Serious Men

applause faded into a long comfortable silence.
    And that was how the evening would unfold, with festive commotion giving way to silences, and silences broken by profound questions about the universe, and questions easing into laughs. It was a long tradition here for the scientists to meet on the first Friday of every month and chat.
    Ayyan Mani surveyed the room with his back to the wall, as he had done many times, and tried to understand how it came to be that truth was now in the hands of these unreal men. They were in the middle of debating the perfect way to cut a cake and were concluding that carving triangular pieces, as everybody does, was inefficient. Then they made fun of a French scientist, who was not in the room, because he had said that man would never devise a way to predict the highest possible prime number. After that they began to wonder what the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva would reveal.
    Ayyan could not bear it. This never-ending quest for truth. In the simpler ages, wise mendicants, metaphorical zens, sons of God, sages who turned into anthills, all such types could not sayin crisp clear copy that
The Times of India
could publish, the reason why life existed or why there was something instead of nothing. They could have just said it in a neat paragraph and solved the mystery once and for all. But they didn’t. They told fables instead. Now, truth was in the hands of the men in this room, and they were more incomprehensible than the men of God. Ayyan was certain that there was no such thing called truth. There was only the pursuit of truth and it was a pursuit that would always go on. It was a form of employment. ‘Everything that people do in this world is because they have nothing better to do,’ he told Oja Mani once. ‘Einstein had something called Relativity. You scrub the floor twice a day.’
    The Round Table had begun to discuss the fate of Pluto. Oparna Goshmaulik was following every word carefully. She did not understand many things that were being said, but the melancholy induced by her basement office was being lifted. She had always liked the company of men who knew a lot. She tried to understand why they were talking about Pluto with so much seriousness. She liked Pluto. From the arguments around her, she pieced together that the planet had been recently dropped from the model of the solar system at a science exhibition in America. And that had caused, not for the first time it seemed, a fierce debate over whether it should be considered a planet or a diminished member of the Kuiper Belt.
    ‘Pluto is too small, too small. It can fit into America. It’s so small,’ one man said vehemently.
    Even here, she told herself without malice, everything is a kind of penis.
    Nambodri, who was turning towards her and throwing the glances of an aspiring mentor, asked, ‘What do you think, Oparna?’
    She pretended to be coy because she wanted to convey that she believed she was not qualified to have an opinion. After all she was just an astrobiologist, not an astronomer. That meekness, she knew, the men would like.
    She said, ‘I’ll be quite sad if Pluto goes. I am Scorpio.’ Onceagain a silence fell because of her. Oparna awkwardly explained, ‘Scorpio is ruled by Mars and Pluto.’
    ‘So she is a Scorpio. Like me,’ a man said in a low tone, hoping to set off a round of laughter, but somehow this did not happen.
    ‘What are the Scorpio traits?’ a voice asked derisively and chuckled. It was first a robust chuckle, but it soon faded into a self-conscious giggle when the source realized he had no support.
    ‘Intense, strong, confident,’ Nambodri said, looking at Oparna, ‘and passionate.’ A faint laughter died quickly. Oparna managed to smile and mumble, ‘Astrology is not a science, you know.’
    ‘That’s why it’s not in dispute,’ Nambodri said.
    Matters slowly moved to another simmering issue: quotas for backward castes in colleges. There was a fear that the Institute of Theory and Research might be asked to allocate seats for the lower castes in the faculty and research positions. The general mood in the room turned sombre. Some men threw cautious glances at the secretaries and stray peons when there were comments on the political aggression of backward castes. Ayyan looked on impassively. He had heard all these arguments before and knew what their conclusion would be. The Brahmins would say graciously, ‘Past mistakes must be corrected; opportunities must