Serious Men

laid out for financially backward Christians, will benefit you immensely.’
    ‘I am giving it some thought. I am trying to convince my family. You know, there is this mindset against conversion.’
    ‘I know, I know. The human mind is so ignorant,’ Sister Chastity said. She held him with her deep hard eyes. She loved pauses. With nothing more than silence she usually asked him either to leave, or stay right there. This silence now was the calm before a sermon. He wondered if she really was a virgin.
    ‘Mr Mani,’ she said, ‘in a way, you are a good Christian.’
    ‘I am?’
    ‘You are, Mr Mani. How beautifully you’ve forgiven the people who brutalized your forefathers. The Brahmins, the kind of things they did. The things they do even now. In private, they still call you the Untouchables, do you know that? In public they call you “Dalits”, but in private they call you such horrible things.’
    ‘I know,’ Ayyan said, trying to appear angry and moved, because that was what she wanted.
    ‘Hinduism is like that, Mr Mani. It has the upper castes and it has the Dalits. The Brahmins and the Untouchables. That can never change. People only pretend that it has changed.’
    ‘You speak the truth, Sister. The Brahmins ruined my life even before I was born. My grandfather was not allowed to enter his village school. They beat him up when he tried once. If he had gone to school, my life would have been better.’
    ‘Absolutely,’ she said. ‘Tell me, Mr Mani. In the great Institute where you work, all the scientists are Brahmins?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘And all the peons are Dalits?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘But that’s not because the Brahmins are smarter than the Dalits,’ she said.
    ‘No,’ Ayyan said, now allowing himself to be somewhat engulfed by rage even though that was what Sister Chastity wanted. ‘The Brahmins were three thousand years in the making, Sister. Three thousand years. At the end of those cursed centuries, the new Brahmins arrived in their new vegetarian worlds, wrote books, spoke in English, built bridges, preached socialism and erected a big unattainable world. I arrived as another hopeless Dalit in a one-room home as the son of a sweeper. And they expect me to crawl out of my hole, gape at what they have achieved, and look at them in awe. What geniuses.’
    ‘What geniuses,’ she whispered angrily.
    ‘They are murderers,’ Ayyan said, noticing that she smiled exactly like him. Invisibly.
    ‘That’s why you’re a good Christian, Mr Mani. You’ve forgiven them, the Brahmins, whose great fiction Hinduism is.’
    ‘I have not forgiven them,’ Ayyan said, ‘And you know that. I have long renounced Hinduism. I am a Buddhist.’
    ‘Mr Mani,’ she said with a tired face, pushing the two books she had gifted further down the table towards him, ‘Hinduism, Buddhism – all the same thing.’

A YYAN M ANI WALKED through the low, elegant gates of the Institute and sought the will to survive another day in this asylum of great minds. He waved in greeting to the dispirited guards in their glass box who smiled at him.
    ‘Run, you are late,’ one of them shouted with a fond chuckle, ‘the Big Man is in already.’
    Ayyan never understood why this place was so seriously guarded. After all, what happened here was merely the pursuit of truth.
    The Institute of Theory and Research stood on ten acres of undulating lawns and solitary ancient trees. At the centre of the plot was a stout L-shaped building that held its breath inside shut windows. It ran along two sides of a carefully pruned central lawn. Beyond the angular building, the backyard rolled towards moist black boulders. And then there was the sea.
    Here sanity was never overrated, and insanity never confused with unsound mind. Sometimes on the pathways calm men spoke to themselves when they needed good company. This was a sanctuary for those who wanted to spend their entire lives trying to understand why there was not enough lithium in the universe, or why the speed of light was what it was, or why gravity was ‘such a weak force’.
    Ayyan had a haunting desire to escape from this madhouse. Thirteen years was too long. He could not bear the grandness of their vocation any more, the way they debated whether universe must be spelt with a capital U or a small u, and the magnificence with which they said, after spending crores of public money,‘Man knows nothing yet. Nothing.’ And the phoney grace with which they hid their