Manu Joseph - Serious Men

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?’

OPARNA GOSHMAULIK POUND it funny. That the curtain was blood-red, that it went up in somnolent folds, and that there was a silence of anticipation all around. All this drama at an event where the guest lecturer had promised to speak on the ‘Interpretations of Quantum Mechanics’. Even the lights were dimming now. The Talks had begun. It was an annual event in honour of departing research scholars, the Institute’s version of a convocation ceremony but without the black gowns or the precondition that the scholars should now get out into the real world.