Serious Men

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.
    ‘Dr Acharya,’ Oparna tried one more time.
    He leaned back in his chair and observed her in a peaceful way. He liked her. She had done reasonable research in South America on the private lives of earth microbes that survived in almost extraterrestrial conditions. She was fresh and bright, and she knew all that she had to know. He preferred the intelligenceof women, which was somehow subdued and efficient, to the brilliance of men, which often came across as a deformity.
    He rubbed his hands and said, ‘So, Oparna. Good. What took you so long?’ She tried not to react. He looked at the door and maintained a long comfortable silence.
    Oparna probed softly, ‘You called me?’
    ‘Yes, I did,’ he said. ‘Just wanted to know how the lab is shaping up. Everything OK?’
    She thought there was something high maintenance about his face. His teeth were so clean and nothing was peeping out through his nose at all. Extraordinary for an Indian male of his age. The same force that sent the orchids must be maintaining him.
    ‘Yes, everything is OK,’ she said. ‘But, Dr Acharya, you had mentioned that the basement was a temporary arrangement.’
    ‘I remember. It’d be nice if the astrobiology lab is above sea-level. It’s a shame. I know, I know. I called you actually to give the bad news. There is no space. The lab needs a large sprawling area and we simply don’t have room anywhere, it seems, but in the basement.’
    He stood up. He was probably over six foot two. The enormous black chair shuddered in relief. He steered his trousers around his waist. ‘Let’s go to your lab,’ he said, and dashed out. In the anteroom, he wagged a finger at Ayyan Mani