‘Oh — Praise the Lord.’
‘Please don’t feel compelled to say these things.’
‘Not at all. Lord is lord. Nothing Christian about it,’ he said.
‘Him, not it.’
‘Him.’
‘What if I meant it as a very Christian thing. Would you have still said, “Praise the Lord”?’ she asked.
‘Of course. God is one. Hindu god, Christian god — all the same thing.’
‘The same one?’
‘The same one.’
‘Yes,’ Sister Chastity said sadly. ‘People say that. People say many things. But I am sure you like the sound of “Christ is the true Lord”. There is something about it?’
‘Yes, there is something about it, but a lawyer was telling me a few months ago that it is against the Indian constitution to say “Christ is the true Lord”.’
‘What matters, Mr Mani, is the human constitution.’
‘I don’t understand, Sister.’
‘It’s all right. A day like this, Mr Mani, when your son is showing signs of a great future, isn’t it time for you to consider how the boy’s spiritual life is going to be?’
‘I am too dazed today.’
‘I understand. But sooner or later, the Lord will make a decision for you.’
‘His mother is happy with Buddhism right now.’
‘But Buddhism is a philosophy, Mr Mani. Christianity is a religion. Christ said everything that Buddha said and much more. Buddha stopped at the Peepal tree. Christ went all the way.’
‘Yes, but his mother is …’
‘I know, I know,’ Sister Chastity said. ‘I’ve tried talking to her. She just keeps quiet and pretends to be dumb when I try to give her Christ. Once she told me she felt like a Hindu. What a terrible thing to say! After all the atrocities her ancestors and your ancestors suffered, she still wants to follow that religion.’
‘You know how she is,’ Ayyan said, trying to look disappointed.
‘Yes, yes, but you’re a very intelligent man. You are the father of a genius. You have groomed your son so well. Isn’t it time you wondered how you are going to support his future?’
‘I think I’ll manage.’
‘Education is very expensive, Mr Mani,’ she said making a sorrowful face and leaning back on her chair. ‘Christians get discounts. As a financially backward Christian, you will be eligible for many benefits. You know that. I am just saying this as a concerned educator. I am not even implying that you should accept Jesus for the monetary rewards that will certainly come your way if you do that.’
Somewhere in the school, Gloria Fernandes, her throat parched at the very thought of having to teach this class, said in her singsong way, ‘Thirteen ones are thirteen.’ And the class chanted after her. She kept a cautious eye on a boy in the front row. She had a bad feeling today. ‘Thirteen twos are twenty-six,’ Gloria said. The boy lifted his hand.
‘What is it now, Adi?’
‘Why do we learn only the decimal system?’ the boy asked. ‘Why not the binary system?’
AYYAN MANI STARED at the Thought For The Day on the blackboard and was momentarily hypnotized by the power of the written word.
If ancient Indians were really the first to calculate the distance between the Earth and the Moon, why is it that they were not the first to land there? I look at the claims of old civilizations that they have done this and that with great suspicion — Neil Armstrong
Ayyan was tempted to write another invented quote. That would be risky. He usually inserted only one phoney quote every week or so. That way his subversive abuse of the Brahmins would not attract too much attention. But that morning he could not resist the temptation. He pretended to look into a piece of paper and wrote a fresh thought:
Reservations for the low castes in colleges is a very unfair system. To compensate, let us offer the Brahmins the right to be treated as animals for 3,000 years and at the end of it let’s give them a 15 per cent reservation — VallumpuriJohn
When he turned to leave, he saw Oparna Goshmaulik reading the Thought For The Day. ‘Who is Vallumpuri John?’ she asked.
Ayyan shook his head and looked up to ascribe blame.
‘Dr Acharya cannot be asking you to write the Thought For The Day,’ she said, and laughed when she tried to imagine Acharya giving instructions for the daily message. It was a very feminine laughter, heavy with affection, Ayyan thought.
‘Not the Director,’ he said, ‘Administration.’ Oparna nodded. Administration was a word everybody understood here, though nobody knew who it was or where it sat. It was an unseen being, like electricity, that made things work.
She was about to go to the corner stairs leading to the basement when Ayyan asked her, ‘Can you read Marathi?’ He showed her the paper. ‘My son,’ he said.
Oparna read with an honest curiosity that made him like her for a passing moment. Her lips silently mumbled some difficult words. Her long earrings, with a small blue globe suspended in each, trembled slightly. And he chose to see nothing more. He did not look at her proud breasts or how the wind was making her thin purple top stick to her flat stomach.
‘I can’t believe this. I didn’t know your boy was a genius,’ she said. ‘Won’t you bring him here?’
At the end of the third-floor corridor, just before the fateful door called Director, was another door. It said ‘Deputy Director’. Ayyan knocked twice and opened it. Jana Nambodri, who was in a huddle with five other radio astronomers, looked up with a grimace on his face. It seemed as if they were having a shadowy palm-on-the-candle kind of conference. Ayyan withdrew with an apology, but Nambodri’s face swiftly changed into a warm genial emptiness.
‘It’s all right, come in,’ he said.
Ayyan showed him the paper. It was put at the centre of Nambodri’s table and since only one of the astronomers could read Marathi, he read the news item aloud. Murmurs of surprise followed. They looked at Ayyan with smiles and mild astonishment. But, clearly, these men were nervous and distracted. Something was about to happen, Ayyan knew.
‘Isn’t this the same boy who asks his teachers why nothing travels faster than light?’ Nambodri asked.
‘He does?’ someone asked in disbelief.
‘Get him here,’ Nambodri said, ‘Let’s have a look at him.’ And that was it.
Ayyan went to his corner seat in the anteroom. In the morning odours of old cushion and detergent, a faint haunting smell that usually reminded him of old sorrows, he switched on the various machines around him. He wondered what Nambodri and his men were up to. There was a sense of purpose on their faces. They had done something and were preparing for the consequences. The war against Acharya might have begun. The evangelists of alien signals against a dictator who believed that truth was usually not so dramatic.
Arvind Acharya bumbled down the interminable corridor, suddenly reminded of his daughter in the days after she was born. He would sit at the edge of her mother’s bed and stare into the crib. Some days, he would imagine the world through her eyes and he would feel in his heart how long an hour actually was. As a proportion to the fragment of life his daughter had seen, an hour was a vast sprawling place. What appeared to be an hour to him, he calculated then, must have been one thousand five hundred adult hours to her. Time stretched or contracted, depending on who was keeping it. It was a strange enchanting force. In a way, it did not exist unless it was comprehended. And that to him was the key to the Time problem. Time was clearly woven into another force, the force of perception. And perception was the virtue of life alone. So he wondered if life was a fundamental element of the universe like Time itself. This line of thought had many holes, but he enjoyed it. He tried to imagine how a microscopic organism would perceive time. If its lifetime were a second, it would perceive the instant in a very different way from humans. It would live through its life feeling the sheer expanse of the moment, probably even getting bored sometimes.