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Here sanity was never overrated, and insanity never confused with unsound mind. Sometimes on the pathways calm men spoke to themselves when they needed good company. This was a sanctuary for those who wanted to spend their entire lives trying to understand why there was not enough lithium in the universe, or why the speed of light was what it was, or why gravity was ‘such a weak force’.
‘There are bigger things in life than that,’ Ayyan said. ‘See where I go.’
Even now, almost beautiful in a deliberately modest cream salwar chosen to calm the men, she was an event. Aged scientists always veered towards her 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.
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,
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.
He preferred the intelligence of women, which was somehow subdued and efficient, to the brilliance of men, which often came across as a deformity.
‘I will not support people who presume that somewhere, far away in space, there could be beings so human that they will build machines that will send us a radio signal. Man is not searching for aliens. Man is searching for man. It’s called loneliness. Not science. The universe is simply too vast, and we know too little about consciousness, to invest in a quest that rests on a narrow concept of life.
A more meaningful thing to do is to investigate the stratosphere for evidence of microscopic aliens that have come riding on meteorites.’
When they were in Princeton, Acharya was famous for growing marijuana in a flower pot. He even wrote a secret manual called The Joint Family, with clear instructions for future generations on how to grow the grass in a hostel-room environment.
Yet he never really craved to see her. The success of an old man lies in not wishing for company.
She moved in a smooth delicate way, as if there were liquid gel in the joints of her bones.
These days, his neat foreign shirts and corduroy trousers and stylish silver hair had found a meaningful audience. She saved him from the banality of the academic society: those austere men and grotesque hairy women he usually met on the circuit. He had this affliction to be with the youth, the real fragrant waxed youth.
He saw in her the unmistakable insanity of formidable women who longed to crumble.
there was something about being in his presence that she liked. He was a shelter. In his shade, she felt absolutely ignored. She had craved that always,
He dashes up to space, circumvents the globe a thousand times and gains a velocity faster than the speed of light to reverse Time. The rotation of the Earth changes direction. Life on Earth rewinds to the point when the pretty girl is walking through the market lane. ‘Not possible,’ Acharya muttered angrily. He never liked it when Time was exploited this way. But then this was what modern physics itself had become. Time reversal, black holes, dark matter, dark energy, invisibility, intelligent civilizations. Exciting rubbish. The money was in that.
how absurd were the occupations of these men and women who so easily frightened her. An old man wanted to search the atmosphere for microbes that were coming down from space. A young woman would soon study two bottles of air. This was what people did. This was their job. In the real world that lay outside the institute, it was even more weird. Majestic men went in cars, in the isolation of the back seat, studying laptops on their way to work where they would think of ways to fool people into buying cola, or a type of insurance, or a condom that had dots on it. Or invest other people’s money in
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In the twilight that was now the colour of dust, in the fury of horns that was a national language because honking had telegraphic properties, cars stood stranded all around the bus like ants carrying the corpse of a caterpillar.
A man on a bike was riding on the pavement. When he tried to plunge into the road, a car hit him. He fell down but managed to get up. He looked shocked. That, Ayyan loved. After riding like a moron all over the place, observe the face of an Indian when he crashes. He is stunned.
A job at the Eureka Forbes was not only heralded then as the final frontier in marketing but also glorified in underground novels as an assignment that led robust young men to the homes of hungry housewives,
He also saw men scoop the shit of their babies, and once he even saw a man in an apron take the dishes from the dining-table to the kitchen sink. They were the new men. In time, their numbers increased and he saw them everywhere now, standing defeated next to their glowing women.
He wanted to tell her that she should never be sad because to be sad was to be afraid. And to be afraid was to respect the world too much. The world was not a scary place, he always told her. It was full of ordinary people who did ordinary things, even though some of them went in cars and lived in very big homes and spoke in English. He wanted her to know that he was smart enough for this world and that he knew how to take care of her.
‘I want to understand the universe better,’ the shy boy said, when asked what he wanted to do in the future. He will spend one month with top scientists in Geneva …
‘Already, the boy is making me proud,’ Ayyan said, and everyone laughed.
‘But always remember, never be arrogant. People like humility in smart people because that way they don’t feel very small.’
If ancient Indians were really the first to calculate the distance between the Earth and the Moon, why is it that they were not the first to land there? I look at the claims of old civilizations that they have done this and that with great suspicion—Neil Armstrong
Ayyan was tempted to write another invented quote. That would be risky. He usually inserted only one phoney quote every week or so.
