Serious Men

one finger.
    ‘Adi,’ his mother screamed, stuffing the hearing-aid back into his ear, ‘What happens in the end of the last story?’
    ‘The giant runs away.’
    Oja checked the last page of Tinkle. ‘There is no giant,’ she said. ‘Did you read this book? Tell me the truth. You should never lie, Adi. The end of an ox is beef, the end of a lie is grief.’
    ‘So what if he does not want to read silly comics,’ Ayyan said, winking at his son who winked back.
    ‘You don’t interfere,’ she said angrily. ‘This boy is going to become mad if I don’t do something about it right now. Yesterday, he was standing alone on the terrace, in a corner. Other boys were playing.’
    Adi put his hand on his head in exasperation. ‘You don’t understand,’ he said. ‘How many times do I have to tell you? I was out.’
    ‘What do you mean, you were out?’
    ‘I was in the batting team and I got out.’
    ‘So?’
    ‘If you get out, you can’t bat till the next match.’
    ‘But other boys were playing,’ she said.
    ‘Don’t confuse me,’ Adi said angrily.
    ‘Look, Oja,’ Ayyan said sternly, ‘when a batsman gets out, his chance is over. He cannot play.’
    ‘Why are you always on his side?’ she said. ‘And why are you standing here? The meeting is going on now. You are late.’
    ‘I’ll go, I’ll go.’
    The television was on all this while. Oja now appeared to calm down and she settled on the floor to watch her soap. Ayyan observed her closely. He knew something was wrong. Her eyes had been shifting too often towards the washing machine and even now she was not in the trance she usually was while watching TV. She seemed to be very aware of him. She looked sideways to see where he was.
    ‘What is it?’ he asked.
    ‘Nothing,’ she said, and stole another glance at the washing machine. Ayyan opened its lid and peered in. There was a red cardboard box inside. Oja said, first softly and then with a rising pitch, ‘What’s wrong with having a god? All these people have a real god in their homes.’ Ayyan opened the box and there he was – a cheerful Ganesha. It was not the first time she had brought the idol of the elephant god home. Ayyan always threw him away on his way to work. But every few months, the lord returned in different moods.
    Ayyan rolled the idol in a newspaper. ‘I will throw him somewhere tomorrow,’ he said.
    ‘You cannot keep doing that,’ Oja screamed. Adi took off his hearing-aid and shut his right ear.
    ‘Isn’t Buddha enough?’ Ayyan screamed back. ‘Buddha is our god. The other gods are gods the Brahmins created. In their deviant stories, those gods fought against demons which were us. Those black demons were our forefathers.’
    ‘I don’t care what the Brahmins did. Their gods are now mine,’ Oja said. Her voice faltered. ‘I am a Hindu. We are all Hindus. Why do we pretend?’
    ‘We are not Hindus, Oja,’ he said, now calm and somewhat sad. ‘Ambedkar liberated us from being treated like pigs. He showed us how to renounce that cruel religion. We are Buddhists now.’
    ‘I can live with nothing,’ she mumbled, ‘I don’t even wantdreams. All I am asking is to let me have some gods. Our son is growing up. I want him to know the gods that other boys know. I want to take him to the temple. I want him to be aware of these things. I want real festivals in this house.’
    Ayyan considered what his wife had just told him about their son. He had thought about it before. In a way, Adi was growing up like an animal, without any influence of culture. The epics that his father believed were the propaganda of the Brahmins were also the only epics the boy had. And a boy needed those to understand fully that there was an eternal battle between good and evil, and that in an ideal world the virtuous triumphed over the bad. Superman was good, but Mahabharata was deeper. It had complexity. It made the good choose the wrong path, and there were demons who were fundamentally nice persons, and there were gods who ravished bathing girls. Ayyan wanted his son to know those stories. Even though he could not accept Hindu idols in his home, for some time now he secretly wished Oja would win that battle. He wanted to yield but yield grudgingly, so that the religion of the upper castes could be used in his home for entertainment and education, and nothing more. He wanted Adi to grow up knowing morals, patriotism and the gods. And when the boy turned twenty, may he have the