Serious Men (19 page)

‘Do you want me to go with you?’

‘I know you don’t want to come.’

‘I will come.’

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

‘I will go with you.’

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

‘Holiday?’

‘Yes. I am such a sick woman.’

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

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

‘I can see very well,’ he said.

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

‘When are you back?’

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

‘From what?’

‘From you,’ she said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Who is Meenu?’

Lavanya looked exasperated. ‘She is our cook.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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