Serious Men

in a fresh envelope. He checked the voluminous dictionary for the meaning of the word ‘synergize’. It was not the first time he had looked up the word, but despite many attempts he never fully comprehended its meaning. Once more he tried to understand, but gave up. He got the full import of the letter though. It was a major breach. The authority of Arvind Acharya was being challenged. The first arrow had arrived. The excitement of being in the best seat to watch the duel filled him. He decided that whatever happened in his life, he would take no time off in the coming days. The clash of the Brahmins, an entertainment that even his forefathers enjoyed in different ways in different times and had recounted in jubilant folk songs that they once used to sing beneath the stars, was now coming to the Institute.
    Nambodri was not a man who went to battle unless he knew he was going to win. This was because he was a coward. Acharya, on the other hand, did not know how to fight small men who were, probably, the rightful inheritors of an office, any office. But he had that terrifying quality called stature, something that his colleagues, of their own accord, had granted him. From what Ayyan had heard of the battles of the Brahmins, it would be bloodless but brutal. They would fight like demons armed with nothing more than deceit and ideals – another form of deceit among men from good families.
    Ayyan went into the inner chamber with the letter. He placed it carefully in a vacant island in the sea of papers on the table.
    ‘From the Ministry,’ he said.
    Acharya did not look up. Twenty minutes later, he opened the letter. He read it just once and put it in the large bin that was nearly as tall as the table. He turned to the window and stared at the sea.
    Ayyan entered with some files to check if Acharya had read the letter. The envelope was missing from the desk and Acharya’s face no longer wore its customary peaceful expression. His eyes were burning in the glow of the setting sun.
    When Ayyan went back to the anteroom, the mobile phone on his desk was ringing. He could barely recognize the voice of Oja at the other end.
    ‘He burnt her,’ she said, crying, ‘he burnt her.’ She was calling from a phone booth outside BDD. Through the background noise of horns and the laughter of men, Ayyan could hear her desperate gasps for breath.
    It seared him always, the sorrow of his Oja. She said that a boy from Thane had come home with the news that Gauri had been burnt by her husband. Gauri was a cousin she had grown up with. The violence of subsidized kerosene that Oja’s mother had once feared might be the fate of her daughter had consumed another woman. Ayyan knew that woman. He had been to her wedding. She was an unremarkable girl who laughed a lot. He remembered her face through the red hood of her cheap bridalsari. She had tried not to giggle throughout her wedding. She was then consigned to a life of severe beatings, and now this. Two hours ago, she had died of severe burns in a government hospital. Her body was still in the morgue. Oja did not want to go there. She said she did not want to know how a woman looked after she was burnt. It was something every girl she knew had nightmares about when they were growing up.
    ‘Some people say that after you are burnt the face looks white, not black – that is if there is any face left,’ she said into the phone, and fell silent. She had nothing more to say, but she did not want to put the phone down. He could hear her breathing.
    The main door opened and two scientists walked in. They were in the middle of a loud discussion.
    ‘When these correction terms become large, there is no spacetime geometry that is guaranteed to describe the result,’ one man said. The other responded, ‘Yes I agree, the equations for determining the space–time geometry become impossible to solve except under very strict symmetry conditions. But my point is …’ He looked at Ayyan impatiently and pointed to Acharya’s door. ‘We have an appointment,’ he said, with a frown, probably annoyed because the impudent clerk was talking on his mobile.
    Ayyan picked up the land phone and put it on his other ear ‘Sir, Dr Sinha and Dr Murthy are here.’
    The voice of Acharya growled back, ‘I am not meeting anyone today.’
    In his other ear Ayyan heard Oja say something, but in the chaos around the phone booth where she was standing and the debate of the men in front of him, he could not