PART TWO. Big Bang’s Old Foe

THAT MORNING, ARVIND Acharya was lost in the unreasonable joy of trying to solve an old intractable problem. Did Time move continuously, like a smooth line, or did it move in minuscule jumps, like a dotted line? He was standing on the narrow balcony nine floors above the ground and glaring at the Arabian Sea. The summer air was still. A crow on the wooden railing began to hop sideways towards him.

He was wearing a blue tracksuit that had a white tick mark embroidered at the hip, as if he approved of something. It had been sent by his daughter in California who wanted him to go on morning walks. Such things that came through DHL, he now grudgingly conceded as love. Some days, when he was not contemplating a difficult problem, he remembered Shruti fondly as the little girl who on a distant afternoon had looked up nervously and asked if maths was important in life. He had lied, ‘No.’ He might have liked to see her more often than when she decided to visit. Probably, he stood in the tracksuit every morning not to succumb to the indignity of exercise but because it was touched by his girl and dispatched in a packet on which she had written his name in her beautiful handwriting. Yet he never really craved to see her. The success of an old man lies in not wishing for company.

The sun was growing harsh. His eyes, which were the colour of light black tea, softened a little. He smiled too. The excitement of the Time problem was making him hold the railing and rock gently. That was when a steel tumbler with the unmistakable fragrance of Madras filter coffee was shoved towards his chest. His surprise was so operatic it drove away the crow. The strands of abstract geometry and physics collapsed. What remained was the question that had woken him up at dawn, as it did on many dawns.


His wife for forty-two years, and forever his email password, held the cup calmly in one hand as she watered a dying creeper with another. She looked tall and lean even in the oversized T-shirt and pyjamas. Her clear skin was stretched taut over a bony face and she had large dancer’s eyes that men mistook as curious: the kind of woman about whom young girls would say, ‘She must have been beautiful once.’ Her dyed hair was short and thinning. Once, it was rich and flowing and she used to tie it up in majestic arrogance before a fight. She moved in a smooth delicate way, as if there were liquid gel in the joints of her bones. And she was as womanly when she nudged him again with her elbow, ordering him without uttering a word to take the steel cup, unmindful of the fact that she had delayed one of the answers science sought the most from one of the few men it could ask. He looked at her in disgust, but she was not wearing her glasses.

Lavanya Acharya yawned and pointed to a duster on the wire above and asked him to get it. His height was so useful. But when her mother had first met him with a silver plate full of moist fruits, she had said with a sad chuckle, ‘This boy is taller than a Gandhi statue.’ Acharya pulled down the dust cloth from the wire and gave it to his wife, muttering to himself that he had no peace in his own house. He then continued to glare at the sea.

She studied him fondly. He was dressed like a football coach, and just as furious.

‘You wear these things every morning, and then just stand. Why don’t you go for a nice long walk?’ she said.

A twitch appeared on his face. He didn’t turn.

‘Oh, and yes, I didn’t tell you,’ she said with sudden excitement, ‘Remember Lolo? Her husband died last night. Heart attack.’

Acharya abandoned the problem of Time. The news of death, any death, interested him these days. Especially the widowhood of her friends and cousins. These women began to grow healthier after the departure of their men. Their lugubrious eyes filled with life and their skin began to glow.

Lavanya pointed to the ceiling again. This time she asked him to bring down a suspended shrub. She was always doing that to him. Sometimes he complained that every time she saw him she imagined that she wanted something from a height. Yet she herself was tall, especially for a Tamil woman. Five foot nine. When she was twelve, her mother had made her walk one hour every day inside their silent labyrinthine house in Sivagangai with a wooden chest on her head because the family physician had said that the exercise would control her alarming height. But by the time she was eighteen, she had grown to unmarriageable levels. The elite of Sivagangai observed her sadly because tall Brahmin boys were rare then. The only tall types were loitering residues of the British, chiefly old enduring white men who were known to cohabit with servant maids, or Anglo-Indian boys who were terrible at studies and worse, good at sports. The entire family of Lavanya would rather consume Senthil Rat Poison than marry her off to a white man or to the ‘coffee’ as Anglo-Indians were then called. But the elders need not have worried so much. Somehow, they found a twenty-two-year-old boy from a very good family, who too had the deformity of height. He had graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology, but was still studying something inscrutable in the Annamalai University in Madras. Whatever it was that he was studying did not appear to ensure a government job. But Lavanya’s condition made them overlook all the faults of Arvind Acharya. It was a marriage that was ordained not by the frivolity of love, or even its naïve expectation, but by the more reliable bond of equal handicap.


Acharya was now distracted by the excitement of the impending Balloon Mission. He looked up at the clear blue sky. Somewhere there, not very high actually, he knew there were millions of microscopic aliens in a gentle descent. He was going to find them. The glare returned, the morning burned in his eyes, and he was slipping into a pleasurable trance once again. Then he felt something cold touch his legs. He almost jumped. The maid was crouched like a giant frog and mopping the floor. She looked at him with fear and suspicion. She always did. The day she had joined the household, she was shaken by the sound of death that came from his room. It was the voice of Luciano Pavarotti.

Acharya used to listen to the angelic tenor every morning. Pavarotti was his ethereal accomplice in his incurable quest to solve the remaining mysteries of the universe. But Lavanya decided to ban the music in the mornings after she realized that it was terrifying not just the maid but also the cook. He resisted and even began to increase the volume until Lavanya proved that the days he played Pavarotti, the dosas looked baffled and tasted raw. ‘Women are sensitive,’ she had told him, ‘and women cook your food.’

The maid scrubbed the floor near his feet and threw another glance at him. The way she looked at him, he was certain that she suspected he was Pavarotti. ‘Move,’ Lavanya said, ‘she has to clean.’

As he walked around the maid carefully he muttered, ‘All that happens in this house is cleaning.’ He went to the kitchen without knowing why. There the cook was squatting on the sink and doing the dishes because she was too tiny to reach the tap. She turned and looked at him with one eye. It was all so terrible. So ugly.

He marched to Shruti’s abandoned bedroom. It was now used to store the useless gifts that the young kept sending them in the moronic benevolence of keeping in touch. Lavanya saved all the presents and recycled them as wedding gifts.

He went to the huge bookshelf that covered one half of the wall. There was a delicate promise of peace here. But he saw the shadow of Lavanya approach. ‘Arvind,’ she said with a smile that she had initially wanted to hide, ‘Are you going to just walk inside the house? You are supposed to walk outside, you know.’ He did not say anything. He studied the spines of the books. Then he heard her shriek.

‘They haven’t gone,’ she screamed. The way she said ‘they’, he knew she was talking about cockroaches. Lavanya and cockroaches had a special relationship. On the second day of marriage she had confessed that she had the ability to hear them. She was inspecting the floor carefully now, holding a rolled copy of a postdoctoral thesis on Large Molecular Structures in Interstellar Gas.

‘Just last week we had sprayed the whole kitchen. I thought they were gone. But they have all moved in here.’ She went on about the indestructibility of the insects and the inevitability of calling pest control even though, she admitted, it seemed like a very American thing to do. ‘What do we do, Arvind? These things don’t die. What do we do?’

He inhaled a lot of air and looked at her. ‘Lavanya,’ he said, certain that this was really going to annoy her, ‘Like in maths …’

‘What?’

‘Just because there is a problem, it does not mean there is always a solution.’

She tilted her face. And looked at him with a menacing exasperation. He returned the stare. It struck him how rarely he looked at her any more, and how old she actually appeared this close. This was an old woman standing in front of him, whose hair, without the deception of dye, would be the colour of cobwebs. Her face was still beautiful, but the skin on her neck had become loose. In each other’s eyes, probably, they had been diminished by age and disfigured by familiarity. Or was it the other way around? He could smell in her the vapours of all the oils from Kerala that she rubbed on her skin every night like a wrestler. That smell to him was the smell of death. His grandfather used to smell that way, and he used to tell all his grandchildren when they applied the odious oil on his wrinkled body that it was the lubricant old people needed to go smoothly down the tunnel of afterlife, into the body of a newborn. And the kids would then have nightmares about the crooked old men who had entered them when they were babies. The smell, strangely, also reminded him of the importance of digestion. His grandfather, in the aroma of ayurvedic oils that somehow made him appear wise, told the youth of the household every day that the secret of longevity lay in ensuring efficient digestion of food. ‘Always’, he used to say, ‘listen to your arse.’

The vacant silence in Shruti’s room was stirred by a nasal song. It was in an indecipherable language and its volume slowly grew. It was coming from the tiny wood-framed clock with Thai digits on the nightstand, and it was inevitable that the alarm would now make Acharya and Lavanya look at each other for a moment. The interminable song, probably a Thai song, filled the house as it did every morning. It was the 7.45 morning alarm of Shruti which she had set about five years ago in the ambitions of waking up early and reducing her illusory fat. The alarm never really woke her up but she tried every single day. Acharya used to find it poignant.

The alarm died abruptly, as it always did.

‘You really can’t turn this thing off?’ Lavanya asked.

‘I told you, I tried,’ he said, avoiding her eyes.

After the girl left with a software engineer for California, Acharya told his wife that he had tried to disable the alarm several times but could not figure out how to do it. Lavanya found it hard to believe that a man who was once rumoured to win the physics Nobel did not know how to disable the alarm in a silly timepiece bought in the streets of Bangkok. She suspected that, like her, he too wanted to hear the alarm every morning and enjoy the momentary delusion of imagining their girl still sleeping in her room.

Acharya wondered why daughters always went away. So keen they were on finding a moron and leaving. The futility of love and marriage — did they need a whole lifetime to see through it all? Didn’t they learn anything from the lives of their parents? Inevitably, he remembered the only two instances when he believed he had brought true grief to his daughter. Shruti always laughed at his conviction that he had made her suffer only twice. ‘Every day, you were a monster,’ she would say. The two episodes that he conceded happened when she was eight. The first was the morning she realized that chicken was not a vegetable and that he had lied to her about its origin. The second instance was when she had brought a poem to him that she had written called ‘Infinite Stars in the Sky’. He had taken her to the terrace and showed her the night sky. If the number of stars were infinite in the observable universe, he told her, then at every single point in the sky there would be an endless line of stars stacked one after the other, and that would cause the night to be so illuminated that it would be brighter than day. Since that was not the case, since stars were just tiny points here and there, it meant that the number of stars was finite. She did not know there was a word ‘finite’, and had looked very dejected. She renamed the poem ‘Finite Stars in the Sky’, but it was not the same. She did not write another poem for many weeks after that because she was afraid of her father’s facts.


Acharya was lost once again that morning. This time, he was in the trance of memories. Then he heard the voice. First as a whisper call, like the disturbing voice of conscience in old films that seeks the attention of the hero who searches everywhere for the source of the sound until he finds the speaker in a full-length mirror. The voice, the haunting insistent whisper, became a distant ungifted song that grew and grew in volume and tenor until he recognized it as the voice of Lavanya. ‘You are not supposed to just stand in those shoes. You’re supposed to walk. You wake up before the housewives of Mylapore every morning and then you just stand.’

