Manu Joseph - Serious Men

‘He is the guy, isn’t he? The genius,’ one man said.

Adi smiled. He liked being called a genius. It was different from being called special. All handicapped children were called special and he did not believe he was really handicapped. He could hear without the hearing-aid but only in the right ear. He was worried that if the game was over, as his father said, people would begin to call him special again. At the end of the corridor, his father stopped at a door on the left side that said ‘Deputy Director — Jana Nambodri’.

‘Ready?’ his father asked.

‘Ready,’ Adi said.

He saw Ayyan knock twice and then open the door. A man with a lot of white hair looked surprised to see them but he rose from his chair smiling. He was with three men who were younger and had black hair. They were all wearing jeans. They were standing now and smiling at him. He liked it when people looked only at him and nothing else in the room. They made him sit on the table though he wanted to sit on the chair.

‘Aditya Mani,’ someone declared to the room, without looking at him.

‘But that’s my name,’ Adi said, and the men laughed.

‘Tell me, Adi, why do you like prime numbers so much?’ the short man with white hair asked in English.

‘It’s unpredictable,’ Adi said.

‘What are the other numbers you like,’ the man asked.

Adi smiled coyly because that was what his father said he should do if he did not understand the question.

‘He is shy,’ his father said. ‘He doesn’t talk much at all.’

‘What do you want to be in the future, Adi?’

‘Scientist.’

‘Of course. But which field interests you the most?’

Adi smiled coyly.

‘You like maths or physics more?’

‘Physics.’

‘Physics,’ the men said happily, all at once.

Arvind Acharya was relishing the moment. He was imagining a giant balloon, twenty storeys high, soaring against a clear blue sky. The gondola that was carrying the four sealed samplers was such a meagre tip dangling at the bottom of the balloon. It was absurdly disproportionate, he thought, for the basket that was the very reason why the balloon existed, to be a few hundred times smaller than the balloon itself. It was not an aesthetic image. He had always loathed such disproportion. That’s why he had once despised the Zeppelins, and the sight of little white women driving long sedans. The device and its purpose had to be in proportion. But then he wondered if it was a reasonable demand. The device was physical and so it had a size. The purpose was actually abstract and so could not be described by size. The little white woman was not the purpose of the sedan. The sampler in the balloon’s basket was not the purpose of the hot-air balloon. The purpose of the sedan was that the little woman had to go somewhere, say, to a funeral. The purpose of the balloon was to confirm that there were aliens in the sky. So where was the question of disproportion? Also, if the goal of the universe were to manufacture life, as he secretly believed, then the universe was a giant device containing unimaginably vast nebulae and star systems that caused unimaginably large-scale cataclysms to make minuscule pieces of life here and there. So, even in his own version of the truth, the device was physically disproportionate to its purpose.

It was inevitable that he would then wonder, not for the first time of course, if the universe needed a goal. But he liked the idea. A whole universe churning violently inside to create the seeds of what would eventually become a state of being: little disjointed minds that would look back at the sky and acknowledge that yes, it is there, there is a universe. Why must the universe do it? It had enough real estate to create large lifeless bodies. Why must it pack enormous amounts of energy in a type of electricity called consciousness? It was simpler for the universe to make a Jupiter than a frog, or even an ant. All this was leading to an unavoidable question, but he tried to delay it because its philosophical nature embarrassed him, and philosophers were such third-rate bastards. But he asked anyway — So, why is there life? What’s the whole game? It was the sort of moment that frustrated him and made him wish that someone had left the answer in his drawer on a neatly typed piece of paper, so that he could just read it and say, ‘Oh yes, I thought so,’ and go back home for a nice long nap.

The door opened and he was annoyed to see his secretary. For some reason, he was more annoyed at the sight of him today than ever before. Such a terrible apparition Ayyan Mani was. So fresh, so eager, so much of an insider in this world. So hopelessly obsessed with living. Always busy, always up to something. Acharya found it funny that he must think a man was an insider in this world, because he did not know the function of an outsider. But he knew there were the insiders and there were the outsiders. He asked himself where he himself truly belonged.

‘Sir,’ Ayyan said, for the third time.

‘Yes.’

‘I’ve brought my son.’

Adi had by then appeared at the door, and he was looking curiously at Acharya from behind his father’s back. A pleasant smile appeared on Acharya’s face and that surprised even Ayyan. After the end of the Oparna affair, Acharya had become more moody and introspective than ever. Some days, he rocked in his chair excitedly for no apparent reason, but on the whole he had simply withdrawn into himself. He was once again the mammoth ghost that was either arriving or departing.

‘There you are,’ Acharya said. ‘Come in.’

Adi did not move. He opened his mouth wide, put out his tongue and gave a silly laugh.

‘Put your tongue, in Adi,’ Ayyan said sternly. ‘And come in.’

The boy walked in gingerly. Acharya stood up and went to the white couches in the far corner.

‘Let’s sit here,’ he said.

Adi, now more confident, sat facing him across the small centrepiece where the glass jar that was once an accomplice in illicit love now lay bearing fresh orchids. The boy looked at his father and tapped the couch asking him to sit. But Ayyan did not move.

‘Sit down,’ Acharya said impatiently. And for the very first time Ayyan Mani sat in the chamber of the Director.

Acharya studied the boy carefully and said, ‘He is wearing it in the other ear.’

‘What, Sir?’ Ayyan asked.

‘In the picture that they carried in the paper today, he was wearing the hearing-aid in the right ear. But now he is wearing it in the left ear.’

‘Oh, that,’ Ayyan said with a chuckle. ‘By mistake, they flipped the picture in the paper, Sir.’

Acharya did not suspect anything. He was merely struck by the visual anomaly. He did not pursue the matter further. He was more interested in the boy. ‘He seems completely normal. Is this how geniuses are made these days?’

‘He is just an ordinary boy who is fooling around, Sir,’ Ayyan said.

‘I am a genius,’ the boy said defiantly.

‘You must be,’ Acharya said. ‘Tell me, Aditya, how do you remember so many prime numbers?’

‘They are unpredictable.’

‘Adi,’ his father said, with an edge in his voice, ‘he is asking how you remember the first thousand prime numbers.’

‘I hear it in my head.’

‘You do?’ Acharya said with a look of amusement. ‘You like prime numbers?’

‘Yes. They are unpredictable.’

‘They are, they are. But I always found prime numbers ugly. When I was your age I used to love even numbers. Do you like even numbers more than odd numbers?’

Adi shrugged.

‘You should say “yes” or “no”, Adi,’ his father said. ‘Don’t just sit there and make a face.’

‘What do you want to become, Adi?’ Acharya asked.