Serious Men

‘Is there a way I can stay on, Arvind?’
    Ayyan Mani was furious. The war of the Brahmins had ended so fast. And ended in the banal way in which medieval no-talent writers finished their moral fables — the great triumphing over the petty. The loss of anticipation deepened the grimness of his routine and he was filled with the fatigue of an unbearable boredom. When Oparna stood by his desk and asked to see Acharya, he did not even look at her. He just made a call and sent her in.
    She entered the den, as usual, wondering why she could hear her heart every time she saw this man and if this fear had more disturbing names.
    ‘I came here to tell you that I didn’t know why I was called to that meeting,’ she said. ‘I don’t want you to think that I am part of what they tried to do this morning.’
    ‘I know,’ Acharya said. She stood there in the vain hope that he would ask her to sit down and tell her how unfortunate it was that she was caught in the middle of all this, or maybe they could talk about the balloon that they would soon send to the stratosphere. But he was reading.
    After she left the room, Acharya tried to remember something. He had told himself that he would recall it later, but he could not place the moment. Then it came to him: it was when he had seen Oparna in the conference room, he had felt something. It was like a stab, a trivial feeling of betrayal and then a more elaborateagony as though she had died and left him alone. He was not surprised that he thought of her death. Everybody died, the young especially. But why should her death make him feel deserted? He considered the matter for a few seconds, but then his mind drifted to the triumph of remembering it. Nowadays, problems that he scheduled for the future never returned to him.

T HE FUMES GLOWED in the car lights, and they cast giant fleeting shadows of pedestrians in the air. In the vapours of the late evening traffic, cars and trucks lay stranded on the lane as if they were all trying to flee from an approaching calamity. Heads peered out of the windows. Long lines of honking vehicles melded and expanded until, somewhere ahead, they became a huge unmoving knot of metal and smoke. In the heart of the jam was a black Honda City, its bumper torn off. A girl whose navel was pierced by a glimmer of silver, and whose small pink T-shirt said in gold ‘Skinny Bitch’, was standing in a daze. Her hands were spread out, and she said in English, several times, the same thing: ‘What the freaking hell?’
    An abandoned taxi was still kissing the rear of her car. A dark man, who must have been the cab driver, was standing facing her in the middle of the road, sheepish and giggling. People on the pavement looked on in glee. A man who was sitting on his haunches and watching the fun screamed, ‘Now look at
her
bumper.’ Ayyan walked through the situation with a serene smile.
    A few metres ahead was a barber’s called Headmaster, and next to it was a restaurant with aluminium-topped tables and wooden chairs. At the entrance, Ayyan spotted Thambe, the tiny man to whom he had handed an envelope full of notes on the Worli Seaface. They sat at a table and ordered tea. ‘The article was great,’ Ayyan said. ‘My boy is so happy.’
    ‘I hope other papers pick it up,’ Thambe said, flapping his thighs. He stopped a waiter to ask if there was a toilet in the restaurant. The waiter shook his head.
    Thambe was a reporter with Yug, and one of those hectic men who did things that did not have a name. He could bring back lost licences, create ration-cards, and he knew the mobile numbers of government clerks.
    ‘You really did a beautiful job of my son’s achievement,’ Ayyan said.
    ‘I believe that brilliant boys like your son have to be supported,’ Thambe said, pouring his tea into the saucer.
    ‘Has anybody from the English papers contacted you about my son?’
    ‘No,’ the reporter said. ‘The English reporters are such snobs. They never follow up anything we do.’
    ‘I see. You know, Thambe, it would have been nice if you had put him on the front page. After all, a ten-year-old boy winning a contest like that is no small achievement.’
    ‘I know. But the front page,’ Thambe said, smiling sadly, ‘is very expensive, Mani.’
    ‘How expensive?’
    ‘Oh, it’s beyond us. I don’t even go there. It is for big people.’
    ‘Your editor knows that you … you help friends?’
    ‘You are asking me if the editor knows if I