Serious Men

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.

A YYAN M ANI 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 directlyabove 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