Serious Men

more. It has to accept that life and consciousness are a hidden part of what we are trying to study. I cannot say something like this in public because it is a privilege given only to scientists who have gone mad.’
    What he had in his mind was so simple and clear, but when asked, for the first time, to express it through the inadequacies of language it seemed so difficult and even plebian.
    ‘I believe the universe has a plot, a purpose,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what the game is, but something is there.’ Then he said abruptly, clumsily, ‘Have you heard of Libet?’ That surprised her. Never would she have associated Acharya with the name of Libet.
    Benjamin Libet was a part of male exotica, like time travel and antimatter. His name was usually invoked at the confluence of beer and philosophy, when stranded men asked deeply, ‘Who are we?’
    Oparna sat up. ‘Libet?’ she said, and giggled.
    ‘Yes, Libet.’
    ‘When was he active? Sixties, seventies?’ she asked.
    ‘Seventies, eighties.’
    ‘He was with the physiology department, wasn’t he, of the University of California?’
    ‘You seem to know him pretty well,’ Acharya said.
    ‘Some things stick,’ she said. ‘He probed the human consciousness or something like that? And claimed to have proved that Free Will does not exist. But how can anybody prove something like that?’
    ‘He fixed electrodes on the scalps of volunteers,’ Acharya said, in a deep, solemn way, ‘and he asked them to perform ordinary tasks like lifting a finger or pressing a button. He then showed that moments before they believed they had made the conscious decision to perform a task, their brains had already started the neural process to achieve the action. This implies that when a man lifts his finger, he is merely in the illusion of having made the decision. In reality, the event is preordained. If Libet is right, then there is an interpretation that people may not want to accept. That every action on Earth, the turn of a head, the bark of a dog, the fall of a flower, is a predestined inevitability. Like a scene in a film.’
    Oparna wanted to say ‘crap’. But there was something about the way he was gazing at the ceiling, with his eyes soft andintoxicated by a distant memory. She told herself that she would be a woman, she would be understanding. That was her perpetual weakness, anyway. To see the point of the men she loved.
    ‘A long time ago I worked with him very briefly, just for a few weeks,’ Acharya said, without taking his eyes off the ceiling. ‘I helped him in his experiments.’
    Oparna was surprised, but first she had to make a scientific objection: ‘Libet’s equipment was obviously primitive. There could have been an error.’
    Acharya had heard these objections a thousand times, but there was something he knew which made him certain that Libet had stumbled upon a mystery that lay at the very heart of science. Oparna saw in his eyes an opaqueness, a grim unchangeable faith that would have normally exasperated her, but now, in the darkened lab, it almost convinced her that Libet was probably not so bad.
    ‘What were you doing with Libet, anyway?’ she asked. ‘Weren’t you busy demolishing the Big Bang then?’
    ‘When I heard what he was trying to do, I got curious,’ he said. He looked at her. ‘Oparna,’ he said, ‘when I told you that I have not told anyone this, I was not referring to my connection with Libet. It’s something else.’
    She pulled herself closer to him. ‘What is it then?’ she asked.
    ‘Something happened when I was about nine years old,’ he said. He tried to sit up, but the floor was slippery in his sweat. She helped him, and he sat resting his back against the foot of the main desk. ‘I was walking with my family to the circus. The car wouldn’t start that day, and father said that since the circus tent was just a kilometre from home we should walk. There were a lot of us on the road. We were a big family. My mother had a box of groundnuts and she kept putting a heap into my palm. Suddenly, my mind went blank and I saw clearly a dwarf in a red T-shirt and white shorts. He was sitting on an elephant. A blue bird flew over his head. Then he fell off the elephant and was trampled. I saw this in my mind. My mother was walking by my side. I told her what I had seen. She smiled at me and ruffled myhair. “Don’t worry,” she said. When we entered the tent, I saw it was packed but the front seats were