Serious men, p.15
Serious Men, page 15
They reached the glass doors of the terminal where three guards were checking the tickets of passengers in the middle of bad-mouthing a senior who was not present. Acharya fumbled for Lavanya’s ticket in his pockets. He had just purchased it from the counter. He was pleased when he found it and gave his wife a wide grin. She looked at him with worry. How was he was going to take care of himself?
‘Open the door for the maids,’ she said. ‘I have Meenu’s mobile. I will call her every day.’
‘Who is Meenu?’
Lavanya looked exasperated. ‘She is our cook.’
He pulled up the tow handle of the suitcase and gave it to her with a deep, grim face, as though it was a lifetime achievement award. She dragged the suitcase, sniffling, holding a kerchief to her nose which was now red. Before she entered the terminal she turned to look at her husband. He waved at her. A young couple behind her mistook her tears for the romantic distress of separation. They gave the seniors an exaggerated look of approval. ‘So cute,’ the girl said.
Lavanya disappeared somewhere behind the X-ray machines. When Acharya turned to leave he felt the same way he used to feel as a boy when he dropped letters in the postbox. There was this sense of an unremarkable relief mixed with a nagging suspicion that he had lost something he was holding.
It was two in the morning when Acharya reached home. He had expected the gloom of its vast tidy rooms, and the haunting silence of loneliness that was somehow different from the silence of togetherness. He went to the bedroom and played Pavarotti at full volume through the night. Just once he turned the volume down – when he called Lavanya on her mobile to ask if she had arrived safely. She was surprised to get his call. Against the background noise of her loud relatives, she screamed, maybe to show off that her husband cared, ‘Yes, I’ve arrived.’
When the sun rose he was standing in the balcony, and the house was still in the turbulence of Pavarotti’s wails. At the end of an aria, in its transient baffling silence, Acharya heard the doorbell. He opened the door and found the maid. She tried to enter, but Pavarotti’s sudden murderous pitch rose and it shook her. Before she could recover, he slammed the door in her face. When the cook arrived, he did not open the door.
The whole morning he stood on the balcony, missing the interruption of Lavanya and her inopportune Madras filter coffee, and her unreasonable taunts as to why he was not walking when he was wearing Nike shoes. To impress her, in case she called him later in the day, he put on his tracksuit, wore the shoes with pump action (or something like that), and stepped out. He wanted to stroll down the inner lanes of Navy Nagar, but returned in ten minutes, unable to bear the sight of grown-up sailors going to work in white shorts, their hairy legs pedalling cycles or riding motorbikes. And there was something about people wearing white in the monsoon that he found rather foolish. He did not feel like going back home. So he walked inside the Quarters and discovered that its clear blue pool was actually used in the mornings.
A portion of the pool was cordoned off for fat women who were dancing in some kind of ludicrous aerobic activity. There were eight of them and their nervous eyes drifted from the female instructor to his dismayed glare. Close to where he was standing, he saw a little girl trying to swim without floats. She was scared and she told everyone who swam close to her, ‘I am your friend, no?’ She reminded him of Shruti, and he tried to meet her eyes to smile. But he was distracted by a woman in the pool who was trying to teach her mother how to swim.
‘Mama, you’re afraid. I can feel the fear in your stomach,’ she was telling the old woman, with the severity of daughter’s love. ‘I want you to bring your fear up to the ribs,’ she said, placing her hand on her mother’s stomach and moving it up gently. ‘Bring it up further to your throat … Now I can feel your fear. It’s in the throat, Mama. Spit it out, spit it out.’
The shrunken ancient mother, in a costume that would have branded her a whore in her youth, blew uncomfortably into her daughter’s hand, and she surveyed the pool sheepishly.
‘I have robbed you of your fear,’ her daughter said. ‘Now swim.’
At the far end of the pool, Acharya saw a large man in swimming trunks. He had breasts. And near him, waiting to dive, there were more fat women. Apparently the young did not swim any more.
