Serious Men

that he would go completely mad one day.
    ‘But he seems so happy,’ she had told her mother.
    Her mother had stopped scrubbing the copper plate, and said, ‘It’s not only the sad who go mad, my child, it is also the happy.’
    Acharya set the cup on the table and stood. He steered his trousers around his waist and walked out of the house. He began to see things in a way he had never seen them before. The corridor that led to the lift was grey and it had pieces of splintered tiles arranged in concentric circles. The liftman was dark and lost, and he had a mole at the edge of his lip and another one at the edge of his nose, and there was a strand of hair sticking out of both. That reminded him of Lavanya’s hypothesis many years ago that the cure for balding might be in the mysteries of melanin because the longest strand of hair on the limbs and the face, she said, always rose from the moles. The little girl who was playing in the driveway where she might have seen him fall, had he not tried to understand himself in time, was wearing a frock with fractal motifs. And she looked so beautiful that he hoped she would never ever hear the word ‘fractal’ in her life. There were four guards at the gates of the Institute and they were in ash-grey shirts and black trousers, and black caps with two red streaks that were parallel to each other. He looked at the fork of the pathway and the square lawn and the L-shaped main block and the people going about. He felt as if his vision had improved. Like that evening on the Marine Drive where he had once gone to escape Oparna’s love. The grey fog of rain had vanished and a strange light had filled the city.
    He sat on the black rocks and told the sea his version of the universe. A group of young doctoral students were gathered at a distance. They threw cautious looks at him. It was a tradition here to accept that sometimes men spoke to themselves. But Acharya had never been known to seek his own phantoms. They stared at him for a while, then they resumed their animated discussion about supersymmetry, occasionally glancing at him.
    The breeze brought him the rudiments of their debate. He listened, his head inclined. Then he went to them and stood with his hands in his deep trouser pockets. They looked at him nervously. One boy tried to infect others with the smile of contempt.
    ‘Don’t look at me like that, son,’ Acharya told him. ‘When Iwas your age I was so smart that if you wanted to kiss my arse you would’ve had to take an entrance exam.’
    That made the other boys laugh. Acharya laughed too. And he told them what he thought of supersymmetry. They listened, rooted to the ground. They asked him questions and he answered with deeper questions and an excited banter began to flow. His audience began to grow.
    He started arriving every day, like a wandering bard. By the sea rocks, on the pathways and in the undulating backyard, students and scientists milled around him, and listened to the tales of his life, the day he met the Pope and how he was banned forever from the Vatican for whispering abuse in the pontiff’s ear, the hilarious insanities of great minds, their private chauvinism and how they believed wives were conspiracies, the temper of Fred Hoyle, the encounters with Hawking who was a cunning man, the impending shocks that would emerge from the Large Hadron Collider, and the bleak future of theoretical physics. The swarm around him began to grow with every passing day and their banter beneath the skies became a sudden culture.
    It was a sight that Jana Nambodri caught every evening from his new window. And this evening, as he surveyed the resurrection with a face that was always a mask, he held his mobile to the ear and asked when the formal dismissal of Acharya could be arranged. He put the phone away and stared with such meditative forbearance that his mutant ears, which could gather even the voices of thought, did not hear the door open.
    Ayyan Mani stood in the relief of finally catching this man alone. For several days he had been waiting for a quiet moment like this, but Nambodri was always surrounded by his inner circle of liberated radio astronomers.
    ‘Sir,’ Ayyan said, enjoying the startled jerk of his new master. ‘I wanted to have a word with you, Sir.’
    Nambodri nodded without turning.
    ‘That day Oparna Goshmaulik had come here, Sir.’
    ‘Which day?’ Nambodri asked, now looking at Ayyan.
    ‘The day when everybody started talking