably on the television channels, and create one last festive commotion in his home and in the toilet queues.

The Joint Entrance Test (also called JET) exuded the terror of an excruciatingly selective screening process. But it also had the peculiar aura of art. It was a three-hour, objective-type test that carried about a hundred questions, broadly divided into physics, chemistry and maths.

Of the ten thousand candidates who sat the JET every year, two hundred would be shortlisted for interviews, half of them fated to make it — fifty in the postgraduate courses and fifty in research positions. How the JET question-paper was set, how it was printed, stored and eventually distributed to the exam centres, was a closely guarded secret known only to the old hands. Ayyan knew some bits of the secret. He even knew how to make a small hole in the fortress of security systems that were built around the question-paper. The weak brick in the otherwise impenetrable walls was, improbably, a modest bill-file stored in a lockless steel cupboard in the accounts department. Unknowingly, Ayyan began to doodle the ramparts of a fort on his scribbling-pad and then the images of a siege. Finally, he drew a crow flying away from the fort holding something in its beak. A phone rang on his table, and he was shaken out of his daydream. As he took the call, he wondered why he was thinking of the JET question-paper.

It preoccupied him the whole afternoon and made him fear that he was getting obsessed with an insane idea. But in the evening, when Acharya gave him the handwritten letter for Adi, his fever began to subside. It was now confirmed. Adi would not take the test. By the time Ayyan entered the perpetual laments of the BDD chawls, his nefarious excitement had died away without a trace.

In the inner reaches of BDD, there was a festive spirit that evening. Ayyan realized that all heads on the broken cobbled pathways were turned in one direction. Children were sprinting to where the elders were gawking. Near Block Thirty-Three, a crude stage had been erected. A small crowd was gathering near it. Huge speakers were piled on both sides of the stage. Some men were stringing fairylights between two lamp-posts. There was a sudden roar from the crowd. A thin, spirited boy had just walked on to the stage. He was wearing black leather trousers and a black shirt with gleaming silver dots. He took his position at the centre of the stage. His back was to the audience and his legs were parted. That suggested breakdance.

The boy stood waiting for the music to begin. The crowd grew. The boy turned and looked unhappily at his friends near the stage who were having a problem with the sound system. They somehow always did before a breakdance. Ayyan had seen this a thousand times — a boy in leather trousers standing with his back to the audience, legs parted and waiting sheepishly for the music to start. But this time, the wait was brief. Portentous drum-beats filled the night. The boy’s hips began to sway. And he stretched his hands sideways. From the tip of his left hand, a wave began and moved like a violent fit towards his shoulder and then to his right hand, and was about to return the same way when the music died abruptly. His hands fell. He parted his legs again and waited.

Ayyan resumed his walk home. From the shadows emerged a drunkard in loose shorts and a T-shirt that said ‘Smart’, and loose shorts.

‘Mani,’ the drunk said. Even though the man was swaying in a personal gale that only a mixture of rum and egg-roast could unleash, there was something deep and strong about his voice. It was an authority that came from another time, when they were just boys and so close and their simple fates seemed interwoven. Ayyan, who usually handled such defeated friends by continuing to walk with nods and murmurs, was forced to stop. ‘Mani,’ the man said, ‘You know what happened to Pandu?’

Ayyan shook his head. Pandu was the fastest underarm bowler Lower Parel had probably ever seen. That was a long time ago, when he was an unreasonably happy boy who used to draw erotic images of girls with their little buckets, all waiting in the toilet queues beneath a providential sunbeam. In time, the unhappiness of adulthood and the slave job as a driver for Balaji Car Hire transformed Pandu. He grew silent and never found the time to sketch, and drank like a fool every night.

‘He is dead, Mani, he is dead,’ the man said with a chuckle. ‘Police picked him up last night. His owner said that he stole some money. This morning the police came to his house and told his wife that he had hanged himself in the lockup.’

Ayyan’s temples moved in a silent rage, because here everyone knew what it meant when the police said a man had hanged himself in custody.

‘They beat him to death, Mani, they beat the life out of him,’ the drunk said and walked away muttering that Pandu, the greatest painter whom no one knew, was dead.