Oparna was on his mind all the while, like a foreboding. Later that morning, when he went to work and she appeared before him, he did not know what he must say to her. She looked more stunning than ever, even though she had resumed the austerity of the long shapeless top. The smell of young flesh returned to haunt his nervous peace and he was reminded again how, incredibly, she had granted him the right to be her lover. Their eyes met only for an instant. Then she sorted loose sheets of paper in her hands, and he rearranged things on his table. He asked her to sit down. She sat. They looked at each other again, this time for longer.
‘I am sorry,’ Acharya said, ‘I could not see you last night.’
‘There is some progress with the cryosampler,’ she said, and gave him a print-out of an email. And that was how she was in the days that followed. Something in her was dead. He could see it in her eyes.
The way she used to look at him, with the glow of new love, was now replaced by the silent hurt of betrayal and humiliation. She made him sad, but he also longed for this sorrow to arrive in his room as often as possible in that ascetic uniform of long top and jeans, the cassock of her platonic detachment. She spoke to him only about work, and she looked so strong and resolute in her martyrdom that he did not find cues to speak about himself or to blame the forces of virtue that stole him away from the basement.
But he found excuses to be with her. He asked Ayyan to send her to his room on flimsy pretexts. And she came every time he summoned her. Some days, when he thought that he had summoned her too many times, and feared that she might leave the Institute, unable to bear the sight of him, he called group meetings with scientists and research assistants. His eyes would sweep across the assembly, and rest casually on her. She never looked him in the eye, but every time his carefully constructed perfunctory gaze fell on her he was certain that she knew he was looking. Her mask of detachment would slip a little: she would stare harder at the floor, or she would inhale unknowingly. So he devised a new way of looking at her.
He realized that if he adjusted the position of the cylindrical glass jar in which Lavanya’s ethereal agents still filled orchids every morning, he could see Oparna’s reflection. The vase was bought by Lavanya years ago as part of her failed attempt to make his office look beautiful. Now it was an accomplice in his furtive love. It had a reasonable refractive index, it seemed, and so her face was not too distorted. And this was how he would look at her during the long group meetings. Sometimes, he noticed in the jar, she would look at his face in a fond way and turn away when she perceived the threat of being found out. This device consoled him until one afternoon when he saw Oparna’s reflection staring at him and then at the vase. She had somehow figured out the technique. He got up in the middle of the meeting, even as someone was talking to him about the optimum dimensions of the balloon, and carried the vase to the far end of the room. He put it on the centrepiece that lay in the middle of the interfacing white sofas. He rejoined the perplexed group with an innocent face and threw a casual glance at Oparna for appreciation, but she was looking at the floor.
Acharya was miserable the whole week. All day, he would try to work, try to survive the unrelenting influence of Oparna, and go home to hunger and wakefulness. He realized that his home was entirely the colony of his wife. He was running short of shirts and trousers. Underwear that was usually laid out on the morning bed for him like a buffet, now became rare. He could not find anything. So Lavanya, in the middle of sombre funeral prayers, or while serving food to the mourners, would get calls on her mobile and she would whisper, ‘the nail-clipper is in the leopard-skin box … the box is inside a bag with polka dots in the second drawer of the nightstand on my side of the bed … I cannot explain what a polka dot is right now … yes, lots of dots on the bag … I don’t know why they are called polka dots and not dots … don’t forget to put the nail-clipper back in the box … dry yourself after your bath … And why haven’t you been opening the door for the maids?’
Despite his condition, Acharya was aware that the Balloon Mission was entering a crucial phase. The problems in equipment procurement were slowly being solved. His friends in Nasa were helping to release equipment that the American government had blacklisted after the Pokhran nuclear tests. Despite the torments of love and its weird distractions that expanded time, he worked hard on the many finer aspects of the Mission. He was talking to government servants, scientists and weathermen, redrawing the design of gadgetry, scrutinizing the physics at the altitude of forty-one kilometres and commanding everything in him to ensure that the lab in the Institute was worthy of testing the samplers at the end of the Mission. But he had lost his peace. And the privileges of high thought, and his isolation that had once guarded him from the trivialities of life. The beast of genius inside him was now fatally infected by what he diagnosed as common infatuation, but through a minute crack in the fog of misery his mind could still see the beauty in the conviction that alien microbes were always falling from the heavens and they had once seeded life on Earth.
