Serious Men

first tremors of the news. He sat down and repaired the letter with the supply of official envelopes he had in the bottom drawer. He tried to recall when he had last felt this familiar fear in his heart which was a cruel mix of sorrow and anticipation. As he entered Acharya’s room, Ayyan recognized the fear. Many years ago, when he had to wake up the aged father of a friend to inform him that his only son had drowned in Aksa, he had felt this way, as if his heart were turning into ice. He put the letter on Acharya’s desk.
    Acharya regarded the letter without interest. Then he returned to
Topolov’s Superman.
    In the peace of the dormant equipment, shrouded in their plastic covers, Oparna sat on the main desk swinging her legs. She was staring at the phone. The murmurs of subterranean machines filled the room as the door opened. As it slowly shut, the haunting silence returned. Nambodri walked in delicately, like an explorer. He looked up at the ceiling and in other directions, and smiled. He stood by Oparna’s side and looked at her without a word. Unable to bear his phoney intensity any more, she turned to the phone and resumed her vigil.
    ‘Why are you doing this?’ he asked. She removed her hair–band, held it in her mouth, and tied her hair in a fiercer knot.
    ‘You must ask the man, don’t you think?’ she said.
    ‘The victim, are you?’ he asked.
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘He would never even think of doing something like this. Oparna, why don’t you tell me what this is all about?’
    She began softly to hum a rhyme, probably a Bangla rhyme. She was suddenly scary.
    ‘I’ve heard some stories about you and him,’ Nambodri said. ‘Something happened? And this is some kind of a revenge? Woman scorned, or some rubbish like that?’
    ‘Why don’t you come later, Mr Runner-Up?’
    That disturbed his poise but just for a moment. He told her, almost fondly, ‘You’re being stupid, Oparna. This is not the wayto do it. You’re almost there but you have to be careful. Acharya is not easy to destroy.’
    He could see clearly, in the nonchalant way that she was sitting, the way she was swinging her legs, her nervous hum and her paranormal expectation of the phone to ring, an insanity that he might never have suspected before. He felt afraid, not only to be standing there in the deserted basement lab, but for the times when he had tried to flirt with her, because if she had granted him the possibilities, his fate would probably have been far worse than Acharya’s.
    ‘You must listen to me carefully, Oparna,’ he said.
    She slouched a bit and yawned. ‘This is not the time for desperate mentors to come,’ she said. ‘What is done is done.’
    Nambodri leaned on the desk and said, almost in a whisper, ‘Oparna, there is something you must understand. Even before you were born, Arvind Acharya was a name that floated once every year as a probable Nobel recipient. He is big. He is very big. Nobody is going to believe you. He has to just say he was framed and your game is over.’
    ‘There are people who’d like to believe me. I know that much,’ she said.
    ‘That’s true,’ Nambodri said thoughtfully. ‘But writing a letter to the Ministry is not the way to do it. You’ve got to understand. There are people who hate him but there are also very powerful people who love him. The game now could go either way. So you must go to the press right now. It has to be all over the papers before the internal inquiry even begins. People have to see this news, not hear it from their friends. Do you understand? It has to be news, not gossip. People believe news. You’ve got to go public with this story, Oparna.’
    She looked at him innocently, almost like a child, and said, ‘But isn’t that unethical?’
    Then the phone rang, and a fond smile appeared on her face.
    Ayyan Mani said two soft ‘hellos’ to the dictaphone and played his voice back to check an instrument he had never held with somuch reverence before. It was, until this day, an enduring symbol of his plight, a reminder that he was nothing more than a large Indian recorder appended to a small Japanese one. But that morning, his unfailing instinct told him that this small silver thing was going to produce a treasure which he could somehow encash in the decisive war of the Brahmins that was now unavoidable. He did not have a plan, but he knew he would soon find one.
    Oparna arrived without the discomforts of sanity. It was almost the same face that