Serious Men

shut,’ a woman was saying aloud, but not to anyone in particular. Someone was telling the agents that all the forty families on the ground floor would have to be given adjacent flats in the new high-rises because they had lived like one big family for decades. Ayyan wanted to sell, but he knew it was not going to happen soon.
    Some men spotted Ayyan, and egged him to get closer to the agents. ‘Ask questions,’ an old man begged him, with hope in his cataract eyes.
    ‘Mani has come, Mani has come,’ someone said aloud.
    Adi looked severely at a woman and said, ‘That’s our chair.’
    Ayyan endured the meeting in silence wondering if there was a way he could decide for all these fools and settle the matter once and for all. But how? He thought a good special effects engineer could pull it off. Make God appear and say in cosmic echoes, ‘Sell your stupid homes. Take ten lakhs for every flat and be done with it. And don’t piss in the corridors, you bastards.’
    When the meeting ended with the plans for holding another meeting, Ayyan took his son for a long walk to the Worli Seaface. The furtive couples and brisk walkers had left, and the promenade was almost deserted. They ambled in the gentle breeze for a while. Then they sat on a pink cement bench. Adi was sleepy. He was leaning on his father, but his eyes were open.
    ‘Say, “Fibonacci … Fibonacci”,’ Ayyan said. A familiar look of concentration came to Adi’s face. He played with the words in his mind. His father mouthed the words slowly. ‘Fee bo na chi.’
    Adi repeated after him, ‘See rees. Fee bon a chi see rees.’
    Ayyan said, ‘Fibonacci Series.’
    Adi repeated the words.
    ‘Brilliant,’ Ayyan said. They sat there in silence and listened to the soft lull of the Arabian Sea.
    Adi yawned and asked, ‘What if someone finds out?’

R OUND T ABLES WERE oval even in the Institute of Theory and Research. That was the first thought that came to Oparna as she reached the second-floor hall for the monthly Round Table. She had missed the last two and so this was her first. There was a massive oblong desk at the centre of the room around which men were sitting in agitated concentric circles. Some were standing and chatting. Cheerful peons were passing biscuits and tea. There was much gaiety and jostling. Like sperm under a microscope. Most of the scientists were in light shirts worn over loose comfortable trousers. They were austere men who knew they were austere. Some of the younger ones were in jeans. Despite the overwhelming informality of this place, the loose shirts, the tempestuous white hair and the leather sandals, they were so clearly the masters in the room, their special status differentiated from the final concentric circle where the secretaries stood silently, sullen and unspeaking, as though the biscuits were stale. In the eye of the room’s gentle commotion was the solid figure of Arvind Acharya. The men either side of him were turned away, talking animatedly with others. Once again, he was a rock in the stream. All turbulence went around him.
    When Oparna walked in, a silence grew. She made her way nervously through the outer rings. Grey balding heads turned, one after the other. There were two female secretaries somewhere on the fringes, but she felt as though she were the only woman in the room because she knew the men felt that way too. Jana Nambodri, with that cloud of stylish silver hair, short-sleeved shirt neatly tucked into corduroy trousers, was at theoblong table, directly facing Acharya. Nambodri stood up, and with an elaborate sweep of his hand showed her an empty seat in the second row. She inched her way delicately towards the chair. Old men in her path moved their legs and made way. Some of them turned away uncomfortably as her back almost grazed their tired faces. Some pretended to continue chatting while looking at her rear in respectful nonchalance.
    ‘She is a Bengali?’ a man intended to whisper, but the silence was so deep that everybody heard it. (The man probably was a Bengali.) Faint chuckles filled the air.
    ‘Historically,’ Nambodri said aloud, ‘the only just punishment for a Bengali male has been a Bengali female.’ A round of laughter went through the room. ‘We forgot to mention it before, gentlemen, she is our first female faculty,’ Nambodri declared.
    One man clapped. The solitary applause was about to die prematurely, but the others joined in to reinforce the compliment. The