Serious Men

problem, it does not mean there is always a solution.’
    She tilted her face. And looked at him with a menacing exasperation. He returned the stare. It struck him how rarely he looked at her any more, and how old she actually appeared this close. This was an old woman standing in front of him, whose hair, without the deception of dye, would be the colour of cobwebs. Her face was still beautiful, but the skin on her neck had become loose. In each other’s eyes, probably, they had been diminished by age and disfigured by familiarity. Or was it the other way around? He could smell in her the vapours of all the oils from Kerala that she rubbed on her skin every night like a wrestler. That smell to him was the smell of death. His grandfather used to smell that way, and he used to tell all his grandchildren when they applied the odious oil on his wrinkled body that it was the lubricant old people needed to go smoothly down the tunnel of afterlife, into the body of a newborn. And the kids would then have nightmares about the crooked old men who had enteredthem when they were babies. The smell, strangely, also reminded him of the importance of digestion. His grandfather, in the aroma of ayurvedic oils that somehow made him appear wise, told the youth of the household every day that the secret of longevity lay in ensuring efficient digestion of food. ‘Always’, he used to say, ‘listen to your arse.’
    The vacant silence in Shruti’s room was stirred by a nasal song. It was in an indecipherable language and its volume slowly grew. It was coming from the tiny wood-framed clock with Thai digits on the nightstand, and it was inevitable that the alarm would now make Acharya and Lavanya look at each other for a moment. The interminable song, probably a Thai song, filled the house as it did every morning. It was the 7.45 morning alarm of Shruti which she had set about five years ago in the ambitions of waking up early and reducing her illusory fat. The alarm never really woke her up but she tried every single day. Acharya used to find it poignant.
    The alarm died abruptly, as it always did.
    ‘You really can’t turn this thing off?’ Lavanya asked.
    ‘I told you, I tried,’ he said, avoiding her eyes.
    After the girl left with a software engineer for California, Acharya told his wife that he had tried to disable the alarm several times but could not figure out how to do it. Lavanya found it hard to believe that a man who was once rumoured to win the physics Nobel did not know how to disable the alarm in a silly timepiece bought in the streets of Bangkok. She suspected that, like her, he too wanted to hear the alarm every morning and enjoy the momentary delusion of imagining their girl still sleeping in her room.
    Acharya wondered why daughters always went away. So keen they were on finding a moron and leaving. The futility of love and marriage – did they need a whole lifetime to see through it all? Didn’t they learn anything from the lives of their parents? Inevitably, he remembered the only two instances when he believed he had brought true grief to his daughter. Shruti always laughed at his conviction that he had made her suffer only twice.‘Every day, you were a monster,’ she would say. The two episodes that he conceded happened when she was eight. The first was the morning she realized that chicken was not a vegetable and that he had lied to her about its origin. The second instance was when she had brought a poem to him that she had written called ‘Infinite Stars in the Sky’. He had taken her to the terrace and showed her the night sky. If the number of stars were infinite in the observable universe, he told her, then at every single point in the sky there would be an endless line of stars stacked one after the other, and that would cause the night to be so illuminated that it would be brighter than day. Since that was not the case, since stars were just tiny points here and there, it meant that the number of stars was finite. She did not know there was a word ‘finite’, and had looked very dejected. She renamed the poem ‘Finite Stars in the Sky’, but it was not the same. She did not write another poem for many weeks after that because she was afraid of her father’s facts.
    Acharya was lost once again that morning. This time, he was in the trance of memories. Then he heard the voice. First as a whisper call, like the disturbing voice of conscience in old films that seeks the attention of the