Oja Mani opened the door in annoyed haste and went back to sit transfixed in front of the television. Ayyan surveyed the dramatic wailing of the women in the soap. It somehow comforted him.

Pandu deserved the tears of all. Ayyan imagined the prime-time tears in every home in the nation, in every distraught character and in every woman enthralled by the soap, and dedicated the million melancholies to the memory of a boy who once found freedom in art. But then the drama ended abruptly, and there was this sudden gaiety of Red Label Tea. A woman with long flowing hair was serving tea to her family and everybody was becoming ecstatic after a single sip. It was cruel that on the night when the broken body of Pandu was still lying in a morgue, his woman running her frail shivering fingers on the wounds of his chest, and the cops instructing her to accept that the wounds were caused by his cowardly suicide, the wails of the mourners in Oja’s serial must be interrupted by the joys of tea.

Oja sprang to life and began magically to put together a meal.

‘Adi,’ she screamed. It was just a word, but the way she said it meant different things at different times. The boy was sitting near the fridge, turning the pages of a textbook. He was a bit dejected these days because the game had ended. Teachers were still wary of him at school, his classmates still called him ‘brains’ and the neighbours continued to beg him to teach their children, but he knew his heroic status would soon be forgotten if it were not replenished with fresh achievements. He threw the book away and slid to the centre of the room for dinner. Ayyan wanted the attention of his wife who was setting the plates on the floor.

‘You know, Oja,’ he said, ‘there are tea cups that cost five thousand rupees.’

‘A single cup?’ she asked.

‘Yes. Five thousand rupees.’

‘I would be so scared to drink from it,’ she said, sitting down to eat.

‘If you could buy it, you wouldn’t be scared,’ he said.

The commercials ended and Ayyan slowly drifted into the trauma of the soap. He felt a peaceful grief in his heart that numbed all his muscles. And this gloom would stay with him for many days, long after he ceased to mourn a lost friend.

The tired face of Oja, the despondence of Adi, the thousand eyes that gaped vacantly in the grey corridors, the widows who sat and sat, the nocturnal love songs of the drunkards, and the youth who stood impatiently in the toilet queues to go seize the day, and of course fail — all this and more, Ayyan was finally willing to accept as home because the other life, the bewitching life of creating a whole myth, was dangerous. And only bachelors had the fortune to be foolish.

THESE DAYS, HIS thoughts of Oparna Goshmaulik reminded Acharya of an ancient scar in the centre of his huge forehead. The scar was inflicted over three decades ago by a young Belgian astronomer named Pol Voorhoof who threw an unopened beer bottle at him. That night, they were with friends in a New York pub called Zero Gravity. Acharya, who by then was convinced that the wide acceptance of the Big Bang theory was influenced by a Christian compulsion to believe in a beginning and an end, accused the Belgians of starting the whole fraud. It was a Belgian Catholic priest named Georges Lemaître who in 1927 had come up with the idea that the universe began from the explosion of an atom. Unable to bear Acharya’s long unprovoked polemic against Belgians, Voorhoof responded by calling Indians half-naked imbeciles, and even accused their goddesses of being topless tribals. In the happy stupor of inebriation, Acharya stood on the table and declared to the pub that he was smarter than all the Belgians in the world and challenged them to a round of blindfold chess. Voorhoof, of course, accepted the challenge.

They were blindfolded with the kerchiefs given by cautiously excited girls who were confused by the intellectual duel of two foreign men. Acharya and the Belgian spoke their moves, and a drunken friend offered to move the pieces on a chessboard that a waiter had produced. Acharya won in five minutes and let out a long operatic laughter with his blindfold still on. Voorhoof, who was also blindfolded, took an unopened beer bottle and flung it in the direction of the laughter. The bottle found its target but, fortunately for Acharya, it broke only after it hit the ground. But it left a deep gash in his forehead, and for the first time in his life he tasted blood. The gash hurt so much in the coming days that he refused to believe a time would come when he would no longer feel the pain. Long after the wound healed, every time he felt sad, he would think of the scar and remind himself not only of the fleeting transience of pain but also of convictions, friends, love, daughters and everything else that men held so dear.

