Manu Joseph - Serious Men

He did not seem very keen to run around, though he appeared very interested in what was happening around him. After a while, the children came together, close to where he was standing. They were panting gleefully, and someone decided that since they were all very tired they would play husband-and-wife. In their opinion it was a relaxing game.

Without too much conflict they split into pairs. A remaining girl was quickly joined with the silent boy. She looked at him condescendingly, because she was a girl and he was just a boy. Though he didn’t ask for directions she explained the game to him. ‘It’s easy,’ she said, as an incentive. They had to just behave like parents. All the other pairs walked away to various nooks of the terrace where there were imaginary markets and theatres. The boy looked at his girl for a few seconds wondering what they must do that parents did. Then a solution entered his oddly large head.

He gently eased the girl to the ground and spread her legs. She looked confused but tried to figure out what he was trying to do. He climbed on top of her and bobbed his hips clumsily. The young mothers, who until now had gazed lazily in intervals at their children like wild animals on grassland, came to life. They let out embarrassed chuckles and rushed to separate the boy from his temporary wife. The boy went back to his corner with a foul look on his face. The girl disengaged herself from the adult intervention. Now that she understood what he was doing, she continued with the game by pretending to tie her hair, a hint of boredom on her face. Then she went to sleep on the tar-coated floor.

Since all the pairs were busy, and his own mate was asleep, Adi went home. Oja let him in. The boy walked into the house with a wise calm and pulled out the Encyclopaedia Britannica: M — P from the lower portion of the television stand.

‘Forgot to tell you,’ Oja told her husband, ‘his teacher has written a complaint in the handbook again. You have to meet the Principal tomorrow morning.’

‘What has he done now?’ Ayyan asked with a proud smile. Adi looked up at his father and gave a mischievous wink.

‘You are the one who is spoiling him,’ Oja said. ‘They are going to kick him out of the school one of these days.’

She went to Adi and twisted his ear gently. ‘He asked one of those questions again in the class,’ she said.

‘What question?’ Ayyan asked, now chuckling. ‘I don’t know. I wouldn’t know even if you told me now. This boy is crazy.’

‘What did you do, Adi?’

‘The science teacher was saying that if you throw anything up it has to come down. Basic things like that. So I asked her if the acceleration due to gravity of any planet anywhere in the universe can make an object travel faster than light.’

Oja looked distressed. ‘And he was reading one of your books in the class,’ she said in an accusing way. ‘I don’t know how he took it with him.’

Ayyan made a conspiratorial face at his son and asked which book it was.

‘Brief History of Time,’ Adi said. ‘I don’t like it.’

Oja was staring at her son with a mixture of fear and excitement. Ayyan loved that look on his wife’s face, that sudden awakening in her from the gloomy acceptance of a life in BDD.

‘He is just ten,’ she said. ‘How does he understand these things?’

Last month, in the middle of the class, Adi had asked the science teacher something about arithmetic progression. A few weeks before that it was something else. Oja heard these stories from his teachers who were usually in some sort of happy delirium when they complained to her.

That night, Adi was sleeping near the fridge, as always, and his father lay next to him, holding the glass-bangled hand of his wife. Ayyan wondered if he must build a wooden loft. He turned towards his son who was facing him, but he was fast asleep. After a few minutes the boy turned in his sleep and hid his face under the fridge. That was a heartening development.

A pale light was coming through the rusted grilles of the kitchen window and Ayyan could see Oja in the blue glow. Her open palm, with its clear fatelines, rested loosely on her forehead. Her red nightgown was far less arousing than the saris she used to wear after marriage. She was always in a sari in those days because her mother had said that she should not come across as liberal. Oja’s legs were joined together and folded at the knees. Her silver anklets lay still. Ayyan ran his hand over her waist. She opened her eyes without confusion or protest. She lifted her head to check on Adi. The couple moved with skill. They could caress and even tumble and roll a bit without making a sound.

They were in a sort of common entanglement, with Ayyan’s shorts hanging at his knees, Oja’s nightgown lifted, her legs parted, when she, yawning, decided to check on Adi again. He was sitting with his back resting against the wall.

‘They wouldn’t let me play that yesterday,’ he said.

In the morning, when Adi was having his bath in the glass enclosure, Ayyan told his wife, his eyes dejected and voice deep, ‘I have something to say.’ Oja looked at him and then at the boiling milk. ‘For the sake of our son,’ he said, ‘we must stop seeking our own pleasures.’

One hour later, as he was walking Adi to school, Ayyan thought of how Oja had readily accepted his decision. She had nodded, with one eye on the milk. It was an image that stayed with him till he reached a back lane in Worli and approached the tall black gates of St Andrew’s School. The decay of a man, he told himself, is first conveyed to him by his wife.

Oja’s face, in the inconvenience of love, was now a cold face that did not seem even to register pain any more. Once she used to moan and make short gasps and turn coy. Now, when he made love to her, she looked as though she was waiting for the bus. When she first began to assume that hollow gaze, he used it as a device in a private game in which the goal was to extract a reaction from her — a yelp, a sigh, a moan, anything. Then the game transformed. He imagined he was a powerful tea-planter raping a worker who had come to him asking for a loan. But the blank stare of his wife continued to haunt him. Eventually he put an end to all his private games. And he accepted her detached love in the same way that he accepted her cups of tea.

But her blank disenchanted face sometimes frightened him. It reminded him that the woman he loved so much was stranded in a dull life because of him. There was a time when he thought he could save her from BDD and everything else, that love alone could make him superhuman and somehow take them to a better life. But that did not happen, and it probably was never going to happen.

He felt an irresistible urge to fall down and go to sleep, like the perpetual drunkards of the chawls. He felt like fleeing to some place far away where he would be single, where he would expect nothing from people and people would expect nothing from him. He would eat from the fruits of a tree owned by no man, and sleep under clear blue skies, lulled by the sound of the waves and the winds from faraway lands. He imagined himself on a giant hoarding, his back to the world, walking on a long tapering road towards an endless sea, and from the horizon of the sea rose the incandescent words — ‘Free Man ®’.

But, he knew, the freedom of a bachelor is the freedom of a stray dog. On such days, when he felt stranded in family life, he always invoked the memory of the evening when Oja had first walked into his home as a terrified bride. She was so beautiful, and her fear was so arousing. But on the first night, when he sat beside her on the conjugal mattress that was filled with funereal roses left by neighbours and friends, he discovered that his new wife had cut her arms and legs with a Topaz blade. She had done it very carefully and methodically so that she did not damage her veins. She wanted an excuse to be left alone. It was her way of saving herself from being undressed by a stranger.