Serious Men

astonishment. But, clearly, these men were nervous and distracted. Something was about to happen, Ayyan knew.
    ‘Isn’t this the same boy who asks his teachers why nothing travels faster than light?’ Nambodri asked.
    ‘He does?’ someone asked in disbelief.
    ‘Get him here,’ Nambodri said, ‘Let’s have a look at him.’ And that was it.
    Ayyan went to his corner seat in the anteroom. In the morning odours of old cushion and detergent, a faint haunting smellthat usually reminded him of old sorrows, he switched on the various machines around him. He wondered what Nambodri and his men were up to. There was a sense of purpose on their faces. They had done something and were preparing for the consequences. The war against Acharya might have begun. The evangelists of alien signals against a dictator who believed that truth was usually not so dramatic.
    Arvind Acharya bumbled down the interminable corridor, suddenly reminded of his daughter in the days after she was born. He would sit at the edge of her mother’s bed and stare into the crib. Some days, he would imagine the world through her eyes and he would feel in his heart how long an hour actually was. As a proportion to the fragment of life his daughter had seen, an hour was a vast sprawling place. What appeared to be an hour to him, he calculated then, must have been one thousand five hundred adult hours to her. Time stretched or contracted, depending on who was keeping it. It was a strange enchanting force. In a way, it did not exist unless it was comprehended. And that to him was the key to the Time problem. Time was clearly woven into another force, the force of perception. And perception was the virtue of life alone. So he wondered if life was a fundamental element of the universe like Time itself. This line of thought had many holes, but he enjoyed it. He tried to imagine how a microscopic organism would perceive time. If its lifetime were a second, it would perceive the instant in a very different way from humans. It would live through its life feeling the sheer expanse of the moment, probably even getting bored sometimes.
    He realized he was distracted by something, but he did not know what it was. It was a sound, a meek ugly voice that had none of the beauty of the thoughts it sought to abolish.
    ‘Sir,’ he heard someone say.
    Acharya looked around and he realized he was at his door and a dark man with bright eyes and thick black hair neatly combed sideways was standing there with a newspaper andspeaking in the tongue of the defeated landless slaves from another time.
    ‘My son has appeared in the paper, Sir,’ Ayyan said in Tamil.
    Acharya’s mind slowly emerged from the mist and began to understand what was being said. He grabbed the paper from Ayyan.
    ‘It’s in Marathi, Sir’ Ayyan said.
    ‘I can read Marathi,’ Acharya mumbled, and he read. He looked puzzled and asked, ‘Your son?’
    Ayyan nodded.
    ‘Brilliant,’ Acharya said, ‘Why haven’t the English papers written about this?’ The giant read the story again. ‘I didn’t know there was a Department of Science Education in Switzerland.’
    ‘There is, Sir.’
    ‘Bring him here on Monday.’
    ‘OK, Sir.’
    ‘Take good care of him. Don’t ask him to become an engineer or some rubbish like that. Keep your relatives miles away from him. Do you understand?’
    ‘I understand.’
    ‘Let him be. Give him books, a lot of books. You can take anything you want from my shelf. And don’t just give him science books. Give him comics, too. If you need anything you let me know. And don’t forget, give him a lot of comics.’

A PHONE RANG on Ayyan’s desk. It was Acharya on the line. He wanted a print-out of an email. This was a routine instruction. Acharya preferred to read letters the old-fashioned way and had given Ayyan his email password – Lavanya 123. The dedication of passwords was the new fellowship of marriage. To each other, couples had become furtive asterisks. Nothing else had changed about marriages of course.
    He printed the email of a man called Richard Smoot. In the subject line was the cryptic message – Qb3. At the start of the correspondence between the two, Ayyan did not understand the messages in the subject lines which carried codes like Nf3, a6 or something similar. Then he realized that when Smoot had sent his first mail enquiring about the possibility of Acharya delivering a lecture in New York, he had written e4 in the subject slot – the