Serious Men

rocks by the sea or walked around the building, or went up and down in the lifts. On Sundays the place was empty. But today was a working day. So it was full of people. That’s why he was silent in the lift though some people were smiling at him. They smelled very good. They smelled like the inside of a car. Not a taxi but a real car. He had been inside L. Srini’s car once. He liked the smell of a car.
    They were on the third floor. The door opened and a lot of people waited outside to get in. He wanted to spend his entire life going up and down in the lift. But his father held his hand and they went down the longest corridor in the world. He had seen it before, on Sundays. He preferred the corridor dark and empty. Then it looked like a road in the comics. People on the corridor looked at him and smiled.
    ‘He is the guy, isn’t he? The genius,’ one man said.
    Adi smiled. He liked being called a genius. It was different from being called special. All handicapped children were called special and he did not believe he was really handicapped. He could hear without the hearing-aid but only in the right ear. He was worried that if the game was over, as his father said, people would begin to call him special again. At the end of the corridor, his father stopped at a door on the left side that said ‘Deputy Director – Jana Nambodri’.
    ‘Ready?’ his father asked.
    ‘Ready,’ Adi said.
    He saw Ayyan knock twice and then open the door. A man with a lot of white hair looked surprised to see them but he rose from his chair smiling. He was with three men who were younger and had black hair. They were all wearing jeans. They were standing now and smiling at him. He liked it when people looked only at him and nothing else in the room. They made him sit on the table though he wanted to sit on the chair.
    ‘Aditya Mani,’ someone declared to the room, without looking at him.
    ‘But that’s
my
name,’ Adi said, and the men laughed.
    ‘Tell me, Adi, why do you like prime numbers so much?’ the short man with white hair asked in English.
    ‘It’s unpredictable,’ Adi said.
    ‘What are the other numbers you like,’ the man asked.
    Adi smiled coyly because that was what his father said he should do if he did not understand the question.
    ‘He is shy,’ his father said. ‘He doesn’t talk much at all.’
    ‘What do you want to be in the future, Adi?’
    ‘Scientist.’
    ‘Of course. But which field interests you the most?’
    Adi smiled coyly.
    ‘You like maths or physics more?’
    ‘Physics.’
    ‘Physics,’ the men said happily, all at once.
    Arvind Acharya was relishing the moment. He was imagining a giant balloon, twenty storeys high, soaring against a clear blue sky. The gondola that was carrying the four sealed samplers was such a meagre tip dangling at the bottom of the balloon. It was absurdly disproportionate, he thought, for the basket that was the very reason why the balloon existed, to be a few hundred times smaller than the balloon itself. It was not an aesthetic image. He had always loathed such disproportion. That’s why he had once despised the Zeppelins, and the sight of little whitewomen driving long sedans. The device and its purpose had to be in proportion. But then he wondered if it was a reasonable demand. The device was physical and so it had a size. The purpose was actually abstract and so could not be described by size. The little white woman was not the purpose of the sedan. The sampler in the balloon’s basket was not the purpose of the hot-air balloon. The purpose of the sedan was that the little woman had to go somewhere, say, to a funeral. The purpose of the balloon was to confirm that there were aliens in the sky. So where was the question of disproportion? Also, if the goal of the universe were to manufacture life, as he secretly believed, then the universe was a giant device containing unimaginably vast nebulae and star systems that caused unimaginably large-scale cataclysms to make minuscule pieces of life here and there. So, even in his own version of the truth, the device was physically disproportionate to its purpose.
    It was inevitable that he would then wonder, not for the first time of course, if the universe needed a goal. But he liked the idea. A whole universe churning violently inside to create the seeds of what would eventually become a state of being: little disjointed minds that would look back at the sky and acknowledge that yes, it is there, there is