The memory of Oparna too was no longer an open wound. To each other, he believed they had become endearing scars that in solitary moments would open the magical windows of remembrance. That was how he wanted her to remember their brief love. And this hope was reaffirmed when she walked into his room that Wednesday with such tranquillity and with the other deceptions of woman’s amnesia.

‘I called you to discuss the bad news from Boston,’ he said, rocking himself in the chair consciously to reassure her that it was not a tragic matter and that she should not be disappointed. ‘I believe you got a copy too?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Sad, isn’t it.’

Boston University had confirmed that it had finished studying the sampler and had found no sign of life in it.

‘There are still two samplers and Cardiff will be getting back soon,’ he said cheerfully.

‘Let’s hope there is something interesting in them,’ she said, looking at her fingernails.

‘Let’s hope,’ he said, and looked at her fondly. ‘I was thinking, Oparna, Astrobiology has to be made one of the main streams in the Institute. What do you say?’

She said, in a somewhat lifeless way, that it was a good idea.

He mistook her response for the boredom that so often fills researchers after the excitement of a big project. The hired hands in her lab had been asked to leave, most of the equipment was shrouded in protective covers, and she was left alone in the basement once again with ghostly peons, and the uncertain wait for another worthy assignment.

‘You will be part of the faculty then?’ he asked pleasantly.

‘I don’t know,’ she said, and looked away.

That introduced a silence which ended with Oparna asking if there was anything else he wanted to discuss. When she was at the door, she turned to look at him for a passing moment. Just for an instant, he thought, they were once again in that abstract doorway of love where they did not know if they were reuniting or growing apart.

Their next meeting, three weeks later, was more grim. It was in the company of the Press Officer who wiped his forehead out of habit, even though he was not sweating. Cardiff too had said that the study of the two samplers was complete and no form of life had been detected. Acharya looked sombrely at Oparna, and then at the Press Officer, who straightened his back.

‘We have a moral obligation to go public with this news,’ Acharya said. ‘We have to state clearly that two external labs have detected nothing in the samplers.’

After the Press Officer left hurriedly to type out the release, Acharya and Oparna maintained a deep thoughtful silence that both of them understood as a form of professional conversation and not as the discomfort of defeated lovers.

Finally he said, ‘Considering the fact that Cardiff and Boston have not detected anything while we have, it is natural for people to question whether the sampler that was studied here was accidentally contaminated in the lab. I know such a thing could not have happened under your watch. But we must reassure people that our lab maintains the highest standards.’

Oparna nodded, but he could see that her mind was drifting.

He leaned forward and asked her with affection, ‘I hope you are not disappointed with the news from Cardiff?’

‘I am not,’ she said.

‘I am,’ he said. ‘But this is just the beginning. We are going to send many, many balloons up there. And all those things that are falling down, we are going to trap them in our samplers and show beyond any dispute that there are aliens among us.’

Oparna rose from her chair and went around the desk to his side. She held his face with her two warm hands and kissed him on his forehead. She had the peace of a mourner. There was something morbid about her face. It looked as if he had died and she was bidding him farewell. He felt a stab of such a cold fright that he thought of Lavanya, and wanted to complain to her that he was dead.

MANY YEARS LATER, several scientists would still recall that Tuesday morning with the minute details of where they were and what they were doing when they first heard the news, like the word of an assassination freezes the memory of a whole generation.

Jana Nambodri was with his usual company of radio astronomers when the phone rang. He held the receiver to his ear, and after making the first perfunctory noises he listened speechless. The radio astronomers, greatly dispirited after the failed mutiny to erect Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence as an autonomous department, gathered in Nambodri’s office more often than before with lament masquerading as hopeful conspiracy. That morning, there were six of them, including Nambodri, in the room.

It was the portly professor called Jal, with a Gorbachev bird-dropping stain on his bald head, who first noticed that Nambodri’s hand was trembling. Jal nudged others to look at their ringleader. Nambodri’s left hand, which was holding the receiver, was shaking, and his right was drawing concentric circles on a discarded envelope. He finally said into the phone, ‘This is … I don’t know what to say … This is unbelievable.’ He put the phone down and stared blankly.

