Manu Joseph - Serious Men

He was now standing up, fully dressed. She was sitting on the floor looking accusingly at him, holding her torn top. He was embarrassed by her stern look.

‘How do I go home now?’ she asked.

Ten minutes later, they were walking down on the driveway where her Baleno was parked. She was wearing his massive anorak that came almost to her knees.

‘Do I look like a scarecrow?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ he said.

When she got into her car, he bent his head like a benevolent father. She rolled down the window.

‘I will see you tomorrow,’ he told her.

‘We have a lot of work to do,’ she said.

‘Yes. A lot of work to do.’

‘Tell me something,’ she said, turning on the ignition. ‘This search for life in the stratosphere, does it have anything to do with … you know … the missing link in physics and all that?’

‘No.’

The guards opened the gates for her car to pass. Long after it disappeared, Acharya was standing on the driveway feeling the cool breeze and listening to the roar of the sea. He was relieved to be alone. There was a sense of joy in his heart and a feeling that he had done something endearingly mischievous. He imagined Lavanya smiling at him disapprovingly. It started to drizzle, and he made his way towards the gates. The night security scrambled to salute. As he passed through the gates, he and a guard exchanged a long glance of mutual suspicion.

Acharya’s simple joy vanished when he reached home and turned on the lights of the hall. He felt dirty and cheap. He sat in the leather armchair, too scared to go to the bedroom. The clothes Lavanya had discarded in a hurry before shutting her suitcase still lay there on the bed. Her bottles of homeopathic tablets were on the nightstand. There was her treadmill too. Her things. They would be looking at him. So he slept in the hall, in the armchair, until he was awakened by the 7.45 alarm of his daughter. The alarm had an edge to it this morning. It was morbid. Like a little girl’s dismembered doll. The alarm was a voice from the other side of a fence, from where the severe wraiths of his wife and daughter looked at him with hurt and anger. But as the morning unfolded, he was filled with the anticipation of seeing Oparna again.

And that’s how he was in the days that followed. He would wake up in the despair of having murdered his wife and daughter, and then he would search impatiently for his clothes, to go and wait for Oparna.

In the common paranoia that afflicts lovers, Acharya and Oparna did not meet alone in his room any more, even when there was a professional need to meet. Eyes were watching, ears were listening. They feared the omnipotent gaze of Ayyan Mani and his smile that Oparna believed was replete with meaning. The scientists and research hands who were involved in the Balloon Mission began to feel that group meetings were suddenly frequent and long. In those meetings Acharya and Oparna would steal glances of forced grimness. They smiled with their eyes and spoke the language of love through dry enquiries. At night, she would wait for him in the abandoned basement and he would appear like a shadow.

This went on for a week, including a whole Sunday of love and dining in the dungeon. Oparna brought an electric toaster, bread, fruit and even blankets, and they lay huddled all day. On Tuesday, Lavanya called.

AYYAN MANI SET the phone receiver down with a diabolic smile. The fate of every love story, he knew very well, is in the rot of togetherness, or in the misery of separation. Lovers often choose the first with the same illusory wisdom that makes people choose to die later than now. And in the deceptions of new love, they not only forget that this insanity is transient but they also, hilariously, imagine that they are clandestine. Their nocturnal nudity, they believe they have camouflaged in office clothes. Their private bond, they have spread thin in public as careful distances. They infect each other with the fever in their eyes and they believe only they can diagnose it. But in reality, love is like forbidden wealth. Its glow cannot be hidden. Sooner or later everyone comes to know. And two people become spectacles in a show they do not know is running to full houses.

Ayyan was not certain if the Brahmins who contemplated the universe were aware of it yet, but the security guards and the peons and the sweepers knew that the Big Man was screwing the basement item. The spectral presence that the lovers had sensed outside the basement door was the spirit of Ayyan’s long reach. The whole week, he was told about the moans and whispers that came from the lab. The time Acharya went to the basement and when the two emerged, and how he crouched fondly at her car window and said goodbye. Now the time had come for this romance to be shaken, and he suspected it did not have the good fortune to survive. Lavanya Acharya had just called from Chennai.

‘Is he there?’ she asked.

‘No, Madam,’ Ayyan said, after a deliberate pause. The pause, he knew, annoyed her. She suspected that her husband avoided her sometimes at work.

‘Where is he?’

‘I don’t know where he is, Madam,’ Ayyan said. (Acharya was in his room at that moment.) ‘Can I take a message?’

‘Tell him I’m on the seven o’clock flight. I will be arriving before nine. Is it raining heavily?’

‘Very heavily.’

‘Are the roads flooded?’

‘The trains are running.’

‘And the roads?’

‘The traffic is moving.’

‘Tell him he doesn’t have to come to the airport,’ she said. ‘A friend is picking me up.’

Ayyan collected the late mails and fax messages, and walked into Acharya’s room. He was scribbling something on a notepad. Ayyan peeped to see what he was writing. It was a long string of maths rubbish. Numbers and symbols. Pursuit of truth, apparently.

‘Any instructions for me, Sir?’ he asked. Acharya shook his head.

‘I’ll leave then.’

Ayyan did not tell him about his wife’s call. She would be home in a few hours and would try to call him. But then he would be in the unreachable depths of the basement, naked with his mistress. He would go home before dawn in the stupor of love and see the terrifying image of his wife. Why would Ayyan want to tell him about the call?

That night, the lovers lay curled on a purple blanket, like two brackets. A bowl of seedless grapes was by their side. ‘Have you ever wondered about Junk DNA?’ Acharya asked.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘98 per cent of the human genome is junk and does nothing apparently. It makes no sense that junk genes exist.’

‘There must be a reason,’ he said, reaching for a grape. ‘I have a hypothesis.’ He thought she would giggle because she usually found it funny when he said ‘hypothesis’. But she was listening keenly. He said, ‘Life travels through the universe as microscopic spores riding on asteroids and they fall on different worlds. Depending on the conditions in those worlds, different segments of the genome become useful. On Earth, only a fraction is needed.’

‘Where do you think the spores are coming from?’ she asked.

He took another grape and said, ‘I don’t know everything.’

It was around two in the morning when he made his way home. It was raining hard and he went unmindful, like a happy drunk. His light-blue shirt stuck to his soft body; his trousers lay precariously at his lower waist. (He had left the belt in the basement.)

He put the key in the latch and turned the knob. The light was on in the hall. He shut the door and stood near the couch. He tried to understand why the light was on. Then he noticed the tidiness of the room. The curtains and the tablecloth had changed. The books he had left on the couch had vanished. He went to the bedroom with a sinking heart. He could see a sleeping figure shrouded in a blanket.