Manu Joseph - Serious Men

When they began to brush his hand away from their impoverished chests and talk about where it was all heading, and whispered to him the simplicity of marriage, he left them in the knowledge that they could cash in their virginity somewhere else. But some who made love to him in the bushes of Aksa beach, or in the cheap hotels of Manori, were the dangerous kind. It was them he saw in the deceptive calm of Oparna. After their coy nudity and uncontrollable moans that he had to muffle by stuffing his fingers in their mouths; after their easy compliments about how good a lover he was, how thoughtful and informed, how big his penis was (though they had not slept with too many men) came their madness. They would weep for no reason, talk about death, and with great sorrow that matched the despondence of the pale yellow walls of the cheap nocturnal rooms, ask for marriage. They made him fear love, and drove him to the hard mattress of a prostitute in Falkland Street, whose bedsheet was still soaked in the sweat of clients who had been with her before him. As he rocked her beneath him, he would always remember, she sang a song: ‘Joot Bhole Kauva Kate’. It had no meaning. She meant no metaphors. When he asked her to shut up, she said, ‘But I have to while away the time.’ He threw some notes at her and ran. Her laughter echoed behind him. No wail he had heard in his life equalled the melancholy of her psychotic laughter.

Often, he used to tell his girls, as they looked at him with growing affection on the parapet of the Worli Seaface, ‘What is the saddest sight in the world? A couple weeping together. At their failed love, or at the ruins of their home demolished by the municipality, or at the funeral of their child. There is something about a man and a woman weeping together. Nothing is more heart-breaking.’ But he knew that the laughter of that whore was far worse. He would never forget it. ‘Come back, hero,’ she had said.

Unable to bear the promises he had to make merely to touch the breasts of girls who said they loved him, and the sudden sorrows of the broadminded women after they had brought their legs back together, and the wails of undead whores, he finally decided to place a matrimonial in the expensive classifieds of the Maharashtra Times. And he found a virgin who had none of the memories he had given other women.

AYYAN MANI HAD just asked her to go in. Oparna rose from the tired black sofa. She did not know why her heart was pounding. There was something about the hermit who sat inside that unnerved her. Three months ago, Arvind Acharya had interviewed her in between reading something. And when he did look at her, it was with total indifference — as if thirty-year-old women were not regarded as people here. He had studied her gravely and said, ‘You were born after Microsoft?’

She pushed open the inner door and remembered its unexpected heaviness. Acharya, his head bent over some loose sheets of paper on the table, always appeared bigger than she imagined. His desk was cluttered with heaps of bound papers and journals. And there was a curious stone which he used as a paperweight. Some said that it was a piece of meteorite he had stolen from a lab many many years ago. Four fresh orchids stood in a cylindrical glass jar and she knew he was not responsible for them. There was an unnaturally large waste-paper bin near his table, four feet high. Behind him was a long sliding window that was like a living portrait of the Arabian Sea. The walls were stark and empty. No pictures, no framed citations, no quotable commandments that men so loved. Nothing. In the far corner of the room were four white sofas that faced each other around a small centrepiece. The sofas offended her every time she entered the room. White sofas? Why?

She sat across his massive table, wondering whether to clear her throat. That would be too cinematic, so she decided to be silent and look at him carefully. Silver strands of hair on his pink bald head rose and fell in the draft of the air conditioner directly above him. His thick capable hands rested on the table. His tranquil elephant eyes usually looked directly into the heart of the intrusion. Sometimes they stared like an infant’s.

Occasionally, Oparna googled Acharya late into the night. She searched for stray pictures from his youth. He was always in badly stitched suits then, and seemed much angrier; his severe eyes appeared to survey the changing times somewhat baffled as if physics were in crisis. And it really was, according to the young Acharya. He spent the best years of his life in the passion of mauling the Big Bang theory, the world’s favourite idea — that everything began from a microscopic point, that most of the universe was made in about three minutes after an inexplicable moment of beginning called the Big Bang.

How much this man had hated the theory. He accused the Big Bang of being Christian. The Vatican wanted a beginning and the Big Bang provided one. According to him, the Big Bang was that moment in the history of white men when God said, ‘Try to understand from here.’ He did not accept it. Acharya’s universe did not have a beginning, it did not have an end. ‘Because I am not Christian,’ he had famously said. He hated the Big Bang theory so much, and considered it such a repulsive influence of religion, that during a niece’s wedding to an American in San Francisco, when he heard the priest say solemnly, ‘In the beginning was the Word,’ he threw his shoe at the altar.

Around that time (it must have been about thirty years ago) he was at the height of his intellectual powers. Many believed that his work on gravitational collapse would fetch him the Nobel if he behaved and tempered down his embarrassing opposition to the Big Bang. As it was, the odds were stacked against cosmologists. An old rumour had it that Alfred Nobel’s wife had had an affair with an astronomer and the cuckold laid out in his will that those associated with astronomy must be considered to share his money only under exceptional circumstances. Oparna believed that rumour. It was absolutely possible.

Acharya was the type of man who would believe first and then spend the rest of his life seeking that little matter called evidence. Oparna liked such men. They were obsolete in a world where something as low grade as practicality was increasingly mistaken for wisdom. When they spoke, their words had so much power because they knew there was such a thing called the truth. They just believed, blindly. And for many years Arvind Acharya believed in his heart that microscopic aliens were falling all the time on Earth. To prove it he was finally going to send a hot-air balloon to a height of forty-one kilometres with four sterilized metal containers that would capture air at that altitude. The containers would come down, and in her basement lab Oparna would study their contents. If there were any microbes in the containers it would mean only one thing. They came from space. Mankind would have finally found aliens.

Oparna craned her neck to see what Acharya was reading, but from that angle it was hard for her to figure it out.

He was in fact immersed in a confidential report on the mysterious red rains over Kerala. Nobody could convincingly explain the phenomenon that was confirmed by thousands of ordinary people who were stupefied by the red downpour, but he believed he knew what was happening. He was formulating a simple explanation in his mind, when he began to sense a distant smell that he thought was coming from another time, like an old memory. It was familiar, but he could not place it. Then it struck him that it was the odour of youth and it was somewhere very close. Youth. Pathetic, desperate, broke, its glory overrated. He felt in his heart the ignorance and smallness of the mind when the body was strong, and how easily it was brutalized by deceptions that sometimes came as love, and at other times, as convictions.