‘What’s happened?’ Jal asked.

‘I can’t tell you,’ Nambodri said. ‘You’ve had a bypass.’

‘Tell me, Jana. What happened?’

Nambodri, whose mind had not fully returned from the phone call and the train of thought it had inspired, banged the table with his fist, and winced.

‘Stupid girl. Stupid girl,’ he said. Then he stormed out of his room, into the long corridor. Halfway down, he turned and looked at the door that said ‘Director’. Even to the unpoetic mind of Nambodri, the austere wooden door was beginning to resemble the lid of a coffin.

Ayyan Mani looked at the courier letter on his table that the morose peon had dropped, as he always did, like a grievance from his heart. It was an unremarkable courier letter from the Ministry of Defence, and Ayyan knew he was going to open it. He looked furtively to his right, in the direction of Acharya’s door, and to the left where the main entrance was. The letter was from Basu.

Dr Arvind Acharya,

This is to inform you of an extraordinary development. We have a letter with us from Dr Oparna Goshmaulik, Head of the Astrobiology lab and the project coordinator of the Balloon Mission. We have independently verified with Oparna that she was, in fact, the author of the letter. She has declared, with a detailed chronology of the events, that she was pressurized by you into contaminating the contents of one sampler with the purpose of claiming that microscopic life has been detected at the improbable altitude of 41 kilometres above the Earth.

She has claimed that when she first informed you that no life had been detected in the sampler, you instructed her to contaminate it and fabricate a report. And that you threatened her with severe professional consequences if she did not go with the flow. Taking moral responsibility for her actions, she has offered to resign. This is an extraordinary allegation and I’ll be in the Institute on Wednesday, by noon, to see how we can resolve this. I’ll be joined by an empowered committee for an internal inquiry into the matter. All senior faculty of the Institute have been instructed to be available to be called upon. You are hereby asked to present yourself before the empowered committee.

Bhaskar Basu

Only after he had read the letter twice did Ayyan realize that he was standing. A corner of the letter was quivering in the breeze of the air conditioner. It was as if the note were shaking in the first tremors of the news. He sat down and repaired the letter with the supply of official envelopes he had in the bottom drawer. He tried to recall when he had last felt this familiar fear in his heart which was a cruel mix of sorrow and anticipation. As he entered Acharya’s room, Ayyan recognized the fear. Many years ago, when he had to wake up the aged father of a friend to inform him that his only son had drowned in Aksa, he had felt this way, as if his heart were turning into ice. He put the letter on Acharya’s desk.

Acharya regarded the letter without interest. Then he returned to Topolov’s Superman.

In the peace of the dormant equipment, shrouded in their plastic covers, Oparna sat on the main desk swinging her legs. She was staring at the phone. The murmurs of subterranean machines filled the room as the door opened. As it slowly shut, the haunting silence returned. Nambodri walked in delicately, like an explorer. He looked up at the ceiling and in other directions, and smiled. He stood by Oparna’s side and looked at her without a word. Unable to bear his phoney intensity any more, she turned to the phone and resumed her vigil.

‘Why are you doing this?’ he asked. She removed her hair — band, held it in her mouth, and tied her hair in a fiercer knot.

‘You must ask the man, don’t you think?’ she said.

‘The victim, are you?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’

‘He would never even think of doing something like this. Oparna, why don’t you tell me what this is all about?’

She began softly to hum a rhyme, probably a Bangla rhyme. She was suddenly scary.

‘I’ve heard some stories about you and him,’ Nambodri said. ‘Something happened? And this is some kind of a revenge? Woman scorned, or some rubbish like that?’

‘Why don’t you come later, Mr Runner-Up?’

That disturbed his poise but just for a moment. He told her, almost fondly, ‘You’re being stupid, Oparna. This is not the way to do it. You’re almost there but you have to be careful. Acharya is not easy to destroy.’

