Serious Men

by Manu Joseph

there was an unmistakable excitement that masqueraded as shock, just like the entertainment of death fills funeral guests with grimness. Acharya began to understand the mysterious composure of men who are led to the gallows. Their even gait and the strength of their legs that took them unwaveringly to the hollow wooden pedestal had always fascinated him.

‘Lavanya,’ he said, ‘you may not know this, but I’ve thought of you every single day of my life, and my life was very good because of you. Does that make sense to you? What I just said, does that make sense you to?’

He wondered why he did not feel the intensity of death, the final ache of the very end of memories, and the indestructible peace of liberation.

He wanted to understand why there was life, what was the true nature of Time, and he wanted to comprehend the beautiful absurdity of infinity which was the only real evidence mankind had to prove that maths was fundamentally moronic.

He wondered if Lavanya, too, would find happiness in the relief of widowhood, choosing to love him more as an enhanced memory in a photo frame than as a giant living slob.

His mind was dead, his spirit was dead, and they were beseeching from another world to relieve the body too.

‘It’s not only the sad who go mad, my child, it is also the happy.’

was wearing a frock with fractal motifs. And she looked so beautiful that he hoped she would never ever hear the word ‘fractal’ in her life.

Ayyan laughed. Yes, yes, Indians were the oldest civilization on Earth, the greatest, the best. And only Indians had culture. Others were all dumb nomads and whores.

‘The cries of the cows go down to the core of the Earth through Einsteinian pain waves and cause seismic activity, especially after Muslim festivals when there is a mass slaughter of cattle. That’s why, a few days after every Muslim festival, somewhere in the world there is always an earthquake.’

I believe, very early in the life of the Indian civilization, in the vedic age, there was an alien contact.’ Mahabharata’s great war, with its flying machines and mystical missiles, he said, was fought using extraterrestrial technologies that were later mistaken as the hallucinations of poets. ‘Sometime in the great past of our country, there was a technology transfer from an advanced civilization. Our gods are, in reality, artistic representations of extraterrestrial visitors. I really don’t care what you think, but I know that Krishna was an alien.’

a man no less than Galileo Galilei once gave a lecture on the size, dimensions and even the location of hell? And more recently, a scientist called Duncan MacDougall revealed the weight of the human soul. He said it was about twenty grams.’

‘Today’s quote was, “A greater crime than the Holocaust was untouchability. Nazis have paid the price, but the Brahmins are still reaping the rewards for torturing others.” Is that correct, Ayyan?’ ‘Yes, Sir.’ ‘The blackboard says Albert Einstein said this.’

‘If there are clear morphological characteristics that are defined by the genes, obviously even intellectual traits are decided that way,’ Nambodri said. ‘Look at women. They will get nowhere in science. Everybody knows that. Their brains are too small. But our world has become so fucking politically correct, you can’t say these things any more.’

‘But that bastard did get into Mensa.’

Young women in good shoes walked in haste, as though they were fleeing from the fate of looking like their mothers; proud breasts bounced and soft thighs shuddered.

he invests even the most ordinary interactions with keenly observed human quirks, and almost every sentence is a joy to read for its ingeniously constructed language.