‘Not all of us are meant to believe, Arvind. Some of us can only wonder and, on good days, hope. Do you really believe that all life on Earth came from outer space?’
‘Yes. I don’t just believe. I know.’
‘Through microscopic spores that came riding on comets and meteorites?’
‘Yes,’ Acharya said peacefully. ‘And you know what? I also believe that these spores fall on different worlds in different corners of the universe and they spawn life that is suited to those conditions. Life that could be vastly different from what we can imagine. Life that could even evolve into giant zero-mass beings. Like massive clouds. Things we cannot even imagine.’
‘Why don’t you go public on this hypothesis then?’
‘It is not a hypothesis,’ Acharya said softly. ‘It’s a theory.’
In the Institute, a hypothesis was a good idea, but a theory was a good idea that deserved funds.
Acharya rose from the chair, holding his left knee for an instant. When he reached the door, he heard a sad voice ask, ‘Is there a way I can stay on, Arvind?’
Ayyan Mani was furious. The war of the Brahmins had ended so fast. And ended in the banal way in which medieval no-talent writers finished their moral fables — the great triumphing over the petty. The loss of anticipation deepened the grimness of his routine and he was filled with the fatigue of an unbearable boredom. When Oparna stood by his desk and asked to see Acharya, he did not even look at her. He just made a call and sent her in.
She entered the den, as usual, wondering why she could hear her heart every time she saw this man and if this fear had more disturbing names.
‘I came here to tell you that I didn’t know why I was called to that meeting,’ she said. ‘I don’t want you to think that I am part of what they tried to do this morning.’
‘I know,’ Acharya said. She stood there in the vain hope that he would ask her to sit down and tell her how unfortunate it was that she was caught in the middle of all this, or maybe they could talk about the balloon that they would soon send to the stratosphere. But he was reading.
After she left the room, Acharya tried to remember something. He had told himself that he would recall it later, but he could not place the moment. Then it came to him: it was when he had seen Oparna in the conference room, he had felt something. It was like a stab, a trivial feeling of betrayal and then a more elaborate agony as though she had died and left him alone. He was not surprised that he thought of her death. Everybody died, the young especially. But why should her death make him feel deserted? He considered the matter for a few seconds, but then his mind drifted to the triumph of remembering it. Nowadays, problems that he scheduled for the future never returned to him.
THE FUMES GLOWED in the car lights, and they cast giant fleeting shadows of pedestrians in the air. In the vapours of the late evening traffic, cars and trucks lay stranded on the lane as if they were all trying to flee from an approaching calamity. Heads peered out of the windows. Long lines of honking vehicles melded and expanded until, somewhere ahead, they became a huge unmoving knot of metal and smoke. In the heart of the jam was a black Honda City, its bumper torn off. A girl whose navel was pierced by a glimmer of silver, and whose small pink T-shirt said in gold ‘Skinny Bitch’, was standing in a daze. Her hands were spread out, and she said in English, several times, the same thing: ‘What the freaking hell?’
An abandoned taxi was still kissing the rear of her car. A dark man, who must have been the cab driver, was standing facing her in the middle of the road, sheepish and giggling. People on the pavement looked on in glee. A man who was sitting on his haunches and watching the fun screamed, ‘Now look at her bumper.’ Ayyan walked through the situation with a serene smile.
A few metres ahead was a barber’s called Headmaster, and next to it was a restaurant with aluminium-topped tables and wooden chairs. At the entrance, Ayyan spotted Thambe, the tiny man to whom he had handed an envelope full of notes on the Worli Seaface. They sat at a table and ordered tea. ‘The article was great,’ Ayyan said. ‘My boy is so happy.’
‘I hope other papers pick it up,’ Thambe said, flapping his thighs. He stopped a waiter to ask if there was a toilet in the restaurant. The waiter shook his head.
Thambe was a reporter with Yug, and one of those hectic men who did things that did not have a name. He could bring back lost licences, create ration-cards, and he knew the mobile numbers of government clerks.
‘You really did a beautiful job of my son’s achievement,’ Ayyan said.
‘I believe that brilliant boys like your son have to be supported,’ Thambe said, pouring his tea into the saucer.
‘Has anybody from the English papers contacted you about my son?’
‘No,’ the reporter said. ‘The English reporters are such snobs. They never follow up anything we do.’
‘I see. You know, Thambe, it would have been nice if you had put him on the front page. After all, a ten-year-old boy winning a contest like that is no small achievement.’
‘I know. But the front page,’ Thambe said, smiling sadly, ‘is very expensive, Mani.’
‘How expensive?’
‘Oh, it’s beyond us. I don’t even go there. It is for big people.’
‘Your editor knows that you … you help friends?’
‘You are asking me if the editor knows if I take money to write? Be direct. We are friends now. Of course he knows. You know how much my salary is? Eight hundred rupees. When he hired me, he said, “We don’t pay much.” Then he took out a press card with my photograph on it and said, “Now go out into the market and make whatever you want.” ‘
They drank their tea silently. Then the reporter said, ‘I have to go now. So if …’ Ayyan took out his wallet and counted some notes.
‘This is for friendship,’ he said, as he handed the cash to Thambe. ‘The advance I gave you, that too was for our friendship.’
‘Friendship, of course,’ the reporter said. His face turned serious as he counted the notes. It was the same serious face, Ayyan remembered, that descended on the great minds of the Institute when they counted cash.
‘Friendship is everything,’ Thambe said, somehow finding space for the notes in his shirt pocket, which was already bulging. ‘I took your word, Mani. You said your son won the contest, I believed you. No questions asked. That’s friendship.’
‘Is there a way such a friendship can get English papers to write about my son?’
On his way back home, a familiar gloom filled Ayyan. There was no getting away from it. He tried to fight it by imagining the face of Oja Mani, how jubilant she had looked when Adi’s teacher had sent the first frantic note about the boy’s insubordinate brilliance. But the gloom only grew into an acidic fear in his stomach. Fear worried him because it reminded him that life was not always a familiar place. This game he was playing was far bigger than the other plots of his life. The game, this time, was his son.
The rise of Adi as a child genius had begun about a year ago when Ayyan had gone home late one evening and Oja had opened the door with tears in her eyes and a deep joyous smile that made him suspect that her demented mother had finally won a lottery.
‘My son got 100 per cent in the maths test,’ Oja had said. ‘There are forty-two boys in his class. All fair and rich and fat. My son was the only one who got 100 per cent.’
Oja, who usually stared blankly at him without ambition or hope, and sometimes in the sorrow of being stranded in a humid hell, was so ecstatic that only tears could release the joy. That night he had taken Adi out for ice-cream. When they were walking down the Worli Seaface he heard the boy mutter the name of every car that was parked or was passing by. He had merely to look at a car, its front or its rear, and he would know its make. It seemed exceptional, but Ayyan knew there was nothing there more than a simple streak of smartness that most children possessed. He had heard a thousand times men chatting in the train about the brilliance of their children — ‘My son is just three but he knows how to turn on the computer and send emails. He is a genius.’ Or, ‘My daughter is ten but she knows the names of all the lakes in the world.’ It was in that way that Adi was smart. ‘City, Ambassador, Zen, Esteem, City,’ the boy was saying on the promenade. The vigilant mind of Ayyan began to think of a simple plot, to achieve nothing more than some fun and a distraction from the inescapable miseries of BDD.