The thoughts of the origin of life sometimes diminished his longing for of Oparna. Microbe to microbe – that was all there was to life and death. Love was insignificant – a devious evolutionary device. Nothing more. These thoughts comforted him, but only briefly. Ultimately, he realized, Oparna was the unavoidable inspiration behind his renewed attempts to keep the Balloon Mission on target. She was deeply involved in the project, the very heart of the core team. It was the most important time in her professional life. That was why, despite the discomfort of unrequited love, she was not leaving the Institute. Any serious snag in the project would disappoint her, and as a consequence, embarrass him. So he ordained in his mind, come what may, the balloon would go up and come down, and the air sampler would be analysed. This resolve made him work like a madman. He slogged in the glory of an old incurable faith in the extraterrestrial origin of life, in the fear of losing Oparna forever, in the torturous certainty that he had no choice but to lose her eventually, in the confusion of what exactly a wife means to a man, in the bitter aftertaste of the terrible food Ayyan Mani brought him and in the deathly fatigue of insomnia. Finally, eight days after Lavanya had left to mourn her sister, something in him snapped.
He pushed everything that was on his table to the floor and rose from his chair. He did not know what time it was and he did not care. He knew Oparna was in the basement. She had to be there.
He walked out through the anteroom that Ayyan had long deserted. Its ghostly phones rang and fax machines belched. There was not a soul in the corridor. It lay in front like a supernatural bridge to autumnal love. He heard the lift heave and echo as it descended to the basement. He walked beside the stark white walls, feeling the anxiety of violating a young body that was right there at the end of this narrow corridor. He felt a mad rage against her for pushing him from the fortress of stature that others had built for him over the decades into a miserable hell where other old men like him crawled on their stomachs and begged young women for a mere look of affection. But what truly infuriated him was the painful suspicion that it was now, in this late age, that true love had come to him.
Until a few weeks ago, he was in the peace of consigning love as that brief juvenile excitement he once felt for Lavanya in the freshness of marriage. It was an easy painless thing. There was no pursuit, no battle. She was there in the morning, she was there in the evening, and on some nights of her choosing she became naked. Love, he had always thought, was arranged. He was certain that alcoholic poets had overrated its misery. But now, he felt its agony and the insane fear of rejection.
He flung open the door of the lab. It was almost dark. Oparna was sitting on the floor at the foot of the main working desk that filled half the room. She had turned off all the lights except a single inadequate bulb directly above the desk. It cast giant shadows of microscopes and other optical devices, and they appeared to lie in wait, like curious voyeurs. She was in her long top of forced modesty and blue jeans. Her hair was tied back. He walked to her side, and stood with his knee brushing against her shoulder.
‘Why are you doing this to me?’ he asked.
She did not reply. He lifted her by her arms and kissed her, or bit her (he would not remember). They fell on the floor in a heap, and they kissed and licked and wrestled. He tore her top and dismantled her jeans. She fought, not sure yet if she was resisting or assisting. When he took away all her clothes, she stopped fighting. She turned away from him in a sting of shame, her face on the floor, an elbow shielding it from this wild man, proud breasts reaching for a place to rest, her bronze back rising and falling like the roll of a sand-dune in the twilight, her long firm legs lying languid.
