Serious Men

reprimanded him for the hysteria of the huge fonts, but the rest of the release was approved.
    It was around two in the afternoon when Ayyan began to get calls from the exceptional faculty of the Institute asking for more information. Phones began to ring in almost every room, especially the sanctified third floor where the senior scientists worked. The news began to travel. Old men pressed the phone receivers to their hairy ears and raised their eyebrows in incorruptible fascination as they heard from their peers what Acharya had discovered. The younger scientists fired questions at their informers to crosscheck their disbelief. Then the many doors on the long finite corridors of the Institute opened. Scientists walked from their nooks to the office of Arvind Acharya. They went without invitation because it was a tradition here that an appointment need not be sought to congratulate a scientist.
    They went to Acharya not in friendship, not in the secret mourning of someone’s good fortune, not even with the foresight of sycophancy. They went as scientists. They wanted to celebrate a moment in time — a rare moment in time – when man was about to learn something more about his little world. That there were living things in the cold reaches of the stratosphere; that they were coming down from space not going up from Earth. That we were not alone, we were never alone. For the first time in the history of rationality, the nature of alien life was going to be explained. So they went to hold the large chubby hand of a difficult man, an arrogant man, who more than everything else, was now a discoverer.
    When they began to trickle into the waiting-room, the moving honesty of the silent concourse gave Ayyan gooseflesh. He accepted for the very first time that there was, in fact, such a thing called the pursuit of truth and that these men, despite all their faults, held this pursuit very close to their hearts. That day, just for that day, he conceded that there were things far more important in the universe than the grievances of an unfortunate clerk. He kept Acharya’s door open. It did not have a doorstopper, so he shoved a glossy newspaper supplement that spoke of hair-care, meditation and relationships under the crack beneath the door. He went to a corner of the waiting-room and stood in a funereal silence as the men went in to whisper compliments, or to give a pen in appreciation, or to just stand beside him. From where Ayyan was standing he could see Acharya. He looked happy and graceful, as he stood by the large sea window with the old guard and the young. Jana Nambodri too arrived eventually, though his office was the closest to the Director’s. He went into the open chamber and said, ‘Something in me dies when a friend does well.’ And they hugged.
    Later in the evening, the Press Officer sombrely surveyed the ground-floor media-briefing room. There were about twenty journalists. Photographers were taking up positions near the dais. Large men at the back were setting up their cameras. The Press Officer searched the faces of the journalists. He knew most of them. They were seasoned science reporters. He looked with concern at some young fresh faces. He asked their names and said sternly, but with the occasional servile smile, ‘Please read the release very carefully. Everything you need to know is in it. I hope you are aware that the Director is extremely short-tempered.’
    A photographer came to him and asked if the aliens could be photographed.
    ‘No, no,’ the Press Officer yelped. ‘They are microbes, they are microbes. And right now we are not in a position to release their visuals.’ He looked worried now. ‘Listen, don’t ask himanything directly. Ask me. And be very careful when you take pictures of Dr Acharya.’
    ‘Careful, meaning?’
    ‘Don’t get too close. Don’t use flash. Just make sure he is not annoyed, OK? I don’t know what will make him go mad.’
    The memories of what had happened when Stephen Hawking had last visited Bombay were vivid in his mind. A horde of photographers had surrounded the crippled physicist. Hawking’s delicate face could not take the explosion of flashes all around. He had looked frightened in his wheelchair, unable even to beg them to stop. Acharya had come to his rescue, charging towards the photographers with clenched fists. ‘He deserved better treatment,’ he later said, ‘even though he is an ambassador of the Big Bang.’
    The Press Officer