Serious Men

reserved for us. Everybody looked at us as we walked through the aisle and sat on the best seats. I sat between my parents. I wanted to feel safe because I knew what was going to happen.
    ‘In the middle of the show an elephant walked on to the stage with a dwarf in a red T-shirt and shorts sitting on top of it. I looked at my mother. She was looking at me as though I were playing a trick on her. She was trying to figure out how I could have known. She pinched my thigh and whispered, “You sneaked in here yesterday? Tell me, I won’t tell your father.” A small blue bird appeared from nowhere and flew in a panic over the audience. Everybody howled because it was so beautiful. It flew over the head of the dwarf and disappeared through a small hole in the roof. The dwarf then fell off the elephant. The elephant had not shaken him off. It was calm. It was not afraid, nor had it gone mad. As though part of the show, the elephant then walked over the dwarf. It put its leg on his chest. I saw the dwarf’s head rise for an instant and then fall. He died there on the floor. There was a commotion and everybody tried to run out. I remember my mother’s face. She looked at me in fright. When we returned home she told my father about what I had told her. He didn’t believe her or me. Then, somehow, the incident was forgotten. My mind never went blank like that again. I have never seen the future again. But something in me changed that day. And I have remained the same after that.’
    Acharya’s mind, in the trance of recounting an event from his childhood, stayed in that distant time. He remembered other images. The steam trains that bellowed beneath the footbridge, the stiffness of his starched shirt, his mother’s safety-pin that sometimes held the fly of his shorts, the dragonflies in the paddy-fields to whose tails the boys tied a thread and used them as live kites. How the girls disapproved of this. And how they cried when the boys told them that soon it would be the fate of butterflies too. The final journeys of the dead, their noses stuffed with cotton, their faces yellow, the seriousness of the mournerson whose shoulders went the bed of the corpse or the decorated chair in which the dead sometimes sat so comically. The sunlit courtyard of his childhood home, its clean chessboard floors, the huge immovable doors and those carved wooden pillars that were more ancient than ghosts. And the narrow enchanted lane outside which ran through the shadows of other huge benevolent homes that could only be inherited now and never built. On their tiled roofs peacocks that had no masters used to stand still. Once, that was his life. And it all came back to him.
    ‘So God has just been playing an old film all this while?’ Oparna said. There was another question on the tip of her tongue, a more serious question, but she felt a little foolish articulating it. ‘Why do you think there is life?’ she asked, somewhat sheepishly. A naked woman sitting beside a naked man and asking, ‘What is the meaning of life?’ It was like a terrible moment from a porn film that aspired to be art. Yet she wanted to know what he had to say.
    ‘I have a hypothesis,’ he said, and the word ‘hypothesis’ made her arch forward and laugh, her loose hair falling over her face. He took it sportingly. He laughed too. ‘I have a hypothesis,’ he said again, and looked at her eagerly in the hope of making her laugh one more time. Then his grin slowly narrowed until it vanished entirely.
    ‘Through life, the universe saves itself the trouble of making whole star systems by concentrating vast amounts of energy as consciousness. Why make a Jupiter, when you can just create a frog.’
    ‘Jupiter and a frog have the same energy?’
    ‘I think so.’
    ‘That, Dr Arvind Acharya should never say in public.’
    ‘Of course not.’
    She put her head on his shoulder. There was something healing about this closeness that reminded her of all her wounds. What this man had told her about his childhood and his interpretations of what it all meant should have shaken her. But somehow she imagined that only he could be a part of thisspring-toy universe where everything unwound in an inescapable, preordained way. Absolute truth was a gloom that happened to other people. Like him. It suited him. She could imagine Arvind Acharya, in the long pursuit of truth, wading through star systems across the aeons, trying to crack the game of life. The universe