He tugged at her shoulder to make her face him. He wanted to see her arrogant face now tamed and helpless, but she held on tenaciously to the foot of the main desk and dug her face further into her elbow. He held her hair in his fist and tried to see the face that had destroyed his peace. She had no more strength left in her to resist. Her hand left the foot of the desk, her shoulders obeyed and she turned to him, defeated and deranged. Her hair was now wild, the terrified hair-band had rolled away long ago. She shut her eyes as he suffocated her with a long violent kiss. He tried to hold her legs, but they were now glistening in sweat and his hands slipped. That made her laugh. But her demented laughter soon become wails as he finally managed to prise open her legs and plunder her with an inhuman strength. But it was a brief attack. In less than a minute, he fell on her breasts and rolled down on the floor panting and laughing.
He did not know such pleasurable violence was permitted outside the myth of pornography. The amused smile of the young Lavanya, that look of a patient zen master condoning the imperfection of an apprentice, was what he had thought the face of woman’s love to be. But what had happened just now was different.
Oparna was looking at him, breathing hard, lying on her mauled breasts. She and Acharya stared at each other as if they both knew they were going to die and had accepted this death. It was a long time before either spoke.
‘What have we done?’ she said, with a smile.
‘What have we done?’ Acharya repeated, more seriously than her. ‘What now?’
‘What now? You can’t steal a woman’s line. That’s not allowed.’
‘It’s a woman’s line?’
‘Of course. Anyway, it’s too early to say it.’ She rolled to his side and put her head on his chest. He felt her finger probe his navel. ‘You have such a big navel,’ she said, ‘It’s very deep too. And there is a lot of lint.’ She showed him what she had scooped out.
‘Your wife is away?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You seem to be very experienced.’
‘In what?’ Somehow it was a question that had only uncomfortable answers.
‘How many lovers have you had?’ he asked.
She looked at the ceiling, toying with her hair. ‘Is it true that we follow the decimal system because we have ten fingers?’
‘Most of us have eight fingers.’
She looked confused, but then her face lit up in comprehension. ‘Eight fingers and two thumbs?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Why do you want to know about the decimal system?’
‘I was counting my men,’ she said, ‘and eight fingers and two thumbs were not enough.’ She lifted her head to see his face. ‘Does it annoy you that I have slept with so many men?’
‘Yes. And I hate them,’ he said.
‘And that’s a nice thing to say to a woman,’ she said.
She looked at him fondly. He was like a cuddly giant seal. His eyes, usually bright and furious, now stared in the diffused glow of affection or gratitude. They lay together on the floor in silence for over an hour. Then something crossed her mind.
‘At The Talks,’ she said, ‘you remember the speech you gave at The Talks?’
‘You were there?’
‘Yes. I was there to letch at you. You said something then. You said, “Maybe we cannot understand physics at the quantum level without understanding other things which are not considered physics today. Other things like…” Then you stopped. I thought you wanted to say something, but did not think it was right to say it.’
‘Was it that obvious?’
‘What did you want to say?’
He became thoughtful and distant. She set her chin on his chest and tried to understand his face. Beautiful lips, she thought, full and somehow smug. As if they would accept the kiss of a woman as a deserved right. She was offended by this. She should have made him suffer more before yielding. He must not think she was his right, like a Nobel or something.
‘Tell me,’ she said.
‘There are things that a man like me cannot say in public,’ he said. ‘There are things that physics does not accept as its own. That’s why I could not say it then.’
‘You can tell me. A man can tell a naked woman anything.’
He did not speak for what seemed like a long time. She waited.
‘I have not told anyone this,’ she heard him say. And he fell silent again. He found it odd that he must say this now, in the dampness of a nudity that was somehow comical, and say it to a woman he did not know beyond the temporal anguish of love.
‘Physics has to go,’ he said, like a dying revolutionary wishing freedom for his real estate. That disappointed her even though she knew what he had to say was going to be, of course, about physics. She had hoped it would be about something else.
‘Nobody is admitting it, but physics is stuck, physics has to change,’ he said. ‘The current laws are not enough. It needs something else. It has to accept something. Bombarding particles in a nine-billion-dollar collider is useless. It has to accept that. And more. It has to accept that life and consciousness are a hidden part of what we are trying to study. I cannot say something like this in public because it is a privilege given only to scientists who have gone mad.’
