Serious Men: A Novel

by Manu Joseph

Ayyan was certain that there was no such thing called truth. There was only the pursuit of truth and it was a pursuit that would always go on. It was a form of employment.

There are Tamilians who can live without water.

Reservations for the low castes in colleges is a very unfair system. To compensate, let us offer the Brahmins the right to be treated as animals for 3,000 years and at the end of it let’s give them a 15 per cent reservation–Vallumpuri John

‘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 have been inside your mind,’ Acharya said. ‘It was a short journey.’

Even though he survived the world through unambiguous practicality, he believed that a man’s bond with his wife should not be corrupted by too much rationality. 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.

Only the young can love, because the imbecility of youth is the only spectrum of love. He could see it so clearly now. Like every ray of light with a wavelength of 700 nanometres is always red, everyone who is in love is young.

Love, he had always thought, was arranged. He was certain that alcoholic poets had overrated its misery.

‘Of all human deformities,’ he said softly, ‘genius is the most useful.’

Adi, despite the misfortunes of poverty, would somehow have to find a way to get into an engineering college. And then ensure that he did not spend a single day of his life as an engineer. Because everyone would tell him then that the real money was in MBA.

the million melancholies

It was, until this day, an enduring symbol of his plight, a reminder that he was nothing more than a large Indian recorder appended to a small Japanese one.

When Michael Jackson had visited the city a few years ago, Waman had been part of the group of politicians who met him. The minister had later told the press, ‘He is a very polite man. There is not a trace of arrogance in him. You don’t get the feeling at all that you are talking to a white man.’

The crowd applauded every compliment he gave their imagined ancestors. 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.

Ayyan detested this moronic pride more than anything else about the country. Those flared nostrils, those dreamy eyes that people made when they said that they were once a spectacular race. How heaps of gems were sold on the streets, like berries. How ancient Brahmins had calculated the distance between the Earth and the Moon long before the whites; how ayurveda had figured everything about the human body long before Hippocrates; how Kerala’s mathematicians had discovered something close to the heliocentric theory long before Copernicus. In this delusional heritage of the country, his own ancestors were never included. Except as gory black demons in the fables of valiant fair men.

‘At least the milk is boiled,’ she said, easing the creases of her sari. Ayyan tried to understand what she had said. ‘Why did you boil the milk?’ he asked. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘When I don’t know what to do, I boil the milk.’