‘You can open it from inside,’ he told her.
‘I know,’ she said, as she struggled out of the vehicle.
‘Then why didn’t you do it?’ he asked angrily. ‘Why are you being dramatic?’
‘I am being dramatic?’
‘I know I forgot you in the car. So?’
‘So nothing. It happens. Did I say anything?’
That night, after they returned from the hospital, Acharya could not sleep. He stood on the long, narrow balcony and looked at the dark sea and at the heavens above. It was a moonless summer night and he could see the stars. Once, he knew them intimately and by their names. Some people wanted the excitement of searching for signals from those faraway places. They were not romantic men who had the endearing desperation of a child. They were rotting scientists who were stranded in mediocrity, who had slogged for years in radio astronomy and had found no glory. They wanted the easy fame of a dramatic nonsense. They were willing to go to war with him for that. He knew how to fight them. Another battle, he thought. And he felt tired.
SEVEN MEN WERE gathered around the oval table. In the silence of an unnerving wait, they could hear the hum of the air conditioning. They were waiting for something to pass. Every time there was the slightest sound outside, they would look up at the closed door and return to a wait that they knew would soon end.
The door opened, and an almost perceptible wave of fear and anticipation went through the room. But when they saw Oparna Goshmaulik there was relief. She sat down, wondering who had died. ‘Thanks for coming,’ Nambodri said, the exhilaration of seeing her subdued by the heaviness of the moment.
She raised her eyebrows to ask what it was all about.
‘You will soon know,’ he said.
A few minutes later Bhaskar Basu walked in. He was a trim tidy man who suspected that he was good-looking. His jovial grey hair was distant cousin to Nambodri’s radiant aureole. The frames of his spectacles were thick and artistic. Behind the glasses, his narrow eyes looked shrewd and capable. Asshole, Oparna guessed.
Basu’s searching eyes, inevitably, rested on her. He asked Nambodri, ‘Won’t you introduce us?’
Oparna did not understand this peculiar habit of Indian men. If they could letch at her so overtly, they might as well ask her directly who she was. Why did they always turn to someone else and say, ‘Won’t you introduce us?’ It was so pathetic.
‘Oparna Goshmaulik,’ Nambodri said, ‘Head of Astrobiology.’
‘A Bengali girl,’ Basu said, a light coming to his face as if an inner bulb had switched on. He said something to her in Bangla and she tried to respond with something approaching a polite smile.
Basu turned self-important and stylish. He leaned back in his chair and broke the silence of the scientists around him.
‘Don’t worry, I am going to take care of it. I am here now,’ he said. ‘The old man is not here yet? I think we should call him.’
‘He will come,’ Nambodri said dryly. He feared that the presence of Oparna was inspiring the bureaucrat to assume a certain coolness that could be suicidal. Acharya, if slighted, was capable of flinging a paperweight at the offender. Oparna was in that room because Nambodri wanted her to witness the first tremors of a shift in the balance of power, and also to disrupt the Balloon Mission. But he was beginning to regret the move. Basu was getting carried away.
Basu launched into the structure of the new Seti department, even though the radio astronomers had already been briefed. When he spoke, he kept glancing at Oparna, who decided that she would toy with her mobile. He eventually fell silent because he had nothing more to say and everybody was looking grim and distracted anyway. The brooding wait resumed: all ears were listening for the door.
When Arvind Acharya walked in, one of the scientists stood up on impulse, thereby greatly ruining the ‘aggressive position’ Nambodri had said they should take. Acharya sat between two radio astronomers who looked more keenly at the table than they really needed to. Nambodri was disturbed by his old friend’s calm. He knew something was wrong.
‘Thanks for coming,’ Basu said, with a gracious smile. ‘Let me now …’
Acharya held up his hand to him and said, ‘Shut up.’
Basu’s elegant face appeared to lose size. He tried to form words. ‘Excuse me? I don’t understand,’ he said, looking severe. ‘What do you mean by that?’
Acharya consulted his watch.
‘I don’t understand this.’ Basu raised his voice.
‘Do you understand everything, usually?’ Acharya asked. There was something about the way he said it, with the deep serenity of an ancient pedagogue, that brought about another silence.
The radio astronomers looked at each other. Acharya consulted his watch again. There was the sound of a mobile phone vibrating in silent mode. It was a persistent spasmodic screech. Basu reached for his coat and took out his mobile. He saw the number and went to a corner of the room.
‘Yes, Sir. Yes, Sir,’ the astronomers heard him say with a sinking feeling.
‘Yes, Sir. Yes, Sir,’ Basu said many times. It was a private dialect of bureaucracy, and it had no other words.
When Basu put the phone back in his coat pocket, Nambodri knew the revolution was over. Basu sank into his chair looking pale.
‘Dr Acharya,’ he said, ‘the Minister has asked me to apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you. We are dropping our proposal to start a Seti department and the matter will not be broached as long as you are opposed to it.’
Basu rubbed his nose during the pause and continued, somewhat pathetically, ‘I hope you understand my efforts were in the best interest of science. I really believed that the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is a very important step forward. I thought it had defence implications too. I may have been wrong, but I hope you will get inside my mind and see the …’
‘I have been inside your mind,’ Acharya said. ‘It was a short journey.’
Basu left the room first. Oparna followed. The radio astronomers then rose, one after the other, and left the room in a funereal procession. Only Acharya and Nambodri were left. They sat still, the officious parabola of the oval table between them. Nambodri was smiling. The smile reminded Acharya of the arrack drinkers who used to fall defeated in the paddyfields of his childhood.
‘I thought you were beyond office politics,’ Nambodri said, ‘but it looks as if you have learnt a few things from the little men, as you call us. I forgot how famous you are, Arvind. Who did you call? The PM? The President? Who did you call?’
‘I want you out, Jana.’
Acharya felt sorry for this old man who did not know he was old, with whom he had spent many summers of his youth in a cold distant land, when together they had so much hope for each other and the world.
‘What do you want, you bastard?’ Acharya asked, almost in anguish.
‘What do I want?’ Nambodri said, with a sad chuckle. ‘I just want to search for extraterrestrial intelligence, Arvind. It’s very simple. What do you want?’
‘I want scientists in my institute to work on real science. If radio astronomers here are bored with pulsars, then they must quit and grow rubber on their fathers’ hills. Not chase alien signals.’
‘We have been saying the same things to each other for a long, long time,’ Nambodri said, ‘like two people in a bad marriage.’
‘Tell me something,’ Acharya said, in a tone that was remarkably kind. ‘Do you really believe you are going to find a signal from an advanced alien civilization?’
‘There is no reason why we shouldn’t.’
‘That’s not what I asked. Do you believe you will? What do you believe? Remember the word “belief”? That thing you had when you were twenty? What exactly do you believe? When you wake up in the morning, what do you know is certainly true?’