He could see clearly, in the nonchalant way that she was sitting, the way she was swinging her legs, her nervous hum and her paranormal expectation of the phone to ring, an insanity that he might never have suspected before. He felt afraid, not only to be standing there in the deserted basement lab, but for the times when he had tried to flirt with her, because if she had granted him the possibilities, his fate would probably have been far worse than Acharya’s.

‘You must listen to me carefully, Oparna,’ he said.

She slouched a bit and yawned. ‘This is not the time for desperate mentors to come,’ she said. ‘What is done is done.’

Nambodri leaned on the desk and said, almost in a whisper, ‘Oparna, there is something you must understand. Even before you were born, Arvind Acharya was a name that floated once every year as a probable Nobel recipient. He is big. He is very big. Nobody is going to believe you. He has to just say he was framed and your game is over.’

‘There are people who’d like to believe me. I know that much,’ she said.

‘That’s true,’ Nambodri said thoughtfully. ‘But writing a letter to the Ministry is not the way to do it. You’ve got to understand. There are people who hate him but there are also very powerful people who love him. The game now could go either way. So you must go to the press right now. It has to be all over the papers before the internal inquiry even begins. People have to see this news, not hear it from their friends. Do you understand? It has to be news, not gossip. People believe news. You’ve got to go public with this story, Oparna.’

She looked at him innocently, almost like a child, and said, ‘But isn’t that unethical?’

Then the phone rang, and a fond smile appeared on her face.

Ayyan Mani said two soft ‘hellos’ to the dictaphone and played his voice back to check an instrument he had never held with so much reverence before. It was, until this day, an enduring symbol of his plight, a reminder that he was nothing more than a large Indian recorder appended to a small Japanese one. But that morning, his unfailing instinct told him that this small silver thing was going to produce a treasure which he could somehow encash in the decisive war of the Brahmins that was now unavoidable. He did not have a plan, but he knew he would soon find one.

Oparna arrived without the discomforts of sanity. It was almost the same face that Ayyan had seen one morning, many months ago, when she had come with her hair untied and dressed in clothes that seemed to have a purpose. She had come to propose then. Now, there was a deep wound inside her and it showed on her face in a slanted smile. It was a misery that he recognized as a fate of love. He had seen this many times from very close, very close — that perilous distance from where the face of any woman would look ugly, and in the agony of being spurned must quickly choose to either kiss or spit. In the pale rooms of the lodgings where he used first to soften his aspiring wives with caresses, and then bid them a final farewell with a clear head — which is another form of cruelty in love — he had seen this face of Oparna. And that made him grin. At how he had escaped from the treacherous minefields of freedom unscathed, into the safety of marriage. While one of the most intelligent men alive was about to be mutilated.

Free love, Ayyan knew in his heart, is an enchanting place haunted by demented women. Here, every day men merely got away. And then, without warning, they were finished. The girl would come and say, like a martyr, that she was pregnant, or would remember that all the time she was being raped, or her husband would arrive with a butcher’s knife. Such things always happened in the country of free love. Ayyan Mani had fled in time from there into the open arms of a virgin. But Acharya had fled the other way.

Oparna found her man exactly the way she had imagined. Acharya was sunk in his massive black chair, his beautiful face staring in blank confusion, like an infant’s. She sat across the table from him and smiled.

He asked in a voice that was without force or expectation, ‘Why, Oparna?’

She made an exasperated face as if she had hoped to talk about more interesting things.

‘What did you expect, Arvind?’ she said, almost with compassion. ‘You sleep with me till your wife comes back from her vacation and then ask me to get out of your life.’

‘I thought you understood,’ he said, and at that moment, when he said it, he conceded to himself that he didn’t know what he meant by that.

‘No, Arvind,’ she said, her words hurried and angry now. ‘I did not understand. And I’ve never understood it when men tell me “it was fun but now we have to get rid of you”.’

‘So you do this?’

‘Try to understand. All my life, men have humiliated me. I don’t know why but that’s what I remember of men. Then I go mad over an old man. And he too dumps me. I wanted to kill you. I really did.’ She studied her palm and the slender fingers which she thought looked a bit too bony and aged.

