Manu Joseph - Serious Men

The peon covered his mouth with his hand and giggled again, partly from lack of comprehension. Then he remembered something.

‘I’ve got something to show you, Mani,’ he said. He dug into his pocket and took out an ATM card. ‘I got it today,’ he said, and looked at it fondly. ‘All your work, Mani,’ he said.

Ayyan had helped the peon to open a bank account. He somehow knew people everywhere who magically waived the requirement of difficult documents. Ayyan leaned towards the peon and said softly, ‘You know what I used to do when the money machines first came? When the machine would spit out the cash, I would pluck out only the central notes. I would leave the first and the last. It was a difficult art. It needed technique. I had to practise. The machine would swallow the two remaining notes and the way it was programmed then it would not register the transaction. It would spit out a paper that would say “zero rupees withdrawn”. Now these machines have become smarter.’

The peon shook his head in easy awe. ‘You are such a clever man, Mani,’ he said. ‘If only you had the fathers that these men had, you would have had a room of your own today with your own secretary.’

‘There are bigger things in life than that,’ Ayyan said. ‘See where I go.’

The main door outside opened, startling the peon who always stood erect when surprised. Murmurs from the corridor filled the room like fresh air. Jana Nambodri, the convivial Deputy Director of the Institute and a radio astronomer who was incurably infatuated with corduroy trousers, stood in the doorway holding the door open. ‘Good morning,’ he said cheerfully. His hair always distracted Ayyan. It was a silver tidal wave that lent him an amicable flamboyance. And he had a long benevolent face that clever women usually mistrusted.

There was always a quiet dignity about Nambodri, something very calm, even though he was at the heart of The Giant Ear Problem. He wanted to scan the skies with radio telescopes and search for alien signals, but Arvind Acharya would not let him.

‘I believe he has come,’ Nambodri said, making eyes at the inner door in a conspiratorial way.

‘Yes he is inside, Sir, but he has asked me not to disturb him for thirty minutes,’ Ayyan lied. He never missed the slightest chance to cause the smallest misery to a Brahmin. Nambodri stared at the floor for a moment and left.

‘There is something happening here, Mani,’ the peon said. ‘My chaps are telling me that something big is going to happen. Things have been very tense. Old men are speaking in whispers in the corridor. What is it?’

‘War of the Brahmins,’ Ayyan said. ‘That’s what is going to happen. It’s going to be fun.’

‘War? What war?’

Ayyan studied his fingers thoughtfully. ‘It’s like this,’ he said slowly. ‘Some men here want to search for aliens in space by using something called a radio telescope. They think we might receive messages from life forms in outer space. But the Big Man inside says they are talking rubbish. He won’t let them search for aliens that way. He says there is only one way to search for aliens — his way.’

‘And what is his way?’

‘He says aliens are as small as germs. They are falling all the time from the heavens to the Earth. So he wants to send a balloon up and capture them.’

‘That’s it?’ the peon whispered.

‘Yes, that’s it,’ Ayyan said.

After the peon left, Ayyan went through the research papers that the peon had brought for Arvind Acharya. There was a lot of maths in the pages and its incomprehensibility lent it an air of special wisdom. Ayyan had developed the habit of reading anything in front of him, even if it was something he did not really understand, because he believed that one reason why everybody was here, including the sons of municipal sweepers, was to collect as much information as possible before dying with a funny look on the face. All through his boyhood he had read anything he could lay his hands on. That’s how he had taught himself English. Even when he used to go with friends to art film festivals to watch the uncensored nudity in foreign films, he tried to read every word in the free brochures.

Ayyan read the White Dwarf’s grim tale with his elbows on the table and fingers gathered around his temples. He looked more resolute than interested. But progress was hard. He could not get through the numb dullness of the prose. Then the sharp fragrance of lemon reached him. He looked up. She was always a sight.

He dialled a number briskly and said, ‘Dr Oparna Goshmaulik has come, Sir.’ He put the receiver down and pointed her towards the seasoned black sofa. Acharya had asked him to send her in, but Ayyan wanted to take a good look at her. ‘You have to wait, Madam,’ he told her.

The moment Oparna Goshmaulik had walked into the Institute, three months ago, for the interview, in a blue sari that the stenographers thought was a devious masterstroke, and with her wiry black hair tied back in a fierce knot, she was a commotion. Even now, almost beautiful in a deliberately modest cream salwar chosen to calm the men, she was an event. Aged scientists always veered towards here on the corridors and narrated the many tales of their past, the great things they had done. In the overtures of mentoring, they tried to smell her breath.

She had a round unsmiling face and the flawless skin of lineage; moist lips; and eyebrows arched in a surprise she probably did not intend. Her eyes were arrogant and distant some days, smiling other days.

Ayyan was watching her surreptitiously as she stared thoughtfully at the floor. Another high-caste woman beyond his reach. She went to the Cathedral School in the back seat of her father’s car. Then on to Stanford. Now she was here: the Head of Astrobiology, the solitary queen of the basement lab. So easy it was for these women. Soon, some stupid reporter would write that she had ‘stormed the male bastion’. All these women were doing that these days. Storming the male bastion. ‘Rising against the odds’ — they all were. But what great subjugations did these women suffer, what were they denied by their fathers, what opportunities didn’t they get, what weren’t they fed, why were they so obsessed with their own womanhood? Oja Mani did not even know that there was something called womanhood. ‘Downmarket’ was what women like Oparna would call her, even discreetly laugh at her perhaps if they met her: at the powder in the nape of her neck, the oil in her hair and the yellow glow of turmeric on her face.

Ayyan felt an immense hatred for Oparna and all her friends. Of course, they too had miseries. Chiefly, the state of men. They were obsessed with men. And men were people who were different from him.

Oparna knew he was looking. Jerk. She looked up from the floor to meet his eyes. Ayyan caught her naked glare only for an instant before turning away, but that moment was enough for him to decide why she had always seemed so familiar to him.

So composed and normal she appeared, but in her eyes he saw the hidden insanity of some women that drove men to the security of marrying others. Through the promise of transience, they would lure men, and frighten them while lying spent by weeping uncontrollably or muttering the name of a man from their distant adolescence. Oparna Goshmaulik was an enchantment that was always beyond his fortunes, but despite the unscalable rungs of society, there were only so many types of people and once upon a time, he had rumbled with the type of Oparna.

That was over a decade ago when he was a young salesman for Eureka Forbes. He would woo typists, secretaries and shop attendants, and mesmerize them with his general knowledge, the future rebellions he planned against the rich, and his jokes about the Brahmins. They would let him squeeze their breasts on the Worli Seaface. Then, misled by decency, they would ask for marriage. And weep through the pause. Traditionally on the Worli Seaface, infatuation fondled and love cried. He was terrified of that love.