Serious Men

on the railing and slowly rose on his feet. He balanced himself with his hands in the air. He felt a bit ridiculous, and it struck him how unaesthetic the process of suicide actually was.
    As he stood perched to jump, it was inevitable that he would think of his whole life. ‘It was easy,’ he summarized. He wondered why he did not feel the intensity of death, the final ache of the very end of memories, and the indestructible peace ofliberation. Instead, his mind was filled with too many thoughts that reminded him of his old desperation to live every moment. He was thinking of the frustrating problem of gravity at the moment of death, standing on a railing nine floors above the ground. He was even embarrassed on behalf of humanity for not solving the elementary question – What exactly is gravity? It was shameful that man did not know what gravity actually was. How pathetic. And he felt a wild rancour towards theoretical physicists who said that gravity was made up of gravitons. What rubbish. He wanted to understand why there was life, what was the true nature of Time, and he wanted to comprehend the beautiful absurdity of infinity which was the only real evidence mankind had to prove that maths was fundamentally moronic. There was so much to do, he thought, on either side of the wooden railing. Then he felt an inglorious fear. That, he recognized, was not the trivial fear of falling. But it was the memory of the devious friends of Lavanya, and how their faces began to glow after the death of their husbands. He wondered if Lavanya, too, would find happiness in the relief of widowhood, choosing to love him more as an enhanced memory in a photo frame than as a giant living slob. He felt an intense bitterness that only a husband can feel for his wife. And in a moment of pristine jealousy he wanted to deny her the pleasure that she might derive at his expense. He slipped on the railing, but found his balance in time.
    Beneath the solitary palm when he had prescribed to himself the simplicity of death, he was certain that he had arrived at an obvious solution. His mind was dead, his spirit was dead, and they were beseeching from another world to relieve the body too. But now he understood what had happened to him since the day of the trial. He understood why he did not feel anything after they consigned him to the short blacklist of fraudulent scientists. The truth was, as always, simpler than he thought. What they had killed was not his mind, or spirit, or other things that might not exist at all. What they had killed was his stature. The great Arvind Acharya, the Nobel laureate who did not win a Nobel. The Big Bang’s Old Foe. The lone discoverer of aliens. That being hadbeen slain. And the confusing numbness of death inside him was actually the paradise of relief. All his life he had tried to hide the torments of one paranormal boyhood experience. He had hidden them behind the manly grandness of science. His cerebral deformity which others called genius had made it easy for him to understand the mathematical pursuit of truth and it had quickly shrouded him in an inescapable glory when he was very young. He was entrapped in a fame that he feared he would lose if he tried to explain that every single action in the world was preordained, or if he attempted to investigate the purpose of life. Now that he was stripped of his reputation, he was free. He could now become the prophet of a new form of science that would not try to understand the universe through particles and forces but through the great game of life.
    The decision of a woman in the market to buy cabbage instead of brinjal, the decision of a man at a junction to turn left instead of right: what if these events were as preordained as the birth of a star and its inevitable death? If the flutter of a butterfly or the shudder of a flower in the breeze was preordained aeons ago, he would now find a way to understand it. There would be no shame in that. Because every man grants others the power to shame him, and Arvind Acharya decided to withdraw that privilege from the world.
    He walked into the hall, dusting his trousers. He sat with his elbows on the dining-table. Lavanya came with a tray. She watched him curiously. ‘Are you all right, Arvind?’ she asked.
    He did not reply. He sipped his coffee and looked around the house as though it were the first time he was here.
    At that moment, she was reminded of her mother’s prophecy, a day before her wedding,