Serious Men

for this sorrow to arrive in his room as often as possible in that ascetic uniform of long top and jeans, the cassock of her platonic detachment. She spoke to him only about work, and she looked so strong and resolute in her martyrdom that he did not find cues to speak about himself or to blame the forces of virtue that stole him away from the basement.
    But he found excuses to be with her. He asked Ayyan to send her to his room on flimsy pretexts. And she came every time he summoned her. Some days, when he thought that he had summoned her too many times, and feared that she might leave the Institute, unable to bear the sight of him, he called group meetings with scientists and research assistants. His eyes would sweep across the assembly, and rest casually on her. She never looked him in the eye, but every time his carefully constructed perfunctory gaze fell on her he was certain that she knew he was looking. Her mask of detachment would slip a little: she would stare harder at the floor, or she would inhale unknowingly. So he devised a new way of looking at her.
    He realized that if he adjusted the position of the cylindrical glass jar in which Lavanya’s ethereal agents still filled orchids every morning, he could see Oparna’s reflection. The vase wasbought by Lavanya years ago as part of her failed attempt to make his office look beautiful. Now it was an accomplice in his furtive love. It had a reasonable refractive index, it seemed, and so her face was not too distorted. And this was how he would look at her during the long group meetings. Sometimes, he noticed in the jar, she would look at his face in a fond way and turn away when she perceived the threat of being found out. This device consoled him until one afternoon when he saw Oparna’s reflection staring at him and then at the vase. She had somehow figured out the technique. He got up in the middle of the meeting, even as someone was talking to him about the optimum dimensions of the balloon, and carried the vase to the far end of the room. He put it on the centrepiece that lay in the middle of the interfacing white sofas. He rejoined the perplexed group with an innocent face and threw a casual glance at Oparna for appreciation, but she was looking at the floor.
    Acharya was miserable the whole week. All day, he would try to work, try to survive the unrelenting influence of Oparna, and go home to hunger and wakefulness. He realized that his home was entirely the colony of his wife. He was running short of shirts and trousers. Underwear that was usually laid out on the morning bed for him like a buffet, now became rare. He could not find anything. So Lavanya, in the middle of sombre funeral prayers, or while serving food to the mourners, would get calls on her mobile and she would whisper, ‘the nail-clipper is in the leopard-skin box … the box is inside a bag with polka dots in the second drawer of the nightstand on my side of the bed … I cannot explain what a polka dot is right now … yes, lots of dots on the bag … I don’t know why they are called polka dots and not dots … don’t forget to put the nail-clipper back in the box … dry yourself after your bath … And why haven’t you been opening the door for the maids?’
    Despite his condition, Acharya was aware that the Balloon Mission was entering a crucial phase. The problems in equipment procurement were slowly being solved. His friends in Nasawere helping to release equipment that the American government had blacklisted after the Pokhran nuclear tests. Despite the torments of love and its weird distractions that expanded time, he worked hard on the many finer aspects of the Mission. He was talking to government servants, scientists and weathermen, redrawing the design of gadgetry, scrutinizing the physics at the altitude of forty-one kilometres and commanding everything in him to ensure that the lab in the Institute was worthy of testing the samplers at the end of the Mission. But he had lost his peace. And the privileges of high thought, and his isolation that had once guarded him from the trivialities of life. The beast of genius inside him was now fatally infected by what he diagnosed as common infatuation, but through a minute crack in the fog of misery his mind could still see the beauty in the conviction that alien microbes were always falling from the heavens and they had once seeded life on Earth.
    The thoughts of the origin of life sometimes diminished his longing for of