Manu Joseph - Serious Men

Something happened in the trembling vessel on the stove, and she busied herself with that.

After dinner, which was saved only by the prawn fry, Ayyan went up to the terrace for the meeting. He took his son along. Adi was wearing both the caps his father had got him, one over the other. Against a bleak starless sky, over a hundred men and a few women were gathered. Some were sitting on chairs; some sat on the tar floor of the terrace; others were standing. A drunkard sang softly. At the heart of the conference were three men who looked cruel. They were the agents of a builder. One of them was a fat man with moist black lips and calm eyes. He was an old hand of the underworld who mended his ways after the spiritual experience of being shot by the police. It was said that every Tuesday, when he went to the Siddhivinayak temple in Prabhadevi, he wore a bloodstained vest with three bullet holes in it.

Every now and then, builders who eyed the vast sprawling property on which the grey blocks of BDD stood started a round of enticements to lure the residents into selling off their flats. This nocturnal meeting was one of the many Ayyan had seen. He knew nothing would come out of it. There were too many dissenting voices and an irrational greed. Some thought they could extract more if they waited. Alcoholics wanted to sell fast, and that strengthened the resolve of those who wanted to wait. And then there were many who feared that they would not be able to survive in the new skyscrapers that the builders had promised. ‘My sister says that in the apartment blocks, you have to keep the doors shut,’ a woman was saying aloud, but not to anyone in particular. Someone was telling the agents that all the forty families on the ground floor would have to be given adjacent flats in the new high-rises because they had lived like one big family for decades. Ayyan wanted to sell, but he knew it was not going to happen soon.

Some men spotted Ayyan, and egged him to get closer to the agents. ‘Ask questions,’ an old man begged him, with hope in his cataract eyes.

‘Mani has come, Mani has come,’ someone said aloud.

Adi looked severely at a woman and said, ‘That’s our chair.’

Ayyan endured the meeting in silence wondering if there was a way he could decide for all these fools and settle the matter once and for all. But how? He thought a good special effects engineer could pull it off. Make God appear and say in cosmic echoes, ‘Sell your stupid homes. Take ten lakhs for every flat and be done with it. And don’t piss in the corridors, you bastards.’

When the meeting ended with the plans for holding another meeting, Ayyan took his son for a long walk to the Worli Seaface. The furtive couples and brisk walkers had left, and the promenade was almost deserted. They ambled in the gentle breeze for a while. Then they sat on a pink cement bench. Adi was sleepy. He was leaning on his father, but his eyes were open.

‘Say, “Fibonacci … Fibonacci”,’ Ayyan said. A familiar look of concentration came to Adi’s face. He played with the words in his mind. His father mouthed the words slowly. ‘Fee bo na chi.’

Adi repeated after him, ‘See rees. Fee bon a chi see rees.’

Ayyan said, ‘Fibonacci Series.’

Adi repeated the words.

‘Brilliant,’ Ayyan said. They sat there in silence and listened to the soft lull of the Arabian Sea.

Adi yawned and asked, ‘What if someone finds out?’

ROUND TABLES WERE oval even in the Institute of Theory and Research. That was the first thought that came to Oparna as she reached the second-floor hall for the monthly Round Table. She had missed the last two and so this was her first. There was a massive oblong desk at the centre of the room around which men were sitting in agitated concentric circles. Some were standing and chatting. Cheerful peons were passing biscuits and tea. There was much gaiety and jostling. Like sperm under a microscope. Most of the scientists were in light shirts worn over loose comfortable trousers. They were austere men who knew they were austere. Some of the younger ones were in jeans. Despite the overwhelming informality of this place, the loose shirts, the tempestuous white hair and the leather sandals, they were so clearly the masters in the room, their special status differentiated from the final concentric circle where the secretaries stood silently, sullen and unspeaking, as though the biscuits were stale. In the eye of the room’s gentle commotion was the solid figure of Arvind Acharya. The men either side of him were turned away, talking animatedly with others. Once again, he was a rock in the stream. All turbulence went around him.

When Oparna walked in, a silence grew. She made her way nervously through the outer rings. Grey balding heads turned, one after the other. There were two female secretaries somewhere on the fringes, but she felt as though she were the only woman in the room because she knew the men felt that way too. Jana Nambodri, with that cloud of stylish silver hair, short-sleeved shirt neatly tucked into corduroy trousers, was at the oblong table, directly facing Acharya. Nambodri stood up, and with an elaborate sweep of his hand showed her an empty seat in the second row. She inched her way delicately towards the chair. Old men in her path moved their legs and made way. Some of them turned away uncomfortably as her back almost grazed their tired faces. Some pretended to continue chatting while looking at her rear in respectful nonchalance.

‘She is a Bengali?’ a man intended to whisper, but the silence was so deep that everybody heard it. (The man probably was a Bengali.) Faint chuckles filled the air.

‘Historically,’ Nambodri said aloud, ‘the only just punishment for a Bengali male has been a Bengali female.’ A round of laughter went through the room. ‘We forgot to mention it before, gentlemen, she is our first female faculty,’ Nambodri declared.

One man clapped. The solitary applause was about to die prematurely, but the others joined in to reinforce the compliment. The applause faded into a long comfortable silence.

And that was how the evening would unfold, with festive commotion giving way to silences, and silences broken by profound questions about the universe, and questions easing into laughs. It was a long tradition here for the scientists to meet on the first Friday of every month and chat.

Ayyan Mani surveyed the room with his back to the wall, as he had done many times, and tried to understand how it came to be that truth was now in the hands of these unreal men. They were in the middle of debating the perfect way to cut a cake and were concluding that carving triangular pieces, as everybody does, was inefficient. Then they made fun of a French scientist, who was not in the room, because he had said that man would never devise a way to predict the highest possible prime number. After that they began to wonder what the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva would reveal.

Ayyan could not bear it. This never-ending quest for truth. In the simpler ages, wise mendicants, metaphorical zens, sons of God, sages who turned into anthills, all such types could not say in crisp clear copy that The Times of India could publish, the reason why life existed or why there was something instead of nothing. They could have just said it in a neat paragraph and solved the mystery once and for all. But they didn’t. They told fables instead. Now, truth was in the hands of the men in this room, and they were more incomprehensible than the men of God. Ayyan was certain that there was no such thing called truth. There was only the pursuit of truth and it was a pursuit that would always go on. It was a form of employment. ‘Everything that people do in this world is because they have nothing better to do,’ he told Oja Mani once. ‘Einstein had something called Relativity. You scrub the floor twice a day.’