Acharya went to his room and shut himself inside. He fed The Three Tenors into the music system and triumphantly thumbed the play button as retribution for everything he had to endure in the house. He sat on the edge of the bed and remembered how Shruti used to say that if he had more hair, and agreed to dye it black and comb it sideways, and opened his mouth more often in anguish, he would very closely resemble Pavarotti.

The piercing wail of ‘Nessun dorma’ filled the room, and he yielded to its anthemic glory. He stared back at his own images on the wall. How young and fierce he once was. There was so much hope in him those days for theoretical physics. But now he was tired. He was tired of the battles and tired of rubbish like Tachyons, Higgs Bosons and Supersymmetry. He felt in his bones the weight of how complicated the quest for truth itself had become. How obscure, how mathematical, how pompously it tried to exclude ordinary people. Physics was on the verge of becoming a religion. A medieval religion. A handful of seers stood on the pedestal and lay people had to accept everything they heard. He still found joy in theoretical physics, and in the mysteries of Time and gravity. But there was nothing he loved more now than his search for the eternal spores that came riding on meteorites.

In the decisive finality of ‘Nessun dorma’, so titanic, so perfect, he began to hear discordant beats which he slowly recognized as violent thumps on the door. He heard the desperate voice of Lavanya trying to rise above Pavarotti’s. He was about to increase the volume when he heard her say, ‘Shruti is on the phone.’ That made him open the door.

He did not meet her eyes as he went past her to the hall.

‘I have been banging on the door,’ Lavanya said, and then got distracted by the dust on the door. They had moved from Princeton ten years ago, but she had never gotten used to how easily dust gathered in Bombay.

Acharya held the receiver and grumbled that the line was dead.

‘Obviously,’ Lavanya said, ‘She is not going to wait for …’ She clenched her fist and yelled, ‘I am going to turn off that bloody music.’ The doorbell rang just then and she opened the door with a violent smirk.

‘Good morning,’ said the cheerful voice of Jana Nambodri. He was the best-dressed scientist she had ever known. Dark-brown corduroy trousers and a crisp white shirt today. She knew that he dyed his hair evenly silver, and she was not sure if she should hate him for it. She had a peculiar soft spot for men who were shorter than her. Also, he was the cultural force of the Professors’ Quarters.

Nambodri was visiting after a long time. She hoped he had come in peace. She let him in muttering, ‘Don’t worry, Jana, I am going to turn that thing off.’

‘It’s “Nessun dorma”,’ Nambodri said, ‘You cannot turn it off like that. It’s disrespectful.’

‘In my house you can,’ she said, and went away.

The two men stood in the living-room staring at each other. They heard Pavarotti perish abruptly, somewhat violently, and the sudden silence made the distance between them seem greater.

‘I’m sorry,’ Nambodri said, ‘The Round Table was not the place for that. I am really sorry.’


OPARNA GOSHMAULIK WAS still not granted the peace of anonymity, but she was now an insider. Those cold gazes when she went down the corridors in the wooden beat of her low heels, the number of old scholars who wanted to show her the right path while staring at her breasts, and their wives, some of them, who arrived to have an accidental meeting with her and see for themselves the talk of the Professors’ Quarters — those days were over. Only minor assaults remained. Some wiry postdoctoral students still gaped at her with infatuated eyes, an ancient professor of Number Theory who inhabited the corridors these days waylaid her and showed her his nature poems. Jana Nambodri continued to observe her in a way that he thought was wise and knowing. He wanted to sustain a mild tension between them. A cultured animosity, probably, was the second best thing he sought from a woman. Other radio astronomers still came down to her lab for what they said was just a chat and went back with the news of all that they surveyed — the looming shelves, chromatographs, spectrometers, the eager research students on hire from affiliated universities, the unmoving attendants who waited for something to happen and the many cartons, still unopened, that said ‘this side up’, including the cardboard box of a new coffee machine that they refused to believe was just that. But all this, the attention, malice and affection, she did not mind. Her situation was now improving. She even found the courage to paint her lips. (In pale shades.) Her thick healthy hair was still tied fiercely in the imagined modesty of a pony-tail, but these days she let some curls fall on her cheeks. She could not abandon the reassurance of unremarkable clothes though. Usually, a long shapeless top over blue jeans. But in the sea breeze, the flowing top sometimes hugged her figure, and she feared she was then a feast.

She ran up two flights of stairs from the basement, humming a tune she could not recall hearing for the first time. She took in the breeze at the porch and the smell of the moist grass and wet earth. A gardener, who somehow did not look naked in just his underwear, was watering the main lawn. She made her way to the canteen: a gracious room with bare wooden tables and metal folding chairs, and large square windows that opened out to the undulating backyard. Here, the sound of the sea was another form of silence. Waiters in dark-brown shirts and trousers were emerging from an inner door carrying plates on their forearms and palms, or were just standing still at various points in the canteen.

She saw Nambodri huddled together with four other radio astronomers whose names she had forgotten. He was speaking into his mobile and the others were looking at him keenly. One of them, a bald man with quivering spectacles on his nose-bridge, reminded her of a college professor who had once asked her in his cabin, ‘Do you respect me?’

Nambodri put the phone in his shirt pocket and said in a soft, serious way, ‘Not today, But he is going to get it soon.’

‘I’m thinking of taking an off this week,’ one man said. ‘He is going to go crazy.’

‘No,’ Nambodri said calmly. ‘We are all going to be there. It’s very important that we are all there.’

‘Look, I’ve had a bypass. I can’t handle these things.’

‘It’s going to be very good for your heart,’ Nambodri said.

He spotted Oparna, and a smile appeared on his face. He pointed to an empty chair beside him. In his shadowy conference, he did not mind the sudden fragrance of lemon. She was a relief in this asylum. These days, his neat foreign shirts and corduroy trousers and stylish silver hair had found a meaningful audience. She saved him from the banality of the academic society: those austere men and grotesque hairy women he usually met on the circuit. He had this affliction to be with the youth, the real fragrant waxed youth. Before Oparna came along, his only recourse was the parties thrown by his unscientific friends where young girls gathered around him when they heard he was a radio astronomer. He loved it when their delicate bodies, so slight, stood close to him, their legs so naked, their vodka eyes asking him what exactly he did, and their intelligent nods of incomprehension. He began with astronomy and told them what jazz was and in a naughty way made fun of Bryan Adams. He would search their pretty faces for one-minute crushes. He loved the young and spoke to them in their language.

Oparna suspected as much. He was the sort of man who would say to his son, ‘I am a friend, not a father,’ and then give the boy a condom when he turned eighteen. A waiter brought her usual glass of tea and stared hard as he pushed a sugar jar on the table towards her.

‘Nice earrings,’ Nambodri said, ‘You don’t wear long earrings very often. What’s special today?’

‘Nothing is special.’

‘You need clearance from the old man for another microscope?’

One of the astronomers chuckled. Oparna made a sound that she was certain would pass off as a sporting laugh.

She knew there was a lot of pent-up resentment in these men because they could not accept that something like Astrobiology had become a bustling department in this temple of physics while the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence was not allowed to be even a parenthesis in radio astronomy.

Her mobile rang, and she was grateful for that. The voice of Ayyan Mani said, ‘Sir wants to see you right now.’ She looked at her phone, somewhat confused. She had not given her number to anyone.

Oparna burst into the anteroom and felt the full stab of Ayyan’s calm scrutiny. She was wary of this dark man with his wide eyes.

‘We’ve been searching for you,’ he said, ‘He is waiting.’

As she passed by his table, he studied her back. He was certain the men in this institute of excellence did not know her at all. They were all deformed. Too much education; too much class. They looked at a woman through the charades she created around her, through what she said and how she spoke, and her degrees. And through the many myths of modernity that men and women erected when they were fully clothed. But the bed is medieval, and honest, and in it he wanted to believe Oparna would be something else. She would understand it if a man slapped her in the urgency of love, or to destroy her arrogance. He saw in her the unmistakable insanity of formidable women who longed to crumble. Then the thoughts of Oparna vanished and the excitement of what was to happen next morning filled him. A shudder ran through him. He felt a cold fear in his tongue.

She pushed open the inner door and felt the same odd mixture of cold air and anticipation she felt every time she entered. Meeting Acharya was still an event, though he never did anything to make it an occasion. He was sitting behind his massive tumultuous desk. As always, his pink bald head that was now bent over something on his lap appeared larger than she had expected. She sat across the table and murmured, ‘I am here.’ He did not look up. It was a convenient moment for her to observe him carefully. Big ears, she thought, and his hand that rested loosely on the table was clean and brutal. She wondered, once again that day, how he might have looked when he was young. The archive pictures on the net were not good enough. And the vacant walls of his room frustrated her. There was not a trace of him here. A young sepia Acharya glaring from the wall might have been entertaining.

All through her brief struggle in the Institute, the infatuations of strange men and the malice of others, and some who were afflicted by both, working with Acharya had a calming effect on her. Their conversations were dry, chiefly about equipment purchases and setting up the lab. But there was something about being in his presence that she liked. He was a shelter. In his shade, she felt absolutely ignored. She had craved that always, from the uncles who used to touch her when they came home for the family dinner, from the boys outside her house who used to play cricket, and all the men who came her way. Finally, here was a man who did not notice her. It was like being in the dark corner of a theatre and watching a good play.


Acharya licked his finger hungrily and turned a page. He was reading a graphic novel which lay furtively on his lap. It was part of a series called Topolov’s Superman, once an underground rage. It was Russia’s investment in popular culture during the Cold War days. In Topolov’s Superman, the man of steel was perceived by ordinary people as a superhero, but in reality he was a vain horny villain from whom two KGB agents constantly saved the world. Acharya licked his finger again and turned the page.

Clark Kent is walking down a deserted cobbled street in Prague. It’s a cold gloomy morning. He sees a beautiful girl in a short skirt walk by. ‘Look at this piece of work. I can have this right now. I am Superman,’ Kent says. He follows her. She walks into a small deserted lane. Kent turns into a whirlwind and becomes Superman. He blocks her path.

‘Superman,’ she says excitedly.

‘Can I take you for a spin, honey?’ he says.

‘Er … sorry … my aunt is ill. I have to go now. But what a lovely surprise. And what are you doing here talking to me? Don’t you have a world to save, Superman?’ She walks away waving goodbye. But when she turns, he is there in front of her, blocking her path again.

‘Are you sure you don’t want anything, honey?’

The girl looks confused, but before she can react, Superman strips her naked and laughs. She screams as he flings her on the sidewalk and takes off his cape and tries to extricate himself from the tunic.

‘This outfit is not quickie-friendly,’ he says.

All of a sudden police cars come with sirens blazing.

‘Superman!’ a cop screams. He is holding the red cape. Other cops point their guns at Superman. People peep through their windows above.

‘Shit!’ Superman says, looking a bit tired. ‘Can’t believe I’ve got to do this again.’ He dashes up to space, circumvents the globe a thousand times and gains a velocity faster than the speed of light to reverse Time. The rotation of the Earth changes direction. Life on Earth rewinds to the point when the pretty girl is walking through the market lane.

‘Not possible,’ Acharya muttered angrily. He never liked it when Time was exploited this way.

But then this was what modern physics itself had become. Time reversal, black holes, dark matter, dark energy, invisibility, intelligent civilizations. Exciting rubbish. The money was in that.


