Serious Men

Moon orbited a more important object like the Earth. Acharya left the room without a word.

T HAT MORNING , A RVIND Acharya was lost in the unreasonable joy of trying to solve an old intractable problem. Did Time move continuously, like a smooth line, or did it move in minuscule jumps, like a dotted line? He was standing on the narrow balcony nine floors above the ground and glaring at the Arabian Sea. The summer air was still. A crow on the wooden railing began to hop sideways towards him.
    He was wearing a blue tracksuit that had a white tick mark embroidered at the hip, as if he approved of something. It had been sent by his daughter in California who wanted him to go on morning walks. Such things that came through DHL, he now grudgingly conceded as love. Some days, when he was not contemplating a difficult problem, he remembered Shruti fondly as the little girl who on a distant afternoon had looked up nervously and asked if maths was important in life. He had lied, ‘No.’ He might have liked to see her more often than when she decided to visit. Probably, he stood in the tracksuit every morning not to succumb to the indignity of exercise but because it was touched by his girl and dispatched in a packet on which she had written his name in her beautiful handwriting. Yet he never really craved to see her. The success of an old man lies in not wishing for company.
    The sun was growing harsh. His eyes, which were the colour of light black tea, softened a little. He smiled too. The excitement of the Time problem was making him hold the railing and rock gently. That was when a steel tumbler with the unmistakable fragrance of Madras filter coffee was shoved towards hischest. His surprise was so operatic it drove away the crow. The strands of abstract geometry and physics collapsed. What remained was the question that had woken him up at dawn, as it did on many dawns.
    His wife for forty-two years, and forever his email password, held the cup calmly in one hand as she watered a dying creeper with another. She looked tall and lean even in the oversized T-shirt and pyjamas. Her clear skin was stretched taut over a bony face and she had large dancer’s eyes that men mistook as curious: the kind of woman about whom young girls would say, ‘She must have been beautiful once.’ Her dyed hair was short and thinning. Once, it was rich and flowing and she used to tie it up in majestic arrogance before a fight. She moved in a smooth delicate way, as if there were liquid gel in the joints of her bones. And she was as womanly when she nudged him again with her elbow, ordering him without uttering a word to take the steel cup, unmindful of the fact that she had delayed one of the answers science sought the most from one of the few men it could ask. He looked at her in disgust, but she was not wearing her glasses.
    Lavanya Acharya yawned and pointed to a duster on the wire above and asked him to get it. His height was so useful. But when her mother had first met him with a silver plate full of moist fruits, she had said with a sad chuckle, ‘This boy is taller than a Gandhi statue.’ Acharya pulled down the dust cloth from the wire and gave it to his wife, muttering to himself that he had no peace in his own house. He then continued to glare at the sea.
    She studied him fondly. He was dressed like a football coach, and just as furious.
    ‘You wear these things every morning, and then just stand. Why don’t you go for a nice long walk?’ she said.
    A twitch appeared on his face. He didn’t turn.
    ‘Oh, and yes, I didn’t tell you,’ she said with sudden excitement, ‘Remember Lolo? Her husband died last night. Heart attack.’
    Acharya abandoned the problem of Time. The news of death, any death, interested him these days. Especially the widowhood of her friends and cousins. These women began to grow healthier after the departure of their men. Their lugubrious eyes filled with life and their skin began to glow.
    Lavanya pointed to the ceiling again. This time she asked him to bring down a suspended shrub. She was always doing that to him. Sometimes he complained that every time she saw him she imagined that she wanted something from a height. Yet she herself was tall, especially for a Tamil woman. Five foot nine. When she was twelve, her mother had made her walk one hour every day inside their silent labyrinthine house in Sivagangai with a wooden chest on her head because the family physician had said that the exercise