Serious Men

from the other windows and from the lawns. But Acharya went on his way unseeing, his head slightly bent. He opened the wooden beach gate and went down to the black rocks. He sat there long after the figures behind the many windows vanished, one after the other.
    He began to arrive every day. He would wander around the lawns or sit on the sea rocks. The guards did not know how to stop him. He would look at them like an infant, and they would silently open the gates. Late in the evening, they would open the gates again for him to leave. He would cross the road without looking and vanish into the Professors’ Quarters.
    This was a fallen man, people said, who was in the misery of disgrace, but in reality Acharya was in the confusion of feelingnothing at all. He felt no pain, no shame, no anger. His eyes were always transfixed, but at nothing. They had lost the power to see even memories. Lavanya tried to console him, but she did not know how she should reach out to a man who was on the far shores of a living death. She allowed herself the mild cruelty of not trying too hard to reclaim him because his disgrace had advertised her own defeat at the hands of a younger woman. Also, his suspension had diminished her authority among the ladies of the Quarters. Her power would have completely perished had it not been for her beauty and unusual height. But she was also a beneficiary of the sympathy of the wives because, in their perennial conviction that they were all victims of men, they had a special place in their hearts for a real one. Mrs Nambodri, now bearing the charming discomfort of being called Mrs Director by the peons and guards, had arrived last week at Lavanya’s door like a visiting stateswoman. And they spoke about the disparities between Vietnamese Buddha heads and Thai.
    Lavanya was certain that her husband would soon rescue himself from the trance of his new abnormality and return to the old. She was more concerned about her daughter. Shruti did not talk to her father any more. She had called him a month ago to say that he must be brave, but when she read about the affair on a website, she first asked her mother if it was true, and did not speak to him after that.
    Shruti’s anger did not affect him. He was grateful to anyone who would offer him silence. But every day, he tried to understand what had happened to him. He wandered inside the Institute in that confusion. Old friends smiled at him. He would look at them with feeble eyes and nod. Young postdoctoral students called him names. He would nod at them too. Sometimes on the pathways, he would stop walking and just gape at his feet.
    One Monday all this changed, for no reason at all.
    He was sitting under a solitary palm in the backyard of the Institute when he thought of something that made him so happy that he felt his life and its many memories return to him. He hadbeen briefly estranged from himself, but now he was all right. He got up and walked briskly towards home.
    Acharya let himself in. Lavanya was asleep on the couch with
Digging to America
on her lap. He stood beside her and looked at her tired face. Her eyelids quivered and opened. She was surprised to see him standing like that.
    ‘I want to talk to you,’ he said.
    ‘Talk then,’ she said, sitting up. She was relieved to hear him speak finally.
    ‘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?’
    She looked worried. ‘Are you all right, Arvind?’ she asked.
    ‘I also have a confession to make,’ he said. ‘During a Cosmic Ancestry seminar, I said, “Ladies and Gentlemen, it’s my deepest belief that all life on Earth came from outer space, not just my wife.
    Lavanya burst out laughing. ‘It’s OK,’ she said, standing up. She tried to understand what could have happened to him, but she was too amused to solve the mystery. ‘Sit down, I will get you a cup of coffee,’ she said.
    Acharya went to the balcony. He looked at the concrete driveway, nine floors below, and calculated that it would take him no more than two seconds to hit the driveway. He inspected the wooden railing and hoped it would take his weight. He did not want to break it. That would be inelegant. The suspended shrubs were too far back to get in the way. Two shirts hung from the clothes wire and they looked like orphans, already. He sat