Oparna was imagining a young man with fiery eyes, long gaunt face, hair neatly combed. Handsome, she thought. What would such a man say to a pretty sepia girl?

‘What’s the progress with the cryosampler?’ the operatic voice of Acharya asked, destroying the ancient world she had carefully created in her mind. His elephant eyes were looking at her.


Outside, Ayyan Mani arranged the courier mail and the ordinary mail that had arrived. Acharya read only some of the courier mail, which he selected at random. He never opened the ordinary mail, those sad, stamped envelopes, though every day he received over fifty from laymen who believed they had a scientific temperament, or worse, had found baffling new theories. The only person who read those letters was Ayyan who knew how to repair an opened envelope. Once, Ayyan had thrown the letters in the bin and delivered only the courier mail to Acharya. The old man had looked confused for several seconds. There was an anomaly in a pattern he was used to. Ordinary mail and courier mail: that’s what he wanted to see. So he asked Ayyan about the ordinary mail, and when he learnt what the secretary had done with it he told him never to throw anything away. The letters were a broad mathematical clue for Acharya as to his place in public consciousness. In a way, he wanted to be there, in the minds of ordinary people, even though he could not bear to read what they had to say.

Ayyan went in with the letters, courier mail and faxes and set them on the desk. The basement item and Acharya were discussing how to send the balloon up and from where. Ayyan glanced at one of the telephones on the desk. It was still slightly off the hook. Good. When he went back to his seat in the anteroom he picked up a landline and listened in on the conversation between Oparna and the Big Man.

Thirty minutes later, when Ayyan put the receiver down, he wondered if there was a way he could tell Oja Mani how absurd were the occupations of these men and women who so easily frightened her. An old man wanted to search the atmosphere for microbes that were coming down from space. A young woman would soon study two bottles of air. This was what people did. This was their job. In the real world that lay outside the Institute, it was even more weird. Majestic men went in cars, in the isolation of the back seat, studying laptops on their way to work where they would think of ways to fool people into buying cola, or a type of insurance, or a condom that had dots on it. Or invest other people’s money in the stockmarket. Some wrote for the papers about how more and more women were interested in cricket, or why Afghanistan was important to Pakistan, or something like that, and some people rewrote what others wrote, some took pictures, some drew, some made faces in front of a camera. This was more or less what big people did, the beneficiaries of the millenniums, at the end of the tunnel of time — this was what they did. He could have done any of those jobs. Oja too. And they could have lived in a building that had a lift, and when they entered the kind of restaurants where emaciated men parked the cars of fat men they would not be so frightened by the calm of the cold air inside and the smell of mild spices and the difficult names of fish. It was so easy to be the big people. All you had to do was to be born in the homes where they were born.

Adi did not have that good fortune, but he would be there one day, among these people. He thought of his little boy, his large eyes that were like his mother’s and his unnatural calm. Ayyan’s mind, inescapably, went to what was to happen in just a few hours. He felt a bit nervous, and he liked the way his fingers quivered.


That evening, as Ayyan went in the Institute’s shuttle bus to the Churchgate station, he looked at the moronic city that was in the hysteria of going home. As though everyone here were going home for the first time. In the twilight that was now the colour of dust, in the fury of horns that was a national language because honking had telegraphic properties, cars stood stranded all around the bus like ants carrying the corpse of a caterpillar. Where a bumper ended and another began, in those crevices, people crossed the road and motorbikes wobbled through, honking. There was a caste system even on the roads. The cars, their faces frowning in a superior way through the bonnet grilles, were the Brahmins. They were higher than the motorcycles who were higher than the pedestrians. The cycles were lowest of the low. Even the pedestrians pretended that they didn’t see them. The bus had to be something in this structure, and Ayyan decided it was him. Lowly, but formidable and beyond torment. In any given situation in this country, Ayyan thought with a chuckle that did not surface, someone was the Brahmin and someone was the Untouchable.

As the bus inched through the evening life, the traffic grew. There was no space on the road any more. A man on a bike was riding on the pavement. When he tried to plunge into the road, a car hit him. He fell down but managed to get up. He looked shocked. That, Ayyan loved. After riding like a moron all over the place, observe the face of an Indian when he crashes. He is stunned.

This country had become a circus, and that was fair. What Ayyan’s forefathers were once to the Brahmins, the Brahmins were today to the world. They and the other privileged, all of whom he recognized only as the Brahmins, had become miserable backward clowns in the discreet eyes of the white man. And there lay the revenge of the Dalits. They were the nation now, and they oppressed the Brahmins by erecting an incurable commotion on the streets. The Brahmins had nowhere to go now but to suffer in silence or to flee to nonvegetarian lands. Their women could no longer walk on the streets in peace. Pale boys elbowed their breasts.

He looked without emotion at the tall unattainable apartment blocks that seemed to rise suddenly. In the pathetic clarity of hope that he once had in his early youth, he used to tell himself that a day would come when he would live in one of those buildings, that he too would get home in a lift. He knew those homes very well, he knew those lives. After all, he was once a door-to-door salesman for Eureka Forbes vacuum cleaners.

A job at the Eureka Forbes was not only heralded then as the final frontier in marketing but also glorified in underground novels as an assignment that led robust young men to the homes of hungry housewives, whose saris sometimes slipped off their blouses as they innocently enquired in how many colours the vacuum cleaners came, or their nightgowns rose in the tempest of a table fan, or they answered the door in a wet towel that they flung away upon the incandescent sight of the Eureka Forbes salesman. The roadside stalls too, where the odorous salesmen sipped tea, were replete with the legend of insatiable housewives. He never encountered such women, but in those homes he learnt about the charmed lives of the rich. He saw women group together and meditate and even chant, ‘I am beautiful.’ Men who were nothing without their inheritances dedicated to themselves a song called ‘My Way’. And he figured through the many pieces of conversations he overheard in those homes that there were four Beatles, and that you had to clap at the incipient guitar piece of ‘Hotel California’. He also saw men scoop the shit of their babies, and once he even saw a man in an apron take the dishes from the dining-table to the kitchen sink. They were the new men. In time, their numbers increased and he saw them everywhere now, standing defeated next to their glowing women. Ayyan often told the peons of the Institute, ‘These days, men live like men only in the homes of the poor.’

At the Colaba causeway, as the bus stood stranded in a jam, he saw kids beg near the window of a taxi. The young couple inside sat with strong defiant faces. How they would have loved to give a rupee, but they had read investigative stories that appeared at least once every year in English newspapers on the cruel begging syndicates that were rumoured to exploit children. By withholding one rupee they were hitting hard at the syndicates, apparently. So much philosophy for a one-rupee transaction.

Then he saw a sight on the pavement that he would later recount to Oja with slight exaggeration. A woman came out of Theobroma — The Pastry Shop. Urchins often stood outside its glass door and gawked. She made a benevolent face at them and appeared to ask them to stand in a line. They stood. There were six of them. They looked like stray dogs at the parcel she was holding. At the head of the line the woman stood in the glow of goodness and opened the packet in her hand. The urchin assembly collapsed. All of them pounced on her, laughing. Many more came from nowhere and joined the attack on the cake. The woman held on to the packet, first with a quiet severity, looking around a bit embarrassed. She began to yell, ‘Line, line.’ She tried to slap a few but missed. The children yelled with laughter and tugged at the packet. The cake fell on the pavement. They crawled all over it and ran away holding large pieces. Two dogs rushed to lick the strewn crumbs on the pavement. Ayyan hoped to catch the woman’s eye and laugh, but she was preoccupied with disgust.

He thought of her shocked face for the rest of the ride. The image stayed with him when he reached Churchgate and as he waited for the train with the monstrous evening crowd that generated its own heat. He thought of her face as he stood silently inside the compartment in the tight squeeze of warm wet men all around. Her stunned face grew and grew in his mind until it was a giant hoarding. By the time he reached BDD he had forgotten her, but his lungs felt good.

He went through the yellow gloom of the broken ways, avoiding the eyes of drunken men in loose shorts. On the ancient colonial stairway of Block Number Forty-One, a bunch of old friends were arguing about something.

‘Mani, this guy says it is not possible,’ a man said. ‘Why don’t you tell this fellow that you can make out if a girl has screwed by the way her arse moves.’

Ayyan said it was possible. He took a drag from someone’s cigarette. From the corner of his eye, he could see that one of the men, a faint sickly fellow, was looking at him quite seriously. That meant he wanted to borrow some money. So Ayyan moved on.


ADI WAS ON the floor, his slight frame bent over a notebook. He was writing something and looking distraught. His T-shirt said, ‘There are 10 kinds of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who don’t.’ Ayyan had found it in the ladies’ section of a shop. He bought it even though he did not get the joke. He probably bought it because he did not understand it. It annoyed him. There was always something that most people, very ordinary people, understood and he didn’t. Later, he found an explanation on Wikipedia, and how the number 2 was written as 10 in the binary system. He then read about binary codes, a whole language built on the arrangement of zeros and ones, and he grudgingly conceded that it was so clever that even if he had been born into privilege, he might not have been smart enough to invent it.

Oja’s long dark hair was still wet after her evening bath and it dampened the back of her red gown. She was smelling of Chandirka, their family soap as ordained by Ayyan. She was sitting on the floor and cutting her toenails with a blade. She did not feel like watching TV that evening, so there was a peaceful stillness. She threw a look at the boy and then at her husband, and they both chuckled at how miserable Adi was at that moment. ‘Imposigen,’ Oja said. ‘Imposition’ was one of the few English words she knew, though she could not pronounce it, just as most people in the world could not pronounce vazhapazham, which she could. She knew about imposition because very often Adi’s teachers gave one to the boy. This evening, he had to write ‘I won’t talk in the class’ two hundred times.

‘Adi, tell your father who you were talking to,’ his mother said.

‘I was talking to myself.’

‘And what were you saying?’

‘I don’t remember.’

‘You remember all the science rubbish, but you don’t remember what you were telling yourself?’

Adi continued to write in silence.

‘This boy never answers me properly,’ Oja said, looking accusingly at Ayyan. ‘You have spoilt him. All those secrets you two have is not good for him. He talks to me only when he wants food.’ That reminded her of something. ‘He has left half the food in the lunch-box.’

‘Did you give him Lady’s Finger?’

‘My god, no! This boy is already abnormal. Lady’s Finger makes you do sums better. I would never give it to him.’ And she said in an affectionate way, ‘Strange boy. He has not troubled the science teacher for some time. I wonder why. But it will come soon, the next summons from the Principal.’

‘He has done something else,’ Ayyan said, with a mysterious smile.

‘What is it?’

‘I can’t tell you now.’

‘Tell me.’

‘You will know in the morning.’

‘What is it?’

‘Don’t waste your time. I am not going to tell you. Wait till morning.’

‘Why morning? What’s going to happen?’

‘Wait and see.’

‘Adi,’ she said, trying to be stern. ‘What have you done?’

‘I’ve not done anything.’

‘What is going to happen in the morning?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘What do you mean, you don’t know?’

‘Don’t confuse me,’ Adi said, annoyed.

‘Come here,’ she screamed. Adi threw the pencil down and came to his mother. ‘Look here,’ she told him, trying to look severe. ‘You are too young to keep secrets from me. What is happening? I have to know. Otherwise I will give you a slap and the truth will come out of your mouth.’