He did not recognize this woman who was sitting in front of him. He felt an excruciating sympathy for her, and then he remembered that it was he who was on the verge of being destroyed. ‘What do we do now?’ he asked feebly.

‘We are finished. That’s all. Together. Your reputation is now over. And no one will hire me again,’ she said in an informative way. ‘It’s a mess, Arvind. Even if you scream from the top of the water tank that you are innocent, you’re finished. And there are enough vultures here who want you out. They already know what they must do.’

‘So there was nothing in the sampler?’

‘Is that what you are worried about? If there were aliens in the sampler? That’s very rude, you know.’

‘Tell me, Oparna, was there anything in the sampler?’

‘There was nothing in it. Just air.’

He found it ridiculous that what pained him more at the moment was that the Balloon Mission had completely failed. He turned to the window and tried to accept the shock of the failure. He had the courage to accept the punishment of Oparna, and the wisdom to understand that it is in the nature of love to be disproportionate with both rewards and retributions. But he was shattered by the fact that he had to now forsake the joy and relief of having found aliens in the stratosphere. He suspected that he might not get another shot. And for the first time in his life he understood the fear of a bleak, vacant future.

He went to the window and stood looking at the calm sea. He felt the presence of Oparna beside him. He did not find it strange that they stood there like that without a word, like an ancient couple who had no need for language. They stared through the window with unflinching eyes, but never before, not even during their first naked gazes in the basement, had they looked so deeply into each other.

When she finally spoke, it was another form of silence, like the sound of the sea, and the songs of the birds. He heard her tell him dreamily how excited she was when the sampler arrived, how she hoped there was something in it that would make him happy.

‘We ran all kinds of tests, Arvind,’ she said. ‘Then, when I began to realize that there was nothing in it, you know what I did? I did not leave the lab for four days. Four days and four nights, at a stretch, I ran test after test because I did not want to see you sad. I don’t know what happened on the fourth night. Something hit me. It was as if I had woken up from a stupid dream. And I was so ashamed. I asked myself why am I such a sucker for men. Here is an old bastard who hurt me so much and I was going mad trying to make him happy, trying like an idiot to find something in a stupid steel box. I was so angry with myself Arvind, and at you, and at everything.’

So, in the stealth of dawn she had contaminated the sampler with microbial cultures that were available in the lab. It consoled her. The idea of taking him to absolute ruin, she said, made her feel powerful and, finally, smart.

They resumed the patient silence of an unnatural belonging. Then he heard her light footsteps leave the room. For hours after that he stood by the window. Pigeons that came in the excitement of landing on the ledge were stunned by his ghostly stare. Down on the pathways around the main lawn, small groups of scientists were gathering. In them there was an unmistakable excitement that masqueraded as shock, just like the entertainment of death fills funeral guests with grimness. Acharya began to understand the mysterious composure of men who are led to the gallows. Their even gait and the strength of their legs that took them unwaveringly to the hollow wooden pedestal had always fascinated him. Now, he almost experienced their condition. He felt a sick enfeebling fear inside him that had the smell of pus. But he too could walk.

By evening, the phones began to ring. Acharya let them ring. Ayyan walked in several times to say that old friends and journalists were on the line begging to know what had happened. Visitors were gathering in the anteroom and their murmurs began to grow in the first hums of a huge impending storm.

‘What must we do, Sir?’ Ayyan asked.

The news of Oparna’s letter quickly spread across the world infecting everyone who was remotely interested. Copies began mysteriously to fall into the inboxes of journalists and scientists, with a subject message that said ‘India’s Woo-Suk’, comparing Acharya to the disgraced South Korean scientist Hwang Woo-Suk, who had fabricated breakthroughs in stem-cell research. Blogs were besieged by self-righteous laments at the increasing fraud in science, and more compassionate analyses of why a great scientist might have stooped so low, and the impassioned defence of old hands who refused to believe Acharya was capable of such deceit. They saw in Oparna’s letter the obvious revenge of an enraged woman. But the story everyone wanted to believe was that Arvind Acharya had fallen. Sombre television reporters stood outside the fortified gates of the Institute and spoke of how the scientific community was in a state of shock.

