Serious Men

story.’
    ‘From the point of view of pure chemistry, it is more miraculous to make wine into water than water into wine. But he did not do that. Because if he had gone to someone’s house and converted their wine into water, they would have crucified him much earlier. He knew, Jana. He knew making water into wine was a more popular thing to do. Searching for extraterrestrial signals is like that. It is more glamorous than searching for pulsars. Lay people love it. Journalists love it. A more meaningful thing to do is to investigate the stratosphere for evidence of microscopic aliens that have come riding on meteorites.’
    ‘Are you saying, Arvind, there is not the slightest possibility of an alien civilization sending us a signal?’
    ‘There is always a mathematical possibility.’
    ‘That’s good enough, isn’t it? A mathematical possibility. Listen to this, Arvind. In 1874 the
American Medical Weekly
reported something strange. During the Battle of Raymond in Mississippi in 1863, a bullet hit the scrotum of a soldier, shattering his left testicle. The bullet penetrated the left side of the abdomen of a seventeen-year-old girl who was sitting in her house nearby. Nine months later she delivered a healthy boy. Apparently, the bullet had carried with it some of the soldier’s semen and had entered the girl’s ovary. That’s how she had become pregnant with the soldier’s child.’
    ‘That’s what she told her mother.’
    ‘A mathematical possibility,’ Nambodri said, ‘A mathematical possibility however small, is enough for us to go in search of truth. In science, hope is everything.’
    ‘Hope,’ Acharya said, with bitter memories, ‘is a lapse in concentration.’
    Nambodri looked gloomily towards the window and rubbed his nose. He knew he had to find more diabolic ways to win this war. And he had to find battlefields where Acharya did not know how to fight. This insufferable fat tyrant was once a lanky affable boy with a lot of mischief in his eyes. 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. How did that boy become this monster who was willing to antagonize everyone for the sake of something as ephemeral as conviction?
    Nambodri rose from the chair and headed for the door. Just then something crossed his mind. ‘You do know about the Pope, don’t you?’ he asked. ‘What about him?’
    ‘Arvind, switch on the TV.’
    ‘Why?’
    ‘The Pope is dead.’
    The two men looked at each other through a perfect silence. Then Acharya smiled.
    He and Pope John Paul shared a past. The top cosmologists in the world were once invited to attend a conference in the most unlikely venue for such a gathering – the Vatican City. The Pontifical Academy of Sciences hosted the scientists because the Pope had figured out that the Big Bang theory was not in conflict with the Old Testament after all, and he wanted to support it cheerfully. Since the Big Bang claimed that the universe had a beginning, it left room for God to do something, like create the beginning. Heretics like Acharya were invited to educate them that God and science can coexist. At the end of the conference, the pontiff met his guests, one after the other, at his summer residence, Castel Gandolfo. In the long queue that moved towards the holy man, the famous crippled scientist Stephen Hawking was right in front of Acharya. When Hawking was wheeled to the Pope, the pontiff famously knelt down on the floor and had a lengthy conversation with him. Then Acharya walked towards the holy man and said something to him in his ear. The Pope turned away looking dismayed. What exactly Acharya had said was never known. He would never tell. The Vatican refused to comment, but a spokesman later said, ‘What that man told the Pope is not important, but, yes, I don’t think he will be invited here again.’
    Nambodri held the door knob, but he was unwilling to leave his friend without solving an old mystery. ‘What did you tell the Pope, Arvind?’
    ‘Nothing.’
    ‘Come on. He is dead now. Some people told me that he looked very hurt. What did you tell him?’
    Acharya wanted to chuckle, but these days he discreetly mourned any death, even if it was the Pope’s.
    ‘He was a good man,’ Acharya said, in a mellow voice. ‘In 1992 he admitted that Galileo