‘I’ve not done anything,’ he said.

‘If you keep doing only what your father asks you to do, you will come to grief, boy. A lamb that follows a pig will eat shit.’

‘Don’t confuse me.’

‘Tell me, what have you done? What’s the secret?’

Adi turned to his father in exasperation.

‘Don’t bother him,’ Ayyan told his wife, and that was that.

Adi went back to his imposition. In the brief silence they heard the faint noise of horns, boys playing cricket and the unmistakable sound of a man, somewhere, beating his wife. Adi raised his head from his notebook and smiled at his father. Ayyan smiled back. That set off Oja again.

‘What is it?’ she almost pleaded.

Ayyan pointed a finger upwards, his eyes inviting her to follow him.

The attic was built a few weeks ago, in the tremors of a carpenter’s violent hammer, its every blow landing on Ayyan’s heart and shaking a secret pride within. He never thought the day would come when he too would build an attic. It reminded him of the failed men of BDD and their desperation to sleep with their wives, away from the sight of the others. Ceilings were high in BDD and almost everyone had an attic. Most of the loud, insufferable children of the chawls were conceived in the attics. In the homes where there were more than one married couple, they took weekly or even daily turns to use the elevated bedroom. The conjugal attic was a sign here. That a man had failed to escape, that he was now stranded.

Oja looked cautiously at her son. He was absorbed in his imposition. Ayyan had a packet with him now and she was curious to know what it was. She had not seen it when he came home. It was remarkable, she thought, how her husband hid things and made them spring out when he wanted them to. He pulled down a folding ladder and climbed up into the loft. Oja followed. The attic was about six feet by three. There was a thin mattress and a blue table fan, and a lot of books that Oja wanted to throw away. They crawled on to the attic floor and sat there.

‘What is it?’ she asked in a whisper.

‘I’ve got something for you,’ he said. He opened the packet and took out a bra.

‘This? It looks so fancy. How much is this?’

‘Look, how stiff it is,’ he said, pointing to the hardwire frame of the cups. She giggled.

‘It’s metal. What if lightning strikes?’

‘It’s plastic.’

‘It’s metal.’

‘To be on the safe side, don’t wear it in the rains.’

‘It’s so funny. Where do you find these things?’

‘It’s not funny, you idiot. This is what girls are wearing these days.’

‘How do you know so much about girls?’ she asked, toying with the bra. ‘It’s so funny. I can’t wear it. What will people say?’

‘I hope people won’t know what you are wearing underneath.’

She slapped his thigh. The sight of the fancy skin-colour bra made her giggle again. Ayyan told her, in a professorial way, ‘This will keep your breasts firm. Or they will begin to sag like your mother’s.’

‘Don’t talk like that about my mother.’

Ayyan poked her breasts. ‘Breasts have eyes, Oja. They look at me now. I don’t ever want them to look down at the floor, like your mother’s.’

He remembered a curious fact, one of the many he collected almost every day for her. ‘You know, Oja,’ he said, as he always started these things, ‘an average woman’s breasts weigh eight kilos.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes.’

‘That’s very heavy,’ she said. Then her eyes fell on a smaller parcel. ‘What’s that?’

‘That’s for Adi.’

Ayyan went down the ladder with the packet. Oja followed.

‘I’ve got something for you,’ he told his son. Adi jumped. He tore open the packet and a toilet roll fell out. The sight of the roll made Adi almost breathless with laughter. He always found it funny. So, occasionally, Ayyan stole toilet rolls from the Institute. There was something else in the packet. It was a Rubik’s cube.

‘You keep turning till every face of the cube has the same colour,’ Ayyan said, ‘Not many people in the world can do it. But you are a genius.’

‘Some boys in the school have it,’ Adi said.

‘Don’t give him such things,’ Oja said, snatching the cube from Adi’s hand. The boy tried to take it back from his mother, but he was not tall enough. ‘Do your imposigen,’ she said. ‘You keep giving him such things,’ she told her husband, ‘Don’t play with his mind.’

‘But he is a genius.’

‘I want him to be normal. We have to make him do normal things.’

‘What can we do if he is not?’

‘That scares me,’ she said.

Adi snatched the cube back from his mother.

Oja looked angrily at her husband. ‘Don’t do these things,’ she said.

‘These are the toys he needs. He is just too intelligent. You will not believe it in the morning.’

‘Tell me, what has he done?’

‘You will know in the morning.’

‘Tell me, she said.’

‘Wait till morning.’

Oja was so angry that night that she punished Ayyan with silences and refused to sleep in the attic. She slept with her son on the floor. From the wooden loft, Ayyan saw his wife through a dim streetlight that was coming through the kitchen window. She looked weak and sad when her big eyes were shut. He wanted to pinch her till she yelped and tell her that he did not like it when she was sad. He wanted to tell her that she should never be sad because to be sad was to be afraid. And to be afraid was to respect the world too much. The world was not a scary place, he always told her. It was full of ordinary people who did ordinary things, even though some of them went in cars and lived in very big homes and spoke in English. He wanted her to know that he was smart enough for this world and that he knew how to take care of her. He whispered from the loft, ‘You know, Oja.’ She did not respond. ‘Oja … Oja,’ he said.

‘What do you want?’

‘A shark can sense a drop of blood miles away.’

‘Let me sleep,’ she said.

‘Isn’t it amazing?’

Ayyan lay awake the whole night. When morning came, he heard the no-talent pigeons first and then the crows whom he liked because they were clever and mean. He heard the rustle of Oja’s silver anklets going to the kitchen. Steel vessels moved. He heard the hush of The Times of India slipping under the door. He went down the narrow folding ladder and put on a shirt.

Oja was by the stove, yawning. ‘It’s morning,’ she said, still angry. ‘Now tell me.’

Ayyan left without a word.


At the end of a lane outside the fringes of BDD was a newspaper-seller whose transient plywood stand that vanished at noon was now neatly packed with papers and magazines. Ayyan felt his tongue go cold as he approached the vendor. He ran his eyes over the stand but could not find it. Then he saw it in a corner. It was called Yug, a Marathi daily. He turned the pages impatiently and stopped when Adi’s face beamed from a snippet. ‘A Special Boy,’ the headline said.

It’s unbelievable but true. Ten-year-old Aditya Mani has been selected by the Department for Scientific Education and Excellence of Switzerland to go to Geneva later this year on a one-month scholarship. Aditya took part in a written test which was meant for all students under the age of 16. Over five hundred 12th standard students sat for the screening test. Only one was selected and it turned out to be the ten-year-old genius who is in the sixth standard of St Andrew’s School. ‘I want to understand the universe better,’ the shy boy said, when asked what he wanted to do in the future. He will spend one month with top scientists in Geneva…

Ayyan bought all the ten copies of the paper.

Oja heard him enter but she was engrossed in the milk. It was always the milk. Adi was still sleeping, hands and legs now spread all over the floor. Ayyan shoved the paper into his wife’s face.

‘What’s this?’ she said, and then she saw Adi’s picture. She switched off the stove. That annoyed her husband who did not expect her to remember to switch off the stove at this moment.

Oja sank to the floor with the paper. Her knees gave way smoothly and she sat in a crouch. She looked frightened as she read. Then a smile appeared on her face. She put her slender fingers on her mouth and looked at her sleeping son. ‘When did he write the test?’

‘Two months ago,’ Ayyan told her. ‘The test was on a Sunday. I didn’t want to tell you. You would have fussed.’

Oja began to cry. ‘My son is famous? They should have carried his full picture. This photo is so bad. He is much more beautiful than this.’ She rubbed Adi’s feet and began to pull his toes. ‘Wake up, Adi,’ she told him. She shook the boy and showed him the paper. Adi stared at his picture and fell back on the pillow.

‘Why didn’t you tell me, Adi?’ his mother asked softly. ‘You should tell your mother everything. Your father never tells me anything. Adi, you should tell your mother everything that you do.’


Ayyan stepped out into the corridor and stood in a line flanked by the jaundice-yellow walls, holding a copy of Yug in one hand and a small blue bucket in the other. The two lines outside the four toilets were long. As always, the women’s queue was longer. That was not only because it moved more slowly but also because fewer men used the toilets here. Several working men of BDD had taught their bodies how to wait till they got to the office. They squatted on the glimmering western commodes of their offices, and on some days even bathed there under luxurious showers. Ayyan too, usually, waited until he reached the Institute. But this morning he chose to stand in the queue with the blue bucket.

The man at the head of the Gents’ line was hollering to the occupant of one of the toilets, ‘How long is this going to take?’ He turned to look at the others in the queue and said in a disappointed way, ‘Boys these days.’ The general suspicion about adolescent boys who spent a lot of time in the toilet was that they were clearing their pipes, and in the mornings, the suspicion drove even the most broadminded of men here crazy. At the end of the queue, Ayyan showed the newspaper to a man in front of him.

Soon, in the glow of a soft ethereal light that was coming through the broken glass of two arched windows above the toilets, a small crowd of men and women, with their own little buckets, gathered around Ayyan. And they read. Some read aloud, some silently.

‘There was always something about him,’ a woman said.

‘The kind of things he talks about,’ a man said shaking his head. ‘I hear he talks about things even adults don’t understand. You are a lucky man, Mani. Look at me. I have a son who lies around like a python.’

The adolescent finally emerged from the toilet and he looked confused at the small commotion outside. The orderly line was now in shreds.

‘All done? Was it good?’ a man asked him angrily, and then with a benevolent face asked Ayyan to jump the queue and finish his job before all of them.

‘Already, the boy is making me proud,’ Ayyan said, and everyone laughed.

*

In the glass enclosure that stood near the kitchen platform, Oja rubbed coconut oil on her naked son. The boy endured the special treatment with a grimace. She was muttering something about the great future that lay before him. ‘But always remember, never be arrogant. People like humility in smart people because that way they don’t feel very small.’ She bathed him in cold water and dressed him up in white short-sleeved shirt and white shorts. She combed his thick oiled hair, holding his jaw violently, and watched like a hawk as he tied his shoelaces. Then she handed him over to her husband. ‘Don’t take the taxi,’ she said, ‘Walk.’

In the back seat of the taxi, Ayyan gave his little finger to his son, who reciprocally locked his in it.

‘Our secret,’ Ayyan said. ‘Our secret,’ the boy said, laughing.

‘You will not tell your mother that we took a taxi?’

‘I will not,’ Adi said. ‘Our secret.’

They didn’t speak for a while. When the car stopped at a signal, the boy asked, ‘What did the newspaper say?’

‘You can read Marathi.’

‘I can’t understand the way the papers write. What did the newspaper say?’

‘That you are very bright.’

‘That’s all?’

‘It also said that you passed a test which five hundred boys wrote.’

‘When did I write the test?’

‘You know that. Think.’

‘Twenty-second April?’

‘Correct. And now you will go to Geneva.’

‘Where is Geneva?’

‘It’s a big city in Switzerland. You know Switzerland.’

‘Yes. But its capital is not Geneva.’

‘What is the capital of Switzerland?’

‘B-e-r-n-e’.

‘You are a very clever boy.’

‘I am a genius.’

