Serious Men

outfit is not quickie-friendly,’ he says.
    All of a sudden police cars come with sirens blazing.
    ‘Superman!’ a cop screams. He is holding the red cape. Other cops point their guns at Superman. People peep through their windows above.
    ‘Shit!’ Superman says, looking a bit tired. ‘Can’t believe I’ve got to do this again.’ He dashes up to space, circumvents the globe a thousand times and gains a velocity faster than the speed of light to reverse Time. The rotation of the Earth changes direction. Life on Earth rewinds to the point when the pretty girl is walking through the market lane.
    ‘Not possible,’ Acharya muttered angrily. He never liked it when Time was exploited this way.
    But then this was what modern physics itself had become. Time reversal, black holes, dark matter, dark energy, invisibility, intelligent civilizations. Exciting rubbish. The money was in that.
    Oparna was imagining a young man with fiery eyes, long gaunt face, hair neatly combed. Handsome, she thought. What would such a man say to a pretty sepia girl?
    ‘What’s the progress with the cryosampler?’ the operatic voice of Acharya asked, destroying the ancient world she had carefully created in her mind. His elephant eyes were looking at her.
    Outside, Ayyan Mani arranged the courier mail and the ordinary mail that had arrived. Acharya read only some of the courier mail, which he selected at random. He never opened the ordinary mail, those sad, stamped envelopes, though every day he received over fifty from laymen who believed they had a scientific temperament, or worse, had found baffling new theories. The only person who read those letters was Ayyan who knew how to repair an opened envelope. Once, Ayyan had thrown the letters in the bin and delivered only the courier mail to Acharya. The old man had looked confused for several seconds. There was an anomaly in a pattern he was used to. Ordinary mail and courier mail: that’s what he wanted to see. So he asked Ayyan about the ordinary mail, and when he learnt what the secretary haddone with it he told him never to throw anything away. The letters were a broad mathematical clue for Acharya as to his place in public consciousness. In a way, he wanted to be there, in the minds of ordinary people, even though he could not bear to read what they had to say.
    Ayyan went in with the letters, courier mail and faxes and set them on the desk. The basement item and Acharya were discussing how to send the balloon up and from where. Ayyan glanced at one of the telephones on the desk. It was still slightly off the hook. Good. When he went back to his seat in the anteroom he picked up a landline and listened in on the conversation between Oparna and the Big Man.
    Thirty minutes later, when Ayyan put the receiver down, he wondered if there was a way he could tell Oja Mani how absurd were the occupations of these men and women who so easily frightened her. An old man wanted to search the atmosphere for microbes that were coming down from space. A young woman would soon study two bottles of air. This was what people did. This was their job. In the real world that lay outside the Institute, it was even more weird. Majestic men went in cars, in the isolation of the back seat, studying laptops on their way to work where they would think of ways to fool people into buying cola, or a type of insurance, or a condom that had dots on it. Or invest other people’s money in the stockmarket. Some wrote for the papers about how more and more women were interested in cricket, or why Afghanistan was important to Pakistan, or something like that, and some people rewrote what others wrote, some took pictures, some drew, some made faces in front of a camera. This was more or less what big people did, the beneficiaries of the millenniums, at the end of the tunnel of time — this was what they did. He could have done any of those jobs. Oja too. And they could have lived in a building that had a lift, and when they entered the kind of restaurants where emaciated men parked the cars of fat men they would not be so frightened by the calm of the cold air inside and the smell of mild spices and the difficult names of fish. It was so easy to be the big people.All you had to do was to be born in the homes where they were born.
    Adi did not have that good fortune, but he would be there one day, among these people. He thought of his little boy, his large eyes that were like his mother’s and his unnatural calm.