An astronomer in the glory of having discovered aliens, now interrupted by a beautiful associate who claimed she had falsified the research on his instructions. It was a great story.

THE TRIAL WAS arranged in a windowless room. It had a beige carpet that was somehow perfect, and there was an air of silent estrangement. Unlike the other conference rooms in the Institute of Theory and Research where large oblong tables conveyed the intention of equality to all chairs, at least before they were occupied by incurable egos, this one was designed for the unambiguous purpose of lecturing. Behind a reddish-brown oak table with a solitary rose peeping out of a narrow white vase, five men sat in a solemnity they had granted themselves. All the chairs in the room had been removed except for two that looked particularly austere without armrests, and they bleakly faced the jury.

Oparna entered with a premeditated smile that was poised between gloom and courage. She was in a sky-blue salwar kameez. Her hair fell in languid curls. When she saw the men behind the table, all seated like a diminished Last Supper gathering, she felt an irrepressible urge to laugh. Basu, in a black suit and red tie, was at the centre; Nambodri was to his right. She did not know the other three men. They must have been in their fifties.

One by one, the men rose to greet Oparna.

‘Please sit,’ Basu said graciously. She sat in one of the two austere chairs, wondering how these men knew this was the way it had to be done. Such an inquiry had no precedence, yet they knew they had to arrange the table that way and the chairs this way. She tried to imagine what would happen when Acharya arrived. She and he, together in this room on these chairs, would look like a terrible couple undergoing counselling. She tried, once again, not to laugh.

She wondered how women would have handled this situation. What if the jury had been comprised of menopausal women? That was a disturbing thought. They would have butchered her in a minute. But this jury of ageing men was going to be easy.

‘You, of course, know Dr Jana Nambodri,’ Basu said smartly, and introduced the other three as senior scientists who were attached to various institutes in Delhi. From the way they looked at her, almost in appreciation or gratitude — she could not tell — it was evident to her that the jury shared a common grievance.

The men examined some papers in front of them. Basu said, without looking up, ‘You have stated everything very clearly in your letter. Is there any change in your statement?’

‘No,’ she said.

‘When Acharya arrives you will have to repeat your statement in front of him. Is that all right with you?’

‘Yes,’ she said.

The jury appeared a bit lost now, as if they had nothing more to say.

‘Are there any other statements you would like to make?’ Nambodri asked, one hand on the table, leaning back a bit in what he imagined was a charming way.

‘No,’ Oparna said, trying to think of the day her grandmother died so that she did not burst out laughing.

‘Acharya had considerable power over you,’ Nambodri said, trying to remind her gently of something she might have missed. ‘Did he misuse his power in any way apart from instructing you to falsify the report?’

‘No,’ she said, offering not even the curiosity of confusion.

‘What I am trying to say is, you are an attractive woman, a very attractive woman, and he was a powerful man who forced you to do something unethical. There must have been other moments when he used his position and made you feel vulnerable? Something that you were embarrassed to mention in your letter?’

‘If you are talking about sexual harassment,’ she said, ‘it is not he who I have a complaint against.’

That inspired Nambodri to fall silent. The other men, too, had nothing more to say to her. They whispered among themselves. Two men looked at their watches. Basu pressed a bell and a clerk appeared at the door.

‘Has he come?’ Basu asked.

‘No, Sir,’ the clerk said, and vanished.

The jury stared at Oparna with the embarrassment of having to wait for the accused. It was an awkward pause that began to disturb the confidence of Nambodri. He imagined the unrelenting presence of Acharya in the room and what it might do to the composure of everyone. Oparna might not be able to sustain the lie. He wanted her to be strong and play a decisive role. But he suspected that she did not fully understand the seriousness of the trial. He tried to draw her into the mood of the moment.

‘There were two American professors in the lab when you were studying the contents of the sampler,’ he said, ‘Michael White and Simon Gore. We spoke to them on the phone this morning on a conference call. They expressed their shock, and refused to believe that Acharya could have instructed you to tamper with the sampler. How did you manage to contaminate the sampler when they were around?’

‘They were not around when I did it,’ she said. ‘I did it around four in the morning.’

