Serious Men

the world to spare him, just for a day, but he was under siege. The forces of little men were outside his door. They infiltrated first as ominous telephone calls, and then they sent their dark messenger with clear white eyes who seemed to know something, who had a disturbing smile at the edges of his lips. Ayyan kept walking in and saying, ‘They have come, Sir,’ or ‘They have been waiting, Sir.’ By noon, Acharya yielded.
    The Balloon Mission had proceeded into a frenetic stage and there were people on the black sofa outside whom he could not avoid. He called them in reluctantly and conducted meetings that collapsed into long silences when he stared blankly at the visitors, not knowing that a question had been put, a clarification sought, an opinion expected. By evening, the siege eased and he tried to find respite in
Topolov’s Superman.
But he could not concentrate. He opened the table drawer and looked at the blue envelope that Oparna had left last night. He had not opened it. ‘These are my pictures,’ she had said. ‘Not every man is allowed to see me like this.’ To open the envelope was to accept the affair, and the thought of Lavanya tortured him.

T HREE HOURS BEFORE his confirmed appointment with love in the basement, it was inevitable that Arvind Acharya’s mind would wonder if Time flowed continuously, like a smooth line, or in tiny jumps like a dotted line. In the crisis of being seduced by a disturbing woman with real black hair, he needed the distraction of a problem that he knew he would not solve in three hours. But he could not take his mind away from the thoughts of touching the forbidden body of Oparna that would lie in wait for him beside microscopes and transilluminators (and, probably, perfumed candles which were not part of the Astrobiology department). But he also felt a morbid sorrow. For his wife of four decades who was at that moment, possibly, in the habitual melancholy of folding clothes. He had never felt this kind of sorrow before. He found it strange that the grief was not in his heart but somewhere in the stomach. And it was a dark, hollow kind of feeling. As if Lavanya had died, leaving him widowed in a pleasurable world. It was not a stab of conscience. It was, in fact, the emptiness of enjoying something all by himself without bringing her to share it. Without her presence, even the pleasure of adultery was not complete. And that was absurd. He could not bear it any more. This gloom in his stomach that hung just above an unexpected joyous swelling.
    He got up from his chair and steered his trousers. The air in the room had become too still. But he forgot why he had risen. He stood rooted near his chair and contemplated the acoustics in the basement, and why men married, and the exalted place of fidelity on a dwarf planet that went around a mediocre main-sequence star somewhere in the outer arm of just another whirlpool galaxy.Eventually, he opened the window and breathed the first rush of sea breeze. It was dark outside, but he could hear the sea. It was violent. And there was something about the wind that portended the mother of all rains. He heard the door open behind him.
    ‘I wanted to see you,’ said the voice of Jana Nambodri, somewhat meekly. He was subdued these days after the defeat of the mutiny and the humiliation of being pardoned.
    Acharya was about to turn and face the intrusion when he realized, just in time, that the youthful swelling caused by the thoughts of Oparna had yet to be tamed.
    ‘Jana,’ he said, without leaving the window, ‘Come tomorrow.’
    Nambodri had already walked into the room when he heard this. He stood there a bit confused, but went away without trying to understand.
    When the door shut, Acharya went hastily to his chair and for a fleeting moment, he felt like a gaping radio telescope. He sat behind the reassuring expanse of his desk and waited for time, whatever it might be, to pass. He tried to squeeze the erection with his massive thighs, suffocate its blood flow and release the tension. It might have been unprecedented, he suspected, for a man of advanced age to kill such a serendipitous unmedicated vigour, the pursuit of which, even among the young, was a billion-dollar industry. He briefly remembered Nicolaus Copernicus, at a moment in history, throttling his own heliocentric theory and conceding to the Vatican that the Earth was indeed the centre of the universe.
    But Acharya’s problem did not subside. It protruded