Ayyan looked at Adi, a bit concerned for a moment, but when the boy returned the stare both of them burst out laughing.

‘Why do countries have capitals?’ Adi asked.

‘Because every country wants to say this is the most important city in our place.’

‘But don’t other cities feel bad?’

‘No. Do you think Bombay feels bad it’s not the capital?’

‘Yes.’

Adi muttered the name of every car that was passing by. ‘Esteem, Skoda, Fiat, Accent, Accent, Baleno, Accent,’ he was saying. He fell silent for about a minute.

‘Say, “Decimal system”,’ his father said. ‘D-e-c-i-m-a-l s-y-s-t-e-m.’

‘That’s easy,’ Adi said, but a look of concentration came to his face. ‘Decimal system,’ he said slowly.


At the iron gates where the security guard stared at the backs of young mothers, Adi let go of his father’s hand and ran to his class. Ayyan made his way to meet the fierce Salesian Principal. Sister Chastity looked surprised to see him. ‘Something wrong?’ she asked. (She always hoped something was wrong in the lives of married people.)

‘It’s something the boy has done,’ Ayyan said.

Sister Chastity went through the news report. In the brief silence that followed, Ayyan could hear the distant murmurs of a class where the teacher was probably delayed. Sister Chastity’s moustache had grown a bit darker, he thought. He caught a glimpse of Christ in the background: Christ, whose heart was on fire and whose munificent eyes reminded him of the woman who had stepped out of the pastry shop yesterday evening.

Sister Chastity lifted her head and inhaled thoughtfully. ‘This boy,’ she said kindly, ‘What has this boy done? I see his picture. But I am sorry, I cannot read Marathi. I can read Hindi and even French, but not Marathi. The script is the same as Hindi you know but some words …’

Ayyan translated the story for her. ‘This boy,’ she said shaking her head. ‘I am going to put it on the notice-board right away. Praise the Lord! I wish the report had mentioned St Andrew’s, Worli. You know, there are so many schools called St Andrew’s. Praise the Lord!’ She stared at him for a moment and said, ‘I see, Mr Mani, you don’t praise the Lord.’

‘Oh — Praise the Lord.’

‘Please don’t feel compelled to say these things.’

‘Not at all. Lord is lord. Nothing Christian about it,’ he said.

‘Him, not it.’

‘Him.’

‘What if I meant it as a very Christian thing. Would you have still said, “Praise the Lord”?’ she asked.

‘Of course. God is one. Hindu god, Christian god — all the same thing.’

‘The same one?’

‘The same one.’

‘Yes,’ Sister Chastity said sadly. ‘People say that. People say many things. But I am sure you like the sound of “Christ is the true Lord”. There is something about it?’

‘Yes, there is something about it, but a lawyer was telling me a few months ago that it is against the Indian constitution to say “Christ is the true Lord”.’

‘What matters, Mr Mani, is the human constitution.’

‘I don’t understand, Sister.’

‘It’s all right. A day like this, Mr Mani, when your son is showing signs of a great future, isn’t it time for you to consider how the boy’s spiritual life is going to be?’

‘I am too dazed today.’

‘I understand. But sooner or later, the Lord will make a decision for you.’

‘His mother is happy with Buddhism right now.’

‘But Buddhism is a philosophy, Mr Mani. Christianity is a religion. Christ said everything that Buddha said and much more. Buddha stopped at the Peepal tree. Christ went all the way.’

‘Yes, but his mother is …’

‘I know, I know,’ Sister Chastity said. ‘I’ve tried talking to her. She just keeps quiet and pretends to be dumb when I try to give her Christ. Once she told me she felt like a Hindu. What a terrible thing to say! After all the atrocities her ancestors and your ancestors suffered, she still wants to follow that religion.’

‘You know how she is,’ Ayyan said, trying to look disappointed.

‘Yes, yes, but you’re a very intelligent man. You are the father of a genius. You have groomed your son so well. Isn’t it time you wondered how you are going to support his future?’

‘I think I’ll manage.’

‘Education is very expensive, Mr Mani,’ she said making a sorrowful face and leaning back on her chair. ‘Christians get discounts. As a financially backward Christian, you will be eligible for many benefits. You know that. I am just saying this as a concerned educator. I am not even implying that you should accept Jesus for the monetary rewards that will certainly come your way if you do that.’


Somewhere in the school, Gloria Fernandes, her throat parched at the very thought of having to teach this class, said in her singsong way, ‘Thirteen ones are thirteen.’ And the class chanted after her. She kept a cautious eye on a boy in the front row. She had a bad feeling today. ‘Thirteen twos are twenty-six,’ Gloria said. The boy lifted his hand.

‘What is it now, Adi?’

‘Why do we learn only the decimal system?’ the boy asked. ‘Why not the binary system?’


AYYAN MANI STARED at the Thought For The Day on the blackboard and was momentarily hypnotized by the power of the written word.

If ancient Indians were really the first to calculate the distance between the Earth and the Moon, why is it that they were not the first to land there? I look at the claims of old civilizations that they have done this and that with great suspicion — Neil Armstrong

Ayyan was tempted to write another invented quote. That would be risky. He usually inserted only one phoney quote every week or so. That way his subversive abuse of the Brahmins would not attract too much attention. But that morning he could not resist the temptation. He pretended to look into a piece of paper and wrote a fresh thought:

Reservations for the low castes in colleges is a very unfair system. To compensate, let us offer the Brahmins the right to be treated as animals for 3,000 years and at the end of it let’s give them a 15 per cent reservation — VallumpuriJohn

When he turned to leave, he saw Oparna Goshmaulik reading the Thought For The Day. ‘Who is Vallumpuri John?’ she asked.

Ayyan shook his head and looked up to ascribe blame.

‘Dr Acharya cannot be asking you to write the Thought For The Day,’ she said, and laughed when she tried to imagine Acharya giving instructions for the daily message. It was a very feminine laughter, heavy with affection, Ayyan thought.

‘Not the Director,’ he said, ‘Administration.’ Oparna nodded. Administration was a word everybody understood here, though nobody knew who it was or where it sat. It was an unseen being, like electricity, that made things work.

She was about to go to the corner stairs leading to the basement when Ayyan asked her, ‘Can you read Marathi?’ He showed her the paper. ‘My son,’ he said.

Oparna read with an honest curiosity that made him like her for a passing moment. Her lips silently mumbled some difficult words. Her long earrings, with a small blue globe suspended in each, trembled slightly. And he chose to see nothing more. He did not look at her proud breasts or how the wind was making her thin purple top stick to her flat stomach.

‘I can’t believe this. I didn’t know your boy was a genius,’ she said. ‘Won’t you bring him here?’

At the end of the third-floor corridor, just before the fateful door called Director, was another door. It said ‘Deputy Director’. Ayyan knocked twice and opened it. Jana Nambodri, who was in a huddle with five other radio astronomers, looked up with a grimace on his face. It seemed as if they were having a shadowy palm-on-the-candle kind of conference. Ayyan withdrew with an apology, but Nambodri’s face swiftly changed into a warm genial emptiness.

‘It’s all right, come in,’ he said.

Ayyan showed him the paper. It was put at the centre of Nambodri’s table and since only one of the astronomers could read Marathi, he read the news item aloud. Murmurs of surprise followed. They looked at Ayyan with smiles and mild astonishment. But, clearly, these men were nervous and distracted. Something was about to happen, Ayyan knew.

‘Isn’t this the same boy who asks his teachers why nothing travels faster than light?’ Nambodri asked.

‘He does?’ someone asked in disbelief.

‘Get him here,’ Nambodri said, ‘Let’s have a look at him.’ And that was it.

Ayyan went to his corner seat in the anteroom. In the morning odours of old cushion and detergent, a faint haunting smell that usually reminded him of old sorrows, he switched on the various machines around him. He wondered what Nambodri and his men were up to. There was a sense of purpose on their faces. They had done something and were preparing for the consequences. The war against Acharya might have begun. The evangelists of alien signals against a dictator who believed that truth was usually not so dramatic.


Arvind Acharya bumbled down the interminable corridor, suddenly reminded of his daughter in the days after she was born. He would sit at the edge of her mother’s bed and stare into the crib. Some days, he would imagine the world through her eyes and he would feel in his heart how long an hour actually was. As a proportion to the fragment of life his daughter had seen, an hour was a vast sprawling place. What appeared to be an hour to him, he calculated then, must have been one thousand five hundred adult hours to her. Time stretched or contracted, depending on who was keeping it. It was a strange enchanting force. In a way, it did not exist unless it was comprehended. And that to him was the key to the Time problem. Time was clearly woven into another force, the force of perception. And perception was the virtue of life alone. So he wondered if life was a fundamental element of the universe like Time itself. This line of thought had many holes, but he enjoyed it. He tried to imagine how a microscopic organism would perceive time. If its lifetime were a second, it would perceive the instant in a very different way from humans. It would live through its life feeling the sheer expanse of the moment, probably even getting bored sometimes.

He realized he was distracted by something, but he did not know what it was. It was a sound, a meek ugly voice that had none of the beauty of the thoughts it sought to abolish.

‘Sir,’ he heard someone say.

Acharya looked around and he realized he was at his door and a dark man with bright eyes and thick black hair neatly combed sideways was standing there with a newspaper and speaking in the tongue of the defeated landless slaves from another time.

‘My son has appeared in the paper, Sir,’ Ayyan said in Tamil.

Acharya’s mind slowly emerged from the mist and began to understand what was being said. He grabbed the paper from Ayyan.

‘It’s in Marathi, Sir’ Ayyan said.

‘I can read Marathi,’ Acharya mumbled, and he read. He looked puzzled and asked, ‘Your son?’

Ayyan nodded.

‘Brilliant,’ Acharya said, ‘Why haven’t the English papers written about this?’ The giant read the story again. ‘I didn’t know there was a Department of Science Education in Switzerland.’

‘There is, Sir.’

‘Bring him here on Monday.’

‘OK, Sir.’

‘Take good care of him. Don’t ask him to become an engineer or some rubbish like that. Keep your relatives miles away from him. Do you understand?’

‘I understand.’

‘Let him be. Give him books, a lot of books. You can take anything you want from my shelf. And don’t just give him science books. Give him comics, too. If you need anything you let me know. And don’t forget, give him a lot of comics.’


A PHONE RANG on Ayyan’s desk. It was Acharya on the line. He wanted a print-out of an email. This was a routine instruction. Acharya preferred to read letters the old-fashioned way and had given Ayyan his email password — Lavanya 123. The dedication of passwords was the new fellowship of marriage. To each other, couples had become furtive asterisks. Nothing else had changed about marriages of course.

He printed the email of a man called Richard Smoot. In the subject line was the cryptic message — Qb3. At the start of the correspondence between the two, Ayyan did not understand the messages in the subject lines which carried codes like Nf3, a6 or something similar. Then he realized that when Smoot had sent his first mail enquiring about the possibility of Acharya delivering a lecture in New York, he had written e4 in the subject slot — the notation of a chess opening. It was customary, Ayyan eventually learnt, for some eggheads to mark the beginning of a dialogue, e4. Acharya, when he replied to the letter seeking further information about the lecture invitation, wrote e5 in the subject slot. Apparently, e5 was black’s traditional response to white’s e4. Smoot responded with the profiles of other speakers who had accepted the invitation, marking the subject as Nf3. Smoot’s knight was now attacking Acharya’s pawn. Acharya responded with Nf6 in the subject line. And now, the two insane men were not only in the middle of a long correspondence but also a fully fledged chess match.

