Serious Men

something?’
    ‘Then Dr Acharya becomes the first person to find living matter from outer space.’
    ‘Why forty-one kilometres above the Earth? Why not twenty, or ten?’ he asked, narrowing his eyes to show curiosity – though he knew why.
    ‘Because, because,’ she said, with mild appreciation, ‘nothingfrom Earth floats to that height. Even volcanic ash does not go up that high. So if we find, say, a bacterium at that height, it will mean that he was coming down, not going up.’
    ‘It’s so interesting what you people do,’ he said. ‘I think I can cook up a great story for my son tonight.’
    As he walked to the door, Oparna asked, ‘What do you know about the Giant Ear?’
    ‘Nothing that you don’t know, Madam,’ he said, walking a few steps back in. Giant Ear was the name given to thirty radio telescopes, a vast array of mammoth dishes pointed at the sky. One after the other, they stood like white monsters on vast farms, about a hundred kilometres from the city. ‘Have you seen them?’ he asked. ‘They belong to the Institute.’
    ‘I saw them once when I was driving past,’ she said. ‘They look beautiful, and evil.’
    ‘There is one strange thing about the Giant Ear,’ Ayyan said softly. ‘You won’t find a single champagne bottle there.’ (The way he pronounced ‘champagne’ was a bit funny but she did not react. She was more intrigued by what he had said.)
    ‘Champagne bottle, you said? There is no champagne bottle inside the Giant Ear. Why should that be strange?’
    ‘Madam, every radio telescope in the world keeps a champagne bottle. It is a tradition. The bottle has to be opened when there is a contact with an alien signal.’
    ‘Why doesn’t the Giant Ear have a champagne bottle?’
    ‘You know why,’ he said, with a conspiratorial smile. ‘The Director hates the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. He says it is not science. He really hates it. The radio astronomers here have been begging him to let them search for signals of intelligent life. But he is not going to allow that.’
    ‘I know, I know,’ she said, almost dreamily. ‘I wonder why he is so adamant about these things?’
    ‘The heavens speak very softly to the Earth, Madam,’ Ayyan said. ‘A mobile phone left on the Moon would be the third clearest radio signal in the entire sky. So you can imagine how easily the gadgets we use can interfere with radio telescopes. A passingcar’s radio could start wild rumours of alien contact. So the Director thinks it is an imperfect way to search for aliens. Also, he does not think aliens are in the habit of sending signals.’
    ‘You know a lot, Ayyan,’ she said, with an honest smile.
    ‘I am just a small man, Madam, who picks up this and that through the great things that people like you do.’
    Her nipples, he observed, had hardened in the air conditioner’s draught.
    After he left, Oparna sat by the desk and looked blankly at the walls. She sat for hours like that, with nothing to do. She felt in her heart an old nameless sorrow. That same melancholy of a twilight rain in a deserted street. She felt stranded. Five years ago, she would have wept like a fool.
    She went up to the porch for respite. She stood behind a fat beam and lit a cigarette. The half-naked gardener who was watering the lawn stared. A few men who were passing by, discussing the Möbius Strip, fell silent.
    ‘Yes, yes, stare at me. You’re right. I smoke. I must be a whore.’
    The stares would always follow her here and she would grow to accept that she was in the world of men. She would learn to laugh at things that did not make her laugh. She would smile when Jana Nambodri said, ‘We have been seeking beauty in physics, but it looks as if it has come to Astrobiology.’ And she would smile when she learnt that the ladies’ rest-room on the third floor was called Ladies and the men’s was called Scientists. She would endure the men who inescapably fell towards her in the corridors and gave her guidance she never sought. She would try to pass through the long corridors of this place like a shadow, and she would fail every day.
    She took one long drag and threw the cigarette butt, and felt a bit manly as she squashed the stub with her foot.

A RVIND A CHARYA LIKED the brooding hum of the air conditioner. It reminded him of the faint drone that was once speculated here to be the sound of the early universe. He was listening to the hum intently and reading another report on