Manu Joseph - Serious Men

‘Phone,’ the maid said with a grimace.

Lavanya went back to reading. The phone on the steel double-helix stand near the television rang for a while and died. They had not been taking calls for the last three days. That morning, the phone was ringing relentlessly, and Lavanya knew why. It was the desperation of a bitch.

The phone rang again. Lavanya let it ring. Acharya looked at the phone just once and turned away sadly. She saw that. The day went by in the lull of the rains and the sedation of its cool breeze, and the unrelenting calm of a wound that was stirred every now and then by the phone. In the evening, when the phone rang one more time, Lavanya finally took the call. There was a silence at the other end.

‘Is that Oparna?’ Lavanya asked.

‘Yes,’ the voice said.

‘This is our home and we do not want to be disturbed. Don’t call again.’

She put the receiver down and pulled the cord out of the socket. She looked at her husband who was sitting at the dining-table. His back was bent and his head drooped to his left a bit. She felt an ache, as though she had denied an infant a simple joy. She served him dinner that night.

‘Can’t get good fish in the rains,’ she told him, wondering if crustaceans could be called fish. He had said something about it before.

On Monday morning, he left for work. On the walkway around the central lawn, he felt he was being watched. The soft sound of the sea was like the murmur of whispers. And two young men in jeans who passed him by appeared to look at him with a cautious respect that had nothing to do with his scientific stature.

Ayyan Mani rose in his customary half-stand. The edges of his lips, surely, were wrinkled in a knowing smile.

‘Ask Oparna to come in,’ Acharya said, as he went into his room.

Ayyan punched in the numbers, thinking of Acharya’s unreasonable tranquillity. It reminded him of the peace in his own chest a fortnight after his father’s death. It was the peace of a cruel relief at how easily a trauma had passed.

‘The Director has asked you to come up,’ he told Oparna. He heard the phone go dead immediately. He looked at the clock to mark the time. If she arrived in less than three minutes it would mean that at some point on the stairways or down the corridors she had been running. It was always entertaining, the misery of lovers. He held a receiver to his ear to check if he could hear the Director’s room clearly. He did not want to miss anything today.

She walked in less than three minutes after Ayyan had called her. But she pretended to be calm, almost lethargic. Ayyan pointed to the sofa. He wanted to study her face. It had been over a week since he saw her. She stood there in a sort of meek defiance. She wanted to head straight to the door, but she was not sure about her place any more. Ayyan could see that.

He dialled a number and frowned as if he could not get through. From behind the frown, he looked at her carefully. So this is how a liberated woman looks when she is heartbroken. Dark circles, defeat in the eyes, hair unhealthy. She would let a man do this to her. Oparna Goshmaulik would. Again and again. But there were many maids in BDD who would never let a man break their hearts. In fact, a growing number of girls in the chawls, especially the ones who were really poor, were choosing to remain unmarried so that they could live in peace. So Ayyan wondered what was so formidable about women like Oparna. More than the impoverished girls of the chawls whom they hoped to uplift, it was Oparna and her lemon-fragrant friends who were weak and dependent on men. They appeared to do many marvellous things, but what they wanted was a man. He thought of Acharya and Nambodri, and the alcoholics of BDD whose livers bled, and the silver sperms in the seaside homes that they inherited, who listened to ‘My Way’, and the pathetic evening faces in the gents’ compartment, and he shuddered at the thought of ever being in a situation where he would have to be dependent on the emotions and love of men. It was a terrifying thought, really.

‘Oparna is here,’ he told the phone, and pointed her to the inner door.

Arvind Acharya could not understand why this apparition always made him weak. The words he was forming in his mind, the morose declaration of separation, vanished. Like the careful notes of an orator blown away by a sudden gust. There she stood, so splendid in her long shapeless top and jeans. Her eyes, so breathtakingly tired, her face diffused and weak and adorable. He wanted to hold her and touch that mystical spot which made the heads of women fall on the shoulders of their men.

He was standing by the window. She walked over to him and held his hand. ‘Why didn’t you call me?’ she asked.

‘I didn’t feel like it, Oparna,’ he said.

‘You didn’t feel like it?’

‘That’s the truth.’

‘Just a call would have kept me from going mad.’

‘You’ll be all right.’

‘I don’t want to be all right.’

‘But that’s the best we can hope for each other.’

She could see in his eyes the finality of decision. She had seen it in other men. The end of a spell and their sudden remembrance of what they called conscience or freedom or family or work, or something else. And she felt tired now. Tired of the violence of love and separation. She reached for his hand again and locked her fingers in his. She looked at the floor and wept. She tried not to, but she wept. Her grip around his fingers grew fierce. She shut her eyes tight. He could barely make out what she said. ‘I am not some holiday you take when your wife is away’ (probably that was what she had said). She untangled her fingers from his and wiped her tears, like a child. Then she walked away.

She would return four times that day, against her better judgement, to plead with him, and each time she would go back in the humiliation of having begged for love. She would do that for another three days until Acharya would tell her, ‘This can’t go on. Either I should leave, or you should leave.’ She pushed the heap of mail from his desk. She looked demented. But Acharya was capable of far greater rage, and in the fury of the moment that drove away the pigeons outside the window, he screamed, ‘Get out, get out.’

Character, Ayyan Mani observed in the anteroom, is actually blood pressure.

Oparna did not visit the third floor for days after that. But one Wednesday she appeared. She went to Acharya and said, ‘I can accept this. It’s over, I know. Sorry I behaved like an idiot. I’m all right now.’

‘I am sorry,’ Acharya said wearily. ‘I am responsible for all this. But I don’t know what is the right thing to do now.’

‘Don’t worry about that,’ she said, ‘I am all right.’

‘You are?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Let’s finish the Mission. It means a lot to both of us. And then we shall see.’

‘And then we shall see,’ he said softly.

Her eyes slowly became luminous and she turned away and left the room. He stood there, feeling lonely, staring at the door that was still closing. He remembered the dwarf from another time who rode the elephant, his fate decided aeons before, like the birth of stars and the collision of worlds. Our stories, too, Oparna, were just meant to be. But this truth, there was something indecent about this truth.

IT WAS RAINING hard and the taxi driver could not see a thing. But he was racing down the wet road, honking. There were no wipers on the windscreen, but there was one lying on his dashboard. He grabbed it, muttering something, and holding the steering-wheel with one hand, he reached out through the window to clean the windscreen. He saw, just in the time, the tail-lights of a car standing at the signal. He almost stood on the break and screamed, ‘Motherfucker.’ The taxi stopped inches from the car. Adi asked his father what a motherfucker was.