A peon walked in and dropped a solitary courier letter on Ayyan’s desk. ‘For the Big Man,’ the peon said. ‘Mani,’ he then said in a whisper, ‘I need a residence proof. I’m applying for a job in the Gulf. I’ve to make a passport now.’

Ayyan appeared thoughtful. ‘I’ve a friend who can help,’ he said. ‘Give me exactly two days.’

After the peon left, Ayyan studied the courier. It said in the bottom left-hand corner, ‘Ministry of Defence’. The Institute of Theory and Research came under the Ministry of Defence because it was originally created to conceive the Indian nuclear programme. The Institute eventually wrangled out of the programme, claiming that nuclear physics was an obsolete science and of too much practical use to enthrall the poetic hearts of theoretical physicists. But the Ministry of Defence continued to fund the Institute.

Ayyan toyed with the envelope. There was something about it. Though the Ministry sent most of its communications through email these days, it occasionally sent courier mail and speedposts. In the canteen, Ayyan had heard impassioned discussions of scientists on whether there was a hidden physical law that governed what the Ministry chose to email and what it chose to courier. They could not find a decisive pattern. But it was generally considered that bad news was almost always couriered.

Ayyan had a stock of blank envelopes marked Ministry of Defence in the bottom drawer. He usually opened Acharya’s official courier mail, read the letters, relocated them in fresh envelopes, recreated clerical scribbles and stapled back the receipts. He studied the latest arrival for another minute before opening it.

The letter was from Bhaskar Basu, a powerful Delhi bureaucrat in the Ministry of Defence who had once perilously tried to establish control over the Institute. He did not believe that scientists should be allowed to manage the Institute. Managing was the job of bureaucrats. But in that meeting when he had tried to wrest control, according to a legend, after Basu made an elaborate presentation about his future plans, there was a long uncomfortable silence which Acharya broke with a calm observation, ‘But you graduated in sociology.’ He had said nothing more, but the meeting had collapsed.

Dr Arvind Acharya [the letter began],

I hope this finds you in good health. Allow me to take your time to address a serious matter. I am deeply disturbed by your unofficial ban on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (Seti). I have studied the complaints from several highly regarded scientists of the Institute and come to the conclusion that they have been unfairly treated. I also believe that an Indian search for extraterrestrials will greatly add to the prestige of the country. The Ministry has come to the decision, after due consultation with the Minister himself, that the Institute may start a Seti programme which will have a departmental status and an independent budget. It will be headed by Dr Jana Nambodri. Also, Dr Nambodri is being given complete charge of the Giant Ear. As he is a pre-eminent radio astronomer, it has been decided, he will have total freedom in deciding what projects the array of giant metre-wave radio telescopes will be used for and the distribution of their usage time to external agencies. For administrative convenience, and to spare you the trouble of supervising this small matter, we have relieved Dr Nambodri of the responsibility of reporting to you as far as the operation of the Giant Ear is concerned. This move is part of the Ministry’s ongoing efforts to synergize the various research programmes that it funds. A formal letter will follow. I am in Mumbai tomorrow to meet you and the new Seti team in this regard. I hope to see you at eleven.

Ayyan folded the letter and put it in a fresh envelope. He checked the voluminous dictionary for the meaning of the word ‘synergize’. It was not the first time he had looked up the word, but despite many attempts he never fully comprehended its meaning. Once more he tried to understand, but gave up. He got the full import of the letter though. It was a major breach. The authority of Arvind Acharya was being challenged. The first arrow had arrived. The excitement of being in the best seat to watch the duel filled him. He decided that whatever happened in his life, he would take no time off in the coming days. The clash of the Brahmins, an entertainment that even his forefathers enjoyed in different ways in different times and had recounted in jubilant folk songs that they once used to sing beneath the stars, was now coming to the Institute.

Nambodri was not a man who went to battle unless he knew he was going to win. This was because he was a coward. Acharya, on the other hand, did not know how to fight small men who were, probably, the rightful inheritors of an office, any office. But he had that terrifying quality called stature, something that his colleagues, of their own accord, had granted him. From what Ayyan had heard of the battles of the Brahmins, it would be bloodless but brutal. They would fight like demons armed with nothing more than deceit and ideals — another form of deceit among men from good families.

Ayyan went into the inner chamber with the letter. He placed it carefully in a vacant island in the sea of papers on the table.

‘From the Ministry,’ he said.

Acharya did not look up. Twenty minutes later, he opened the letter. He read it just once and put it in the large bin that was nearly as tall as the table. He turned to the window and stared at the sea.

Ayyan entered with some files to check if Acharya had read the letter. The envelope was missing from the desk and Acharya’s face no longer wore its customary peaceful expression. His eyes were burning in the glow of the setting sun.

When Ayyan went back to the anteroom, the mobile phone on his desk was ringing. He could barely recognize the voice of Oja at the other end.

‘He burnt her,’ she said, crying, ‘he burnt her.’ She was calling from a phone booth outside BDD. Through the background noise of horns and the laughter of men, Ayyan could hear her desperate gasps for breath.

It seared him always, the sorrow of his Oja. She said that a boy from Thane had come home with the news that Gauri had been burnt by her husband. Gauri was a cousin she had grown up with. The violence of subsidized kerosene that Oja’s mother had once feared might be the fate of her daughter had consumed another woman. Ayyan knew that woman. He had been to her wedding. She was an unremarkable girl who laughed a lot. He remembered her face through the red hood of her cheap bridal sari. She had tried not to giggle throughout her wedding. She was then consigned to a life of severe beatings, and now this. Two hours ago, she had died of severe burns in a government hospital. Her body was still in the morgue. Oja did not want to go there. She said she did not want to know how a woman looked after she was burnt. It was something every girl she knew had nightmares about when they were growing up.

‘Some people say that after you are burnt the face looks white, not black — that is if there is any face left,’ she said into the phone, and fell silent. She had nothing more to say, but she did not want to put the phone down. He could hear her breathing.

The main door opened and two scientists walked in. They were in the middle of a loud discussion.

‘When these correction terms become large, there is no spacetime geometry that is guaranteed to describe the result,’ one man said. The other responded, ‘Yes I agree, the equations for determining the space — time geometry become impossible to solve except under very strict symmetry conditions. But my point is …’ He looked at Ayyan impatiently and pointed to Acharya’s door. ‘We have an appointment,’ he said, with a frown, probably annoyed because the impudent clerk was talking on his mobile.

Ayyan picked up the land phone and put it on his other ear ‘Sir, Dr Sinha and Dr Murthy are here.’

The voice of Acharya growled back, ‘I am not meeting anyone today.’

In his other ear Ayyan heard Oja say something, but in the chaos around the phone booth where she was standing and the debate of the men in front of him, he could not make out what she was trying to tell him. ‘And this is a hint that perhaps space — time geometry is not something fundamental in string theory, but something that emerges in the theory at large-distance scales or weak coupling,’ one of the men was saying.

‘I will go now, I think you have a lot of work,’ said Oja, very faintly.

‘Hello,’ said Ayyan, but the line had gone dead.

He put his mobile in the drawer and looked at these men on the ancient leather sofa, so wise and comfortable in their austere clothes.

One of them was saying, ‘The curvature of the universe, according to Harrison, will be confirmed in our lifetime and I think that is a very important statement. It is nice to know that there are some people who are looking beyond the Collider.’

Ayyan now found these men more unreal than he could ever have imagined. And they were repulsive. He went to the inner door. Acharya was gazing thoughtfully through his window.

‘Sir, they insist on meeting you right now.’

Acharya took his eyes off the window and glared at the table for an instant. Then he walked to his door, flung it open with brute force and yelled at the waiting men who were in the middle of describing the curvature of the universe, ‘Get out, get out. Right now. Get out.’

The string theorists jumped. They looked confused and hurt, but they walked away without a word.

Deep inside himself, Ayyan roared with laughter. It showed on his face in a faint twitch at the edge of his lips.

Acharya returned to his chair and continued his sullen survey of the Arabian Sea. He sat like that for over an hour and then he felt an indefinable pain that he recognized as a familiar sorrow. Slowly, he understood what it was: Lavanya. Her eyesight was failing and there was a stent in her heart too. But why was he thinking about her? Yes, at six, he had to take her to the hospital. The driver was not coming in today and so he had to drive. There was something funereal about it, he thought: an old man driving his old woman to the hospital. Something very lonely about it. Something very sad and American. He got up and steered his trousers around his waist.


At the end of the main driveway of the Professors’ Quarters there was a hard-surface tennis court. An instructor was coaching three little girls who were in frilled tennis skirts. He was gently lobbing the ball across the net to them. One of the girls was bored with the proceedings. She began to pick up jasmine flowers that had fallen on the clay court, and she arranged them on the fading baseline.

Lavanya was watching her. She was reminded of Shruti who was now a married woman and many worlds away. She felt deserted that moment, but was comforted by the thought of her husband who would soon come bumbling down the driveway. She was in the shade of a neem tree, and leaning against an ancient sky-blue Fiat — a relic that was misunderstood in the Quarters as a symbol of Acharya’s simple ways. The truth was that he had neither the money nor the patience to sell his ancestral lands and buy a new car with the loose change. There was a time when she used to tell him, almost every day, that he should sell off the worthless fields and that monstrous house in Sivagangai which was haunted by the ghosts of her in-laws.

She looked at her watch. It was time, but she knew she did not have to call him. It was very strange how he forgot just about everything else but always remembered her hospital appointments. There he appeared at the gate and walked down the driveway, exactly the way she had imagined. He was an old man now, she thought, and for some reason that made her laugh.

Acharya did not say anything to her. That was not unusual. They got into the car and drove in silence. Taxis broke lanes and crossed his path, singing cyclists almost died under his tyres and gave him self-righteous glares before resuming their songs, buses were at his bumper and pedestrians stood in the middle of the road waiting to cross the other half, but Acharya’s blood pressure did not rise.

‘This country has become a video game,’ he said. He did not speak for the rest of the journey.

When they reached the Breach Candy Hospital, he got out of the car, locked the doors and went into the porch. At the reception, he realized that he had left something in the car. He went back, muttering to himself. Lavanya was sitting inside the car with a calm expression on her face.

‘You can open it from inside,’ he told her.

‘I know,’ she said, as she struggled out of the vehicle.

‘Then why didn’t you do it?’ he asked angrily. ‘Why are you being dramatic?’

‘I am being dramatic?’

‘I know I forgot you in the car. So?’

‘So nothing. It happens. Did I say anything?’


That night, after they returned from the hospital, Acharya could not sleep. He stood on the long, narrow balcony and looked at the dark sea and at the heavens above. It was a moonless summer night and he could see the stars. Once, he knew them intimately and by their names. Some people wanted the excitement of searching for signals from those faraway places. They were not romantic men who had the endearing desperation of a child. They were rotting scientists who were stranded in mediocrity, who had slogged for years in radio astronomy and had found no glory. They wanted the easy fame of a dramatic nonsense. They were willing to go to war with him for that. He knew how to fight them. Another battle, he thought. And he felt tired.


