Manu Joseph - Serious Men

Acharya’s office had been transformed into a bustling place, and Ayyan Mani in the anteroom was no longer a medium. All sorts of people had the right to walk in. But after the initial impetus, and after the old friends had fulfilled their promises, they all went back to their countries. Acharya’s room returned to its calm. Ayyan slowly rebuilt the wall again between Acharya and the rest of the world, but his importance was somewhat diminished because the natural force of the events granted Oparna the undeniable right to open the sacred inner door whenever she pleased. Acharya began to spend most of his time with her, and they often worked together into the stillness of the night.

IT WAS PAST midnight, and they were probably the only people left in the Institute. The lone window in his room was shut, but the smell of the impending monsoon was in the air — a whiff of salt and wet earth that lulled the mind into sleep or into remembering old rains. Acharya was reading a long list of lab equipment that had to arrive. He finally took his eyes off the material to give them relief. He removed his glasses, leaned back on his enormous black chair and stretched. He looked at the girl who was sitting across the table from him. Her head was bent in intense concentration. Oparna was reading Elementary Descriptions of Non-culturable Bacteria. She was a reassuring sight, almost pleasing. There was this unremarkable happiness inside her. She laughed easily, and her laughter had a womanly tolerance about it, as though she had heard the joke before but still liked it. And when she chuckled, especially when the men had tried to find a name for the Balloon Project, she would cover her mouth with one hand and arch a bit. And there was this fragrance of lemon about her, a very expensive lemon. She was a few inches shorter than Lavanya, but somehow appeared tall. So firm and strong and agile, she was. Very tidy too. She was always producing tissues from her large olive-green bag.

Girl, he thought, and found it silly that he should think she was a girl because she obviously was a girl. Yet, if she died, mysteriously murdered probably, the newspapers would write, ‘A thirty-year-old woman was found dead in suspicious circumstances.’ They never described a thirty-year-old as a girl. He wondered why. Even she would die one day, and he felt sad it should be so. There was so much life in her, and so much beauty. She had a startling face, which he could not see right now. He looked apologetically at the reasonable mounds of her breasts. Her long fingers were toying with a thin gold chain around her long young neck. He strained to see her feet. But he could not see them from that angle. He liked the way her slender toes rested on her thin slippers. Her toenails were always red, and her fingernails pink. He concentrated on her head, which was still bent. Her thick real black hair was stretched to full tension and tied back in a severe pony-tail. He found it funny.

‘If I strum your head, there will be music,’ he said.

Oparna looked up. When their eyes met, he did not know why he felt he should not look at her. ‘Just an observation,’ he told his paperweight.

‘Sorry, you said something?’

‘I said nothing. Nothing important, actually.’

She smiled and went back to Elementary Descriptions of Non-culturable Bacteria. But she was not reading. She had not been reading for some time. You must strum then, she wanted to say. Unknowingly, her finger circled a curl that was falling on her cheek. She knew he had been looking. And her heart was pounding, her throat felt cold. She quietly conceded that she was all messed up and there was no hope for her. So many cute men in this country nowadays, all beginning to wear good narrow shoes too, and here she was hoping that a giant astronomer whose shirt buttons actually rotated in the strain of his stomach would look at her more carefully and find something more he could do with her hair. But he did have a very beautiful face and pure luminous eyes that sometimes stared like a child’s. She knew how insane a man could make her, and she feared that. But what could she do?

An hour later, they stepped into the anteroom together. (Ayyan had left a long time ago.) They went down the corridor which was now completely deserted. They went in a silence that made them feel like accomplices.

Acharya walked with her to her silver-grey Baleno that lay on the side of the driveway. She got in with an expression that she was sure was the face of indifference. As she drove away, he waved, and he realized from the confused face of the night security at the guard post that he was waving long after she had vanished through the black gates. He went home wondering if Oparna had smiled at him through the rear-view mirror.

It was strange, the way she had got into her car without a word. She was probably angry because he had made a personal comment. He wanted to call her and ask if she was angry, but that, he knew, would be very silly. He turned the key, and opened the door of his home carefully so that Lavanya would not be disturbed, and felt his way from the dark hall to the bedroom. He could see the figure of Lavanya lying on her bed with her hand on her forehead. And the odours of Kerala’s curative oils reached him.

Oparna drove down the Marine Drive with the windows open. The road was empty and against the lemon-yellow street lights she could see a gentle drizzle swaying in the wind. She was thinking of Acharya’s eyes.

At the gates of a high-rise building in Breach Candy, a security guard let her in, his small-town eyes showing faint contempt for a girl who returned home so late. When the lift door closed and became a mirror, Oparna studied it carefully. Her hair was dishevelled, and her long top looked so terrible that she felt like some sort of activist.

When she let herself into her flat she did not know why she became so furtive, as if she had done something delightfully wrong. She tiptoed towards her parents’ bedroom and peeped through the door. They were snoring. Father had a longer hiss. She went to her room, which was in a faint purple glow, its flimsy curtains flying in the wind. She felt shy as she undressed. And smiled to herself when she tried to read.

She lay awake for much of the night, thinking of his infant face and innocent rage. And how easily he understood the world of microbes. Just a silly crush, she thought — it would go away in the morning.

So it is with all sudden lovers who believed that their torments would vanish in the morning, but inevitably it is already morning when such a convenient consolation comes to them.

She was woken by her mother who usually had an ulterior motive when she did that. After ensuring that she had disturbed her daughter’s sleep, she came back with a cup of tea and said, ‘An alliance has come.’ Oparna’s eyes which had just opened shut tight. ‘The boy is not in software,’ her mother said encouragingly, and added, with an edge in her voice, ‘Now don’t say you are a lesbian.’

IN THE ‘FINITE’ corridor of the Institute, four astronomers were huddled together, questioning whether twin-star systems were indeed the norm in the universe. They were then distracted by the distant sound of heels. They fell silent and looked in the direction of the prospect.

Oparna appeared. Her hair flying, face glowing, in a sky-blue shirt that for the first time introduced them to the real shape of her breasts, their study in the coming days destined to be called topology. She was wearing a long black denim skirt which had a flower, or something similar, embroidered around the thigh. She passed by them with an innocent smile. They stared at her back. The sound of the heels faded and died. They knew that here as the Doppler Effect.

‘Birthday?’ asked Ayyan Mani.