Manu Joseph - Serious Men

‘Are you saying, Arvind, there is not the slightest possibility of an alien civilization sending us a signal?’

‘There is always a mathematical possibility.’

‘That’s good enough, isn’t it? A mathematical possibility. Listen to this, Arvind. In 1874 the American Medical Weekly reported something strange. During the Battle of Raymond in Mississippi in 1863, a bullet hit the scrotum of a soldier, shattering his left testicle. The bullet penetrated the left side of the abdomen of a seventeen-year-old girl who was sitting in her house nearby. Nine months later she delivered a healthy boy. Apparently, the bullet had carried with it some of the soldier’s semen and had entered the girl’s ovary. That’s how she had become pregnant with the soldier’s child.’

‘That’s what she told her mother.’

‘A mathematical possibility,’ Nambodri said, ‘A mathematical possibility however small, is enough for us to go in search of truth. In science, hope is everything.’

‘Hope,’ Acharya said, with bitter memories, ‘is a lapse in concentration.’

Nambodri looked gloomily towards the window and rubbed his nose. He knew he had to find more diabolic ways to win this war. And he had to find battlefields where Acharya did not know how to fight. This insufferable fat tyrant was once a lanky affable boy with a lot of mischief in his eyes. When they were in Princeton, Acharya was famous for growing marijuana in a flower pot. He even wrote a secret manual called The Joint Family, with clear instructions for future generations on how to grow the grass in a hostel-room environment. How did that boy become this monster who was willing to antagonize everyone for the sake of something as ephemeral as conviction?

Nambodri rose from the chair and headed for the door. Just then something crossed his mind. ‘You do know about the Pope, don’t you?’ he asked. ‘What about him?’

‘Arvind, switch on the TV.’

‘Why?’

‘The Pope is dead.’

The two men looked at each other through a perfect silence. Then Acharya smiled.

He and Pope John Paul shared a past. The top cosmologists in the world were once invited to attend a conference in the most unlikely venue for such a gathering — the Vatican City. The Pontifical Academy of Sciences hosted the scientists because the Pope had figured out that the Big Bang theory was not in conflict with the Old Testament after all, and he wanted to support it cheerfully. Since the Big Bang claimed that the universe had a beginning, it left room for God to do something, like create the beginning. Heretics like Acharya were invited to educate them that God and science can coexist. At the end of the conference, the pontiff met his guests, one after the other, at his summer residence, Castel Gandolfo. In the long queue that moved towards the holy man, the famous crippled scientist Stephen Hawking was right in front of Acharya. When Hawking was wheeled to the Pope, the pontiff famously knelt down on the floor and had a lengthy conversation with him. Then Acharya walked towards the holy man and said something to him in his ear. The Pope turned away looking dismayed. What exactly Acharya had said was never known. He would never tell. The Vatican refused to comment, but a spokesman later said, ‘What that man told the Pope is not important, but, yes, I don’t think he will be invited here again.’

Nambodri held the door knob, but he was unwilling to leave his friend without solving an old mystery. ‘What did you tell the Pope, Arvind?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Come on. He is dead now. Some people told me that he looked very hurt. What did you tell him?’

Acharya wanted to chuckle, but these days he discreetly mourned any death, even if it was the Pope’s.

‘He was a good man,’ Acharya said, in a mellow voice. ‘In 1992 he admitted that Galileo was right. He admitted that the Earth goes around the Sun. He was a good man.’

Nambodri left the room with a melancholy smile, thinking of the charming old conflicts he was never a part of. That smile, Acharya knew, was the summary of all men who stay out of fierce enchanting battles because they want to build their place in the world through the deceptions of good public relations.

AYYAN MANI ALMOST sprinted up the steep colonial stairway of Block Number Forty-One carrying a plastic bag which had two caps for Adi and prawn fry that was still hot. The faint smell of prawns made his stomach rumble and he was in a hurry to get home, but he stopped on the first floor when he saw the outsiders. Two girls in smallish T-shirts and fitted jeans, and a tall reptilian boy were surrounded by the tiny women who lived on that floor. ‘The morons have come again?’ Ayyan asked a man who was going down to drink.

These three were among the pubescent scholars of International Board schools who landed occasionally in the name of social work to add a glow to their imminent applications to American schools. They brought food for children, pens for illiterate old men (who hated them) and generally tried to empower the women. They often wandered around the corridors, knocking on random doors. Once they told Oja that she should, ‘share responsibilities’ with her husband and make him wash clothes and cook some days.

Ayyan stood at the edge of the small crowd and studied the scholars. Their faces were so lit by good breeding; they were so distinct, so large. This time the saviours were here to influence women to send their children to English-medium schools. They were also running a campaign to convert all municipality schools into English-medium. When the women noticed Ayyan they smiled at him.

‘His son goes to a good school,’ a woman said pointing to him. The two reformist girls looked at him and smiled approvingly. He wanted to slap them really hard.

‘You came in a Honda Accord?’ he asked anxiously.

‘No,’ one of the girls said, ‘it’s a Lancer.’

‘Yes, yes. That’s the car. The boys are scratching it and trying to break the windows.’

‘Oh my gaad,’ the girls yelped together. ‘Where is the bloody driver?’ one screamed. They ran to the stairs. The boy ran behind them.

Ayyan looked at the crowd of women through a moment of silence and they all burst out laughing.

‘Why do you stand like this and listen to those fools?’ he asked.

‘Timepass,’ someone said, wiping her tears, and they shook again with seismic laughter.

He was confused when Oja Mani opened the door and asked him sternly, ‘Did you read the full story?’ The question was meant for Adi, who was standing near the gas-stove looking exasperated. Oja was in the middle of interrogating her son. She had bought a comic book for him to ensure that he read something normal, something far more ordinary than the fat reverential books that his father was encouraging him to read. She was worried that her son was becoming abnormal. She had seen him on the terrace last evening, standing aloof during a cricket match. She had encroached into the notional pitch and asked the boys to let him bat. They looked at her confused and then ignored her. Adi, from the fringes of the game, had made an embarrassed face asking her to leave. The fear of raising a strange genius was eating her for some time. It had inspired her this evening to buy him a Tinkle comic even though it cost twenty rupees. After just a few minutes of sitting with it near the fridge, Adi had declared that he had finished reading it. She did not believe him.

‘Did you read the full story?’ she asked again, pointing to Tinkle. The smell of prawn fry distracted her for a moment and she threw a foul look at her husband because she took outside food as a direct affront. Adi came to his father sniffing like a dog.

‘Praan,’ he said.