Serious Men

make out what she was trying to tell him. ‘And this is a hint that perhaps space–time geometry is not something fundamental in string theory, but something that emerges in the theory at large-distance scales or weak coupling,’ one of the men was saying.
    ‘I will go now, I think you have a lot of work,’ said Oja, very faintly.
    ‘Hello,’ said Ayyan, but the line had gone dead.
    He put his mobile in the drawer and looked at these men onthe ancient leather sofa, so wise and comfortable in their austere clothes.
    One of them was saying, ‘The curvature of the universe, according to Harrison, will be confirmed in our lifetime and I think that is a very important statement. It is nice to know that there are some people who are looking beyond the Collider.’
    Ayyan now found these men more unreal than he could ever have imagined. And they were repulsive. He went to the inner door. Acharya was gazing thoughtfully through his window.
    ‘Sir, they insist on meeting you right now.’
    Acharya took his eyes off the window and glared at the table for an instant. Then he walked to his door, flung it open with brute force and yelled at the waiting men who were in the middle of describing the curvature of the universe, ‘Get out, get out. Right now. Get out.’
    The string theorists jumped. They looked confused and hurt, but they walked away without a word.
    Deep inside himself, Ayyan roared with laughter. It showed on his face in a faint twitch at the edge of his lips.
    Acharya returned to his chair and continued his sullen survey of the Arabian Sea. He sat like that for over an hour and then he felt an indefinable pain that he recognized as a familiar sorrow. Slowly, he understood what it was: Lavanya. Her eyesight was failing and there was a stent in her heart too. But why was he thinking about her? Yes, at six, he had to take her to the hospital. The driver was not coming in today and so he had to drive. There was something funereal about it, he thought: an old man driving his old woman to the hospital. Something very lonely about it. Something very sad and American. He got up and steered his trousers around his waist.
    At the end of the main driveway of the Professors’ Quarters there was a hard-surface tennis court. An instructor was coaching three little girls who were in frilled tennis skirts. He was gently lobbing the ball across the net to them. One of the girls was bored with the proceedings. She began to pick up jasmine flowers that hadfallen on the clay court, and she arranged them on the fading baseline.
    Lavanya was watching her. She was reminded of Shruti who was now a married woman and many worlds away. She felt deserted that moment, but was comforted by the thought of her husband who would soon come bumbling down the driveway. She was in the shade of a neem tree, and leaning against an ancient sky-blue Fiat – a relic that was misunderstood in the Quarters as a symbol of Acharya’s simple ways. The truth was that he had neither the money nor the patience to sell his ancestral lands and buy a new car with the loose change. There was a time when she used to tell him, almost every day, that he should sell off the worthless fields and that monstrous house in Sivagangai which was haunted by the ghosts of her in-laws.
    She looked at her watch. It was time, but she knew she did not have to call him. It was very strange how he forgot just about everything else but always remembered her hospital appointments. There he appeared at the gate and walked down the driveway, exactly the way she had imagined. He was an old man now, she thought, and for some reason that made her laugh.
    Acharya did not say anything to her. That was not unusual. They got into the car and drove in silence. Taxis broke lanes and crossed his path, singing cyclists almost died under his tyres and gave him self-righteous glares before resuming their songs, buses were at his bumper and pedestrians stood in the middle of the road waiting to cross the other half, but Acharya’s blood pressure did not rise.
    ‘This country has become a video game,’ he said. He did not speak for the rest of the journey.
    When they reached the Breach Candy Hospital, he got out of the car, locked the doors and went into the porch. At the reception, he realized that he had left something in the car. He went back, muttering to himself. Lavanya was sitting inside the car with a calm expression on her face.
    ‘You can open it from inside,’ he told