He would sit at the edge of her mother’s bed and stare into the crib. Some days, he would imagine the world through her eyes and he would feel in his heart how long an hour actually was.
Time was clearly woven into another force, the force of perception. And perception was the virtue of life alone. So he wondered if life was a fundamental element of the universe like Time itself. This line of thought had many holes, but he enjoyed it. He tried to imagine how a microscopic organism would perceive time. If its lifetime were a second, it would perceive the instant in a very different way from humans. It would live through its life feeling the sheer expanse of the moment, probably even getting bored sometimes.
‘Take good care of him. Don’t ask him to become an engineer or some rubbish like that. Keep your relatives miles away from him. Do you understand?’ ‘I understand.’ ‘Let him be. Give him books, a lot of books. You can take anything you want from my shelf. And don’t just give him science books. Give him comics, too. If you need anything you let me know. And don’t forget, give him a lot of comics.’
There was something funereal about it, he thought: an old man driving his old woman to the hospital. Something very lonely about it. Something very sad and American.
‘I am being dramatic?’ ‘I know I forgot you in the car. So?’ ‘So nothing. It happens. Did I say anything?’
‘I have been inside your mind,’ Acharya said. ‘It was a short journey.’
Do you really believe that all life on Earth came from outer space?’ ‘Yes. I don’t just believe. I know.’ ‘Through microscopic spores that came riding on comets and meteorites?’ ‘Yes,’ Acharya said peacefully. ‘And you know what? I also believe that these spores fall on different worlds in different corners of the universe and they spawn life that is suited to those conditions. Life that could be vastly different from what we can imagine. Life that could even evolve into giant zero-mass beings. Like massive clouds. Things we cannot even imagine.’
Slowly, Adi’s questions became more complex: ‘If plants can eat light, why aren’t there things that eat sound?’
The myth of a child genius was surprisingly simple to create, Ayyan realized, especially around a boy who was innately smart and who wore a hearing-aid. Adi had simply to say something odd in the class once a week to keep the legend alive.
Marriage needed the absurdity of values. In the world that lay outside his home, there was no right or wrong. Every moment was a battle, and the cunning won. But his home was not something as trivial as the world. To fool Oja into believing that her son was a genius was a crime, a crime so grave that it did not have a punishment.
he absorbed the rudiments of knowledge under the municipality’s lights; he learnt the guile to feed himself and his family; and he was now stranded because there is only so far that the son of a sweeper can go.
And Oja had developed a certain grace, a sort laboured modesty that a Miss World affected when she visited children with cancer.
‘How do stars die, Miss, apart from becoming supernovas?’
‘I like prime numbers because they cannot be predicted.’ ‘It’s OK, Adi, you don’t have to talk like that with me. We play the game only sometimes. Not all the time. You understand?’
And they were disconsolate. She could hear their angry demands to be allowed to at least sit in the aisles. But then even the aisles were filled. This was a strange parallel world.
After a few lines like this she said that the men on the stage needed no introduction and then she introduced them.
‘Though Stephen Hawking had misgivings about what he had said earlier, I am of the opinion that the arrow of Time moves both ways. In some conditions we would remember the future and not the past, and a ripple would cause a stone to fall. Time can be reversed.’
there was no malice in the voice that had spoken. Acharya’s comment somehow invoked the spirit of science and everybody understood it that way.
‘We will talk about it later, Arvind,’ Keeble said jovially. ‘Maybe we can meet yesterday, if you have the time.’
By the laws of probability most of you are mediocre. Accept it. The tragedy of mediocrity is that even mediocre people shake their heads and mull over how “standards are falling”. So don’t mull.
Even she would die one day, and he felt sad it should be so. There was so much life in her, and so much beauty.
Just a silly crush, she thought—it would go away in the morning. So it is with all sudden lovers who believe that their torments will vanish in the morning, but inevitably it is already morning when such a convenient consolation comes to them.
Acharya lifted his enormous head and for a moment he looked as though he had found the Unified Theory by mistake.
And there was a force in her that morning, a calm arrogance that beautiful women usually had. He recognized it as her real face. The shadow she had pretended to be in this kingdom of men, in her long shapeless top and jeans, that subdued acceptance of all situations, he always knew was just a farce.