SEVEN MEN WERE gathered around the oval table. In the silence of an unnerving wait, they could hear the hum of the air conditioning. They were waiting for something to pass. Every time there was the slightest sound outside, they would look up at the closed door and return to a wait that they knew would soon end.

The door opened, and an almost perceptible wave of fear and anticipation went through the room. But when they saw Oparna Goshmaulik there was relief. She sat down, wondering who had died. ‘Thanks for coming,’ Nambodri said, the exhilaration of seeing her subdued by the heaviness of the moment.

She raised her eyebrows to ask what it was all about.

‘You will soon know,’ he said.

A few minutes later Bhaskar Basu walked in. He was a trim tidy man who suspected that he was good-looking. His jovial grey hair was distant cousin to Nambodri’s radiant aureole. The frames of his spectacles were thick and artistic. Behind the glasses, his narrow eyes looked shrewd and capable. Asshole, Oparna guessed.

Basu’s searching eyes, inevitably, rested on her. He asked Nambodri, ‘Won’t you introduce us?’

Oparna did not understand this peculiar habit of Indian men. If they could letch at her so overtly, they might as well ask her directly who she was. Why did they always turn to someone else and say, ‘Won’t you introduce us?’ It was so pathetic.

‘Oparna Goshmaulik,’ Nambodri said, ‘Head of Astrobiology.’

‘A Bengali girl,’ Basu said, a light coming to his face as if an inner bulb had switched on. He said something to her in Bangla and she tried to respond with something approaching a polite smile.

Basu turned self-important and stylish. He leaned back in his chair and broke the silence of the scientists around him.

‘Don’t worry, I am going to take care of it. I am here now,’ he said. ‘The old man is not here yet? I think we should call him.’

‘He will come,’ Nambodri said dryly. He feared that the presence of Oparna was inspiring the bureaucrat to assume a certain coolness that could be suicidal. Acharya, if slighted, was capable of flinging a paperweight at the offender. Oparna was in that room because Nambodri wanted her to witness the first tremors of a shift in the balance of power, and also to disrupt the Balloon Mission. But he was beginning to regret the move. Basu was getting carried away.

Basu launched into the structure of the new Seti department, even though the radio astronomers had already been briefed. When he spoke, he kept glancing at Oparna, who decided that she would toy with her mobile. He eventually fell silent because he had nothing more to say and everybody was looking grim and distracted anyway. The brooding wait resumed: all ears were listening for the door.


When Arvind Acharya walked in, one of the scientists stood up on impulse, thereby greatly ruining the ‘aggressive position’ Nambodri had said they should take. Acharya sat between two radio astronomers who looked more keenly at the table than they really needed to. Nambodri was disturbed by his old friend’s calm. He knew something was wrong.

‘Thanks for coming,’ Basu said, with a gracious smile. ‘Let me now …’

Acharya held up his hand to him and said, ‘Shut up.’

Basu’s elegant face appeared to lose size. He tried to form words. ‘Excuse me? I don’t understand,’ he said, looking severe. ‘What do you mean by that?’

Acharya consulted his watch.

‘I don’t understand this.’ Basu raised his voice.

‘Do you understand everything, usually?’ Acharya asked. There was something about the way he said it, with the deep serenity of an ancient pedagogue, that brought about another silence.

The radio astronomers looked at each other. Acharya consulted his watch again. There was the sound of a mobile phone vibrating in silent mode. It was a persistent spasmodic screech. Basu reached for his coat and took out his mobile. He saw the number and went to a corner of the room.

‘Yes, Sir. Yes, Sir,’ the astronomers heard him say with a sinking feeling.

‘Yes, Sir. Yes, Sir,’ Basu said many times. It was a private dialect of bureaucracy, and it had no other words.

When Basu put the phone back in his coat pocket, Nambodri knew the revolution was over. Basu sank into his chair looking pale.

‘Dr Acharya,’ he said, ‘the Minister has asked me to apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you. We are dropping our proposal to start a Seti department and the matter will not be broached as long as you are opposed to it.’

Basu rubbed his nose during the pause and continued, somewhat pathetically, ‘I hope you understand my efforts were in the best interest of science. I really believed that the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is a very important step forward. I thought it had defence implications too. I may have been wrong, but I hope you will get inside my mind and see the …’

‘I have been inside your mind,’ Acharya said. ‘It was a short journey.’


Basu left the room first. Oparna followed. The radio astronomers then rose, one after the other, and left the room in a funereal procession. Only Acharya and Nambodri were left. They sat still, the officious parabola of the oval table between them. Nambodri was smiling. The smile reminded Acharya of the arrack drinkers who used to fall defeated in the paddyfields of his childhood.

‘I thought you were beyond office politics,’ Nambodri said, ‘but it looks as if you have learnt a few things from the little men, as you call us. I forgot how famous you are, Arvind. Who did you call? The PM? The President? Who did you call?’

‘I want you out, Jana.’

Acharya felt sorry for this old man who did not know he was old, with whom he had spent many summers of his youth in a cold distant land, when together they had so much hope for each other and the world.

‘What do you want, you bastard?’ Acharya asked, almost in anguish.

‘What do I want?’ Nambodri said, with a sad chuckle. ‘I just want to search for extraterrestrial intelligence, Arvind. It’s very simple. What do you want?’

‘I want scientists in my institute to work on real science. If radio astronomers here are bored with pulsars, then they must quit and grow rubber on their fathers’ hills. Not chase alien signals.’

‘We have been saying the same things to each other for a long, long time,’ Nambodri said, ‘like two people in a bad marriage.’

‘Tell me something,’ Acharya said, in a tone that was remarkably kind. ‘Do you really believe you are going to find a signal from an advanced alien civilization?’

‘There is no reason why we shouldn’t.’

‘That’s not what I asked. Do you believe you will? What do you believe? Remember the word “belief”? That thing you had when you were twenty? What exactly do you believe? When you wake up in the morning, what do you know is certainly true?’

‘Not all of us are meant to believe, Arvind. Some of us can only wonder and, on good days, hope. Do you really believe that all life on Earth came from outer space?’

‘Yes. I don’t just believe. I know.’

‘Through microscopic spores that came riding on comets and meteorites?’

‘Yes,’ Acharya said peacefully. ‘And you know what? I also believe that these spores fall on different worlds in different corners of the universe and they spawn life that is suited to those conditions. Life that could be vastly different from what we can imagine. Life that could even evolve into giant zero-mass beings. Like massive clouds. Things we cannot even imagine.’

‘Why don’t you go public on this hypothesis then?’

‘It is not a hypothesis,’ Acharya said softly. ‘It’s a theory.’

In the Institute, a hypothesis was a good idea, but a theory was a good idea that deserved funds.

Acharya rose from the chair, holding his left knee for an instant. When he reached the door, he heard a sad voice ask, ‘Is there a way I can stay on, Arvind?’


Ayyan Mani was furious. The war of the Brahmins had ended so fast. And ended in the banal way in which medieval no-talent writers finished their moral fables — the great triumphing over the petty. The loss of anticipation deepened the grimness of his routine and he was filled with the fatigue of an unbearable boredom. When Oparna stood by his desk and asked to see Acharya, he did not even look at her. He just made a call and sent her in.

She entered the den, as usual, wondering why she could hear her heart every time she saw this man and if this fear had more disturbing names.

‘I came here to tell you that I didn’t know why I was called to that meeting,’ she said. ‘I don’t want you to think that I am part of what they tried to do this morning.’

‘I know,’ Acharya said. She stood there in the vain hope that he would ask her to sit down and tell her how unfortunate it was that she was caught in the middle of all this, or maybe they could talk about the balloon that they would soon send to the stratosphere. But he was reading.

After she left the room, Acharya tried to remember something. He had told himself that he would recall it later, but he could not place the moment. Then it came to him: it was when he had seen Oparna in the conference room, he had felt something. It was like a stab, a trivial feeling of betrayal and then a more elaborate agony as though she had died and left him alone. He was not surprised that he thought of her death. Everybody died, the young especially. But why should her death make him feel deserted? He considered the matter for a few seconds, but then his mind drifted to the triumph of remembering it. Nowadays, problems that he scheduled for the future never returned to him.


THE FUMES GLOWED in the car lights, and they cast giant fleeting shadows of pedestrians in the air. In the vapours of the late evening traffic, cars and trucks lay stranded on the lane as if they were all trying to flee from an approaching calamity. Heads peered out of the windows. Long lines of honking vehicles melded and expanded until, somewhere ahead, they became a huge unmoving knot of metal and smoke. In the heart of the jam was a black Honda City, its bumper torn off. A girl whose navel was pierced by a glimmer of silver, and whose small pink T-shirt said in gold ‘Skinny Bitch’, was standing in a daze. Her hands were spread out, and she said in English, several times, the same thing: ‘What the freaking hell?’

An abandoned taxi was still kissing the rear of her car. A dark man, who must have been the cab driver, was standing facing her in the middle of the road, sheepish and giggling. People on the pavement looked on in glee. A man who was sitting on his haunches and watching the fun screamed, ‘Now look at her bumper.’ Ayyan walked through the situation with a serene smile.

A few metres ahead was a barber’s called Headmaster, and next to it was a restaurant with aluminium-topped tables and wooden chairs. At the entrance, Ayyan spotted Thambe, the tiny man to whom he had handed an envelope full of notes on the Worli Seaface. They sat at a table and ordered tea. ‘The article was great,’ Ayyan said. ‘My boy is so happy.’

‘I hope other papers pick it up,’ Thambe said, flapping his thighs. He stopped a waiter to ask if there was a toilet in the restaurant. The waiter shook his head.

Thambe was a reporter with Yug, and one of those hectic men who did things that did not have a name. He could bring back lost licences, create ration-cards, and he knew the mobile numbers of government clerks.

‘You really did a beautiful job of my son’s achievement,’ Ayyan said.

‘I believe that brilliant boys like your son have to be supported,’ Thambe said, pouring his tea into the saucer.

‘Has anybody from the English papers contacted you about my son?’

‘No,’ the reporter said. ‘The English reporters are such snobs. They never follow up anything we do.’

‘I see. You know, Thambe, it would have been nice if you had put him on the front page. After all, a ten-year-old boy winning a contest like that is no small achievement.’

‘I know. But the front page,’ Thambe said, smiling sadly, ‘is very expensive, Mani.’

‘How expensive?’

‘Oh, it’s beyond us. I don’t even go there. It is for big people.’

‘Your editor knows that you … you help friends?’

‘You are asking me if the editor knows if I take money to write? Be direct. We are friends now. Of course he knows. You know how much my salary is? Eight hundred rupees. When he hired me, he said, “We don’t pay much.” Then he took out a press card with my photograph on it and said, “Now go out into the market and make whatever you want.” ‘

They drank their tea silently. Then the reporter said, ‘I have to go now. So if …’ Ayyan took out his wallet and counted some notes.

‘This is for friendship,’ he said, as he handed the cash to Thambe. ‘The advance I gave you, that too was for our friendship.’

‘Friendship, of course,’ the reporter said. His face turned serious as he counted the notes. It was the same serious face, Ayyan remembered, that descended on the great minds of the Institute when they counted cash.