‘You were in the lab that early for the purpose of contaminating the sampler?’ Nambodri asked in an educative way, like a lawyer preparing the client for trial.

‘Yes.’

‘Acharya asked you to do it around that time, before the professors arrived?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you think it’s possible that the Americans too were involved in Acharya’s conspiracy?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘What proof do you have that Acharya asked you to tamper with the sampler?’ Basu asked.

‘I don’t have any proof,’ she said. ‘But, obviously, I have no motivation to make this revelation. Except on moral grounds.’

‘Obviously,’ Nambodri said. ‘But why are you making it now? Why not before?’

‘I was aware of the implications. I needed time to decide.’

‘We understand that,’ he said kindly, and then looked surprised to see the man at the door.

Ayyan Mani was holding a note in his hand.

‘Dr Acharya asked me to give this to you,’ he told the jury, and held the folded letter in the air. He had started walking in when Basu said ceremoniously, ‘Come in.’ That made Ayyan stop for a moment before resuming his entry.

He handed the note to Basu who read the contents to the gathering: ‘It’s beneath my dignity to react to an allegation of this nature or to present myself before a committee of this composition. I will not be interrogated by bureaucrats and subordinates. In my defence, I present my whole past — Arvind Acharya.’

For a brief moment, Oparna thought Basu was an endearingly formidable man. Then she realized that she felt that way because he was reading out the words of a man who really was.

Basu tore up the letter and handed the shreds to Ayyan.

‘You may give this to him,’ he said, and threw a look at Oparna to see if she was impressed. ‘I interpret this as a direct challenge to the Defence Minister himself,’ Basu said. Ayyan left the room holding the shreds in a tight fist. He looked forward to giving the shreds to Acharya.

Basu studied Oparna with what must have been wisdom, and said, ‘What you did, even though you did it under duress, was wrong. It has brought disgrace to the Institute. But you have done the right thing by offering to take responsibility and resign.’

Oparna, once again, forced herself to think of the sudden demise of her grandmother.

He paused and nodded at the other members. ‘We have nothing more to say to you except that without your courage this matter would never have surfaced. Would you reconsider your offer to resign?’

‘No,’ she said. The briskness with which she replied surprised him and he forgot what he wanted to say.

Nambodri narrowed his eyes and looked sideways at her. ‘Maybe we can find a post for you in one of the other institutes run by the Ministry of Defence?’

‘I am not in a position to think about my future right now,’ she said, standing up. The men rose to bid her farewell. She collected her handbag from the floor and walked out without a word.

Ayyan Mani was certain that after this day Oparna would never be seen in the Institute again. In the tumult of the coming days as the scandal unfolded on television screens, she would be missing. And she would be missing long after people stopped trying to find her. She would become a distant memory to be invoked with mirth — ‘Remember Oparna?’

She would wander through life beseeching men to love her, frighten them with the intensity of her affection, marry one whose smell she could tolerate, and then resume the search for love. And she would suffer the loneliness of affairs. And on some mornings, in front of men who thanked their luck for such an easy fling, she would endure the shame of putting on her clothes, somehow more demeaning than undressing for them. She would wander this way every day of her life until she found shelter in the peace of age.

Ayyan saw this in his mind and waited to feel the glee. But it did not come. There was only an unfamiliar ache in his heart. For a beautiful woman whose hurt nobody fully understood, whose anguish the vultures now used in their larger game.

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

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

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

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

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

‘Questions later,’ he screamed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘How is your son, the genius?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘I want to talk to you,’ he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nambodri nodded without turning.

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

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

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

‘Why wasn’t the door shut?’

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

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

‘Yes, Sir.’

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

‘Yes, Sir.’

‘And you heard it?’

‘Yes, Sir.’

‘Why did she contaminate the sampler?’

‘Love problem, Sir.’

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

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

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

‘Nothing, Sir.’

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

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

‘Your son wants to take our entrance test?’

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

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

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

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

‘About what, Sir?’

‘About what Oparna had told Arvind.’

‘No one, Sir.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘No one. Except me, Sir.’

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

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

‘I’ll pass,’ Adi said.

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