Serious Men

was drifting.
    He leaned forward and asked her with affection, ‘I hope you are not disappointed with the news from Cardiff?’
    ‘I am not,’ she said.
    ‘I am,’ he said. ‘But this is just the beginning. We are going to send many, many balloons up there. And all those things that are falling down, we are going to trap them in our samplers and show beyond any dispute that there are aliens among us.’
    Oparna rose from her chair and went around the desk to his side. She held his face with her two warm hands and kissed him on his forehead. She had the peace of a mourner. There was something morbid about her face. It looked as if he had died and she was bidding him farewell. He felt a stab of such a cold fright that he thought of Lavanya, and wanted to complain to her that he was dead.

M ANY YEARS LATER, several scientists would still recall that Tuesday morning with the minute details of where they were and what they were doing when they first heard the news, like the word of an assassination freezes the memory of a whole generation.
    Jana Nambodri was with his usual company of radio astronomers when the phone rang. He held the receiver to his ear, and after making the first perfunctory noises he listened speechless. The radio astronomers, greatly dispirited after the failed mutiny to erect Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence as an autonomous department, gathered in Nambodri’s office more often than before with lament masquerading as hopeful conspiracy. That morning, there were six of them, including Nambodri, in the room.
    It was the portly professor called Jal, with a Gorbachev bird-dropping stain on his bald head, who first noticed that Nambodri’s hand was trembling. Jal nudged others to look at their ringleader. Nambodri’s left hand, which was holding the receiver, was shaking, and his right was drawing concentric circles on a discarded envelope. He finally said into the phone, ‘This is … I don’t know what to say … This is unbelievable.’ He put the phone down and stared blankly.
    ‘What’s happened?’ Jal asked.
    ‘I can’t tell you,’ Nambodri said. ‘You’ve had a bypass.’
    ‘Tell me, Jana. What happened?’
    Nambodri, whose mind had not fully returned from the phone call and the train of thought it had inspired, banged the table with his fist, and winced.
    ‘Stupid girl. Stupid girl,’ he said. Then he stormed out of his room, into the long corridor. Halfway down, he turned and looked at the door that said ‘Director’. Even to the unpoetic mind of Nambodri, the austere wooden door was beginning to resemble the lid of a coffin.
    Ayyan Mani looked at the courier letter on his table that the morose peon had dropped, as he always did, like a grievance from his heart. It was an unremarkable courier letter from the Ministry of Defence, and Ayyan knew he was going to open it. He looked furtively to his right, in the direction of Acharya’s door, and to the left where the main entrance was. The letter was from Basu.
    Dr Arvind Acharya,
    This is to inform you of an extraordinary development. We have a letter with us from Dr Oparna Goshmaulik, Head of the Astrobiology lab and the project coordinator of the Balloon Mission. We have independently verified with Oparna that she was, in fact, the author of the letter. She has declared, with a detailed chronology of the events, that she was pressurized by you into contaminating the contents of one sampler with the purpose of claiming that microscopic life has been detected at the improbable altitude of 41 kilometres above the Earth.
    She has claimed that when she first informed you that no life had been detected in the sampler, you instructed her to contaminate it and fabricate a report. And that you threatened her with severe professional consequences if she did not go with the flow. Taking moral responsibility for her actions, she has offered to resign. This is an extraordinary allegation and I’ll be in the Institute on Wednesday, by noon, to see how we can resolve this. I’ll be joined by an empowered committee for an internal inquiry into the matter. All senior faculty of the Institute have been instructed to be available to be called upon. You are hereby asked to present yourself before the empowered committee.
    Bhaskar Basu
    Only after he had read the letter twice did Ayyan realize that he was standing. A corner of the letter was quivering in thebreeze of the air conditioner. It was as if the note were shaking in the