‘Friendship is everything,’ Thambe said, somehow finding space for the notes in his shirt pocket, which was already bulging. ‘I took your word, Mani. You said your son won the contest, I believed you. No questions asked. That’s friendship.’

‘Is there a way such a friendship can get English papers to write about my son?’

On his way back home, a familiar gloom filled Ayyan. There was no getting away from it. He tried to fight it by imagining the face of Oja Mani, how jubilant she had looked when Adi’s teacher had sent the first frantic note about the boy’s insubordinate brilliance. But the gloom only grew into an acidic fear in his stomach. Fear worried him because it reminded him that life was not always a familiar place. This game he was playing was far bigger than the other plots of his life. The game, this time, was his son.


The rise of Adi as a child genius had begun about a year ago when Ayyan had gone home late one evening and Oja had opened the door with tears in her eyes and a deep joyous smile that made him suspect that her demented mother had finally won a lottery.

‘My son got 100 per cent in the maths test,’ Oja had said. ‘There are forty-two boys in his class. All fair and rich and fat. My son was the only one who got 100 per cent.’

Oja, who usually stared blankly at him without ambition or hope, and sometimes in the sorrow of being stranded in a humid hell, was so ecstatic that only tears could release the joy. That night he had taken Adi out for ice-cream. When they were walking down the Worli Seaface he heard the boy mutter the name of every car that was parked or was passing by. He had merely to look at a car, its front or its rear, and he would know its make. It seemed exceptional, but Ayyan knew there was nothing there more than a simple streak of smartness that most children possessed. He had heard a thousand times men chatting in the train about the brilliance of their children — ‘My son is just three but he knows how to turn on the computer and send emails. He is a genius.’ Or, ‘My daughter is ten but she knows the names of all the lakes in the world.’ It was in that way that Adi was smart. ‘City, Ambassador, Zen, Esteem, City,’ the boy was saying on the promenade. The vigilant mind of Ayyan began to think of a simple plot, to achieve nothing more than some fun and a distraction from the inescapable miseries of BDD.

From that night, he drew Adi into a pact. ‘Our secret,’ he would tell his son, and make him memorize questions that he should ask his teachers. Ayyan devised simple questions, like, ‘What is gravity made of, Miss?’ Or, ‘Why are leaves green?’ He asked Adi to raise these questions any time during the class, never mind the context. ‘It’ll be fun,’ he told his son.

At first, the boy’s questions in the class seemed endearing. Teachers found him cute and, of course, bright and curious. Slowly, Adi’s questions became more complex: ‘If plants can eat light, why aren’t there things that eat sound?’ Or, when he heard a cue word like ‘ocean’, he would yell in the class, ‘The average depth of the ocean is 3.7 kilometres, why aren’t lakes so deep?’ When his teachers, still enamoured with his oddness, tried to engage him in a conversation about light, or sound, or the ocean, Adi clammed up because he did not know anything beyond what his father had taught him. But his silence did not surprise the staff. He was, after all, just a little boy. An odd, laconic little boy who was also partially deaf.

When it all began, Adi used to mumble to his mother about having a secret pact with his father, but she dismissed it as the prattle between father and son. In time, Adi began to enjoy the attention he was receiving at school. He began to understand that he was considered extraordinary, and not ‘special’ which was what they called the handicapped. He began to attach a certain importance to the pact with his father and even understood the reason why it had to be a secret. He vaguely knew that his mother would not tolerate the game he and his father were playing, and her opposition would deprive him of the status he was beginning to be granted in school.

He looked forward to disrupting every class. The disruptions began to annoy his teachers. They were increasingly baffled by his questions. They began to write notes in his handbook summoning his parents, and that created moments of fear and entertainment at home. Oja was concerned, but she was also excited by the prospects of a genius. ‘I want him to be normal,’ she would say, but she told everyone about his brilliance. She circled fire around his face and stained his cheek with black powder to exterminate the evil eye. The myth of a child genius was surprisingly simple to create, Ayyan realized, especially around a boy who was innately smart and who wore a hearing-aid. Adi had simply to say something odd in the class once a week to keep the legend alive.

It was easy and it was fun, but Ayyan wanted something more. So he arranged for the fictitious news item about Adi. It was still simple. The whole game could be called off at any moment. It had to end some day anyway. And it had to end before they got caught. He believed in his heart that he could get away with it. He found some comfort in the fact that he was not the first person to create the myth of genius around his child. There were people, mothers especially, who had spun far greater yarns. He had once read the incredible story of a French girl called Minou Drouet, a name he could somehow never pronounce. She published her poems when she was just eight. Her poems stunned the giants of French literature until some people began to say that it was her mother who was writing them. Little Minou was tested. She was asked to write poems in front of people. And she did. But the whole matter was never resolved. Even today people did not know if she were a child prodigy or her mother’s fraud. Then there was another girl, a Russian child called Natasha Demkina, whose mother claimed that the girl had X-ray vision. Many doctors even confirmed that Natasha had that ability, but there were many who said she was a fraud. Ayyan wanted to meet those marvellous mothers. He believed he understood them, and understood why they did what they did.

But he would not go too far. His game would end soon. It troubled him sometimes, the readiness with which his son was playing the game. Some days, Ayyan noticed that the boy chose to forget that it was all just a game. He believed that he truly was a genius. He loved the word. He mentioned it in his sleep.

The innocent face of Oja, in the glow of her overnight turmeric treatments and the illusion of a sudden extraordinary life, haunted Ayyan. She must never know the truth because she would never forgive him. The lies he had told her had already taken root and created a fable in her mind. It was too late to retract them. She must live with those lies forever. It frightened him, the thought of living with a woman for a whole lifetime without telling her that he had once fooled her. Even though he survived the world through unambiguous practicality, he believed that a man’s bond with his wife should not be corrupted by too much rationality. Marriage needed the absurdity of values. In the world that lay outside his home, there was no right or wrong. Every moment was a battle, and the cunning won. But his home was not something as trivial as the world. To fool Oja into believing that her son was a genius was a crime, a crime so grave that it did not have a punishment. But the game was also a magnificent lure. He loved it.

That’s what frightened him. Despite his own disgust at the cruelty of the myth he was creating around his son, Ayyan feared that he might not be able to stop. He was falling into the intoxication of the game, its excitement that was so potent. He thought of his alcoholic brothers, in whose eyes he had once seen the desperation to live, but who could not escape the powerful addiction that triumphed over the spirit of life. The thrill of erecting the story of a boy genius and the tales that drew his small family in a cosy huddle in their one-room home — he did not want to lose all that. Because that was all they had. So, what must a man do?

An ordinary man wants his wife to feel the excitement of life. Ayyan had been born into poverty that no human should have to endure; he absorbed the rudiments of knowledge under the municipality’s lights; he learnt the guile to feed himself and his family; and he was now stranded because there is only so far that the son of a sweeper can go. Ayyan had no exceptional talent, but he was bright enough to see so clearly the futility of hope and the grimness of an unremarkable life ahead. So what must a man do? Without the sport of his son’s genius, Ayyan knew that the routine of his life would eventually suffocate him. The future, otherwise, was all too predictable. He would type letters for the Brahmins, take their calls and suffer their pursuit of truth. Then, every single day of his life, he would climb the steep colonial steps of BDD, wade through its undead, and find refuge in the perfunctory love of a woman who did not really look at him any more. He would live out his whole life, so unspeakably ordinary, in a one-room home that was a hundred and eighty square feet (including the illicit loft).


Ayyan began to walk briskly now because that always abolished his sorrows and fears. He appeared so purposeful when he entered the BDD chawls that the defeated eyes of drunken men on the broken walkways looked at him with envy. Here, a man with purpose was a fortunate man. He went through the yellow walls of the top floor and felt the stares from the open doors. Children were playing and screaming on the corridor. Dreamless women combed their hair slowly. Silent widows, ancient and bent, sat on the doorways, their gazes transfixed at a past.

As he passed through the open doors of the corridor he caught voices of the lives in every cell. A woman was saying that she would never buy onions again, he did not know why. Next door, a peon had just returned from work and was sharing a leftover cake he had pinched from someone’s birthday party in the office. Further down, a man was asking for the price of a Maruti Zen on his mobile. These were voices he usually heard. But then, he heard a language that was alien to him. He heard a mother slap her boy. He yelled. Then she gave him a whack on his back. The boy ran out into the corridor patting his mouth, and he sprinted to and fro as if trying to dodge his own pain. So far, there was nothing unusual. Then Ayyan heard the woman scream above the boy’s wails, ‘Do your homework, or I will kill you.’

That, he had never heard in this place before. What Oja had told him was true then. Ever since Adi appeared in the newspaper, mothers, especially in this block, had gone insane. They were belting their sons and making them study, while Oja was buying kites, cricket bats and comics for her son in the fear that he might otherwise become more abnormal than he already was.


After dinner, the three of them went to the tar-coated terrace. There were several dim figures ambling beneath the half-moon. From the distant shadows, a solitary drunkard sang of love and liberation. Adolescent girls stood in groups and giggled at the boys. The boys, pale and scrawny, were in an excited state and they indulged in mock fights among themselves to attract the attention of the girls. Oja mingled with the young mothers who were also in their nighties, which bore the indelible stains of turmeric and chilli. The women looked at Oja with affection or malice — Ayyan could never tell which — but they looked at her more carefully than before. And Oja had developed a certain grace, a sort laboured modesty that Miss World affected when she visited children with cancer.

Ayyan held the index finger of his son and went towards an isolated corner. He pretended to study his phone to escape old friends. They still came to him, but though Ayyan smiled and greeted them, he never took his eyes off the phone.

Adi spotted a tennis ball stuck in a drain. He looked around to see if anyone else had noticed it. He tried to extricate his finger from his father’s grip, but it would not release. He pulled hard, but he was not strong enough. They were laughing now, father and son. Adi tried to bite his father’s hand, but even that didn’t help. ‘Let me go,’ he said.

‘Say, “Supernova”,’ he heard his father say. That made Adi forget the ball. He loved this game.

‘Supernova,’ his father said.

‘Supernova,’ Adi said. ‘Easy.’

‘How do stars die, Miss?’ Ayyan said in English.

‘How do stars die, Miss?’

‘How do stars die, Miss, apart from becoming supernovas?’

‘How do stars die, Miss, apart from becoming supernovas?’

‘How do stars die, Miss, apart from becoming supernovas?’

‘How do stars die, Miss, apart from supernovas?’

‘Apart from becoming supernovas?’

‘How do stars die, Miss, apart from becoming supernovas?’

‘Bright boy.’

Adi extricated himself from his father and went to take the ball that was stuck in the mouth of the drain. He looked around innocently before he crouched and pulled the ball out. He played with it for some time. Then he said to his father, ‘I like prime numbers.’

Ayyan ignored him.

‘I like prime numbers because they cannot be predicted,’ Adi said, in a casual, conversational sort of way. ‘You don’t have to talk to me like that, Adi.’

‘Like how?’

‘Like how you are talking right now about prime numbers.’

‘I like prime numbers because they cannot be predicted.’

‘It’s OK, Adi, you don’t have to talk like that with me. We play the game only sometimes. Not all the time. You understand?’

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