‘If I strum your head, there will be music,’ he said.
Oparna looked up. When their eyes met, he did not know why he felt he should not look at her. ‘Just an observation,’ he told his paperweight.
‘Sorry, you said something?’
‘I said nothing. Nothing important, actually.’
She smiled and went back to Elementary Descriptions of Non-culturable Bacteria. But she was not reading. She had not been reading for some time. You must strum then, she wanted to say. Unknowingly, her finger circled a curl that was falling on her cheek. She knew he had been looking. And her heart was pounding, her throat felt cold. She quietly conceded that she was all messed up and there was no hope for her. So many cute men in this country nowadays, all beginning to wear good narrow shoes too, and here she was hoping that a giant astronomer whose shirt buttons actually rotated in the strain of his stomach would look at her more carefully and find something more he could do with her hair. But he did have a very beautiful face and pure luminous eyes that sometimes stared like a child’s. She knew how insane a man could make her, and she feared that. But what could she do?
An hour later, they stepped into the anteroom together. (Ayyan had left a long time ago.) They went down the corridor which was now completely deserted. They went in a silence that made them feel like accomplices.
Acharya walked with her to her silver-grey Baleno that lay on the side of the driveway. She got in with an expression that she was sure was the face of indifference. As she drove away, he waved, and he realized from the confused face of the night security at the guard post that he was waving long after she had vanished through the black gates. He went home wondering if Oparna had smiled at him through the rear-view mirror.
It was strange, the way she had got into her car without a word. She was probably angry because he had made a personal comment. He wanted to call her and ask if she was angry, but that, he knew, would be very silly. He turned the key, and opened the door of his home carefully so that Lavanya would not be disturbed, and felt his way from the dark hall to the bedroom. He could see the figure of Lavanya lying on her bed with her hand on her forehead. And the odours of Kerala’s curative oils reached him.
Oparna drove down the Marine Drive with the windows open. The road was empty and against the lemon-yellow street lights she could see a gentle drizzle swaying in the wind. She was thinking of Acharya’s eyes.
At the gates of a high-rise building in Breach Candy, a security guard let her in, his small-town eyes showing faint contempt for a girl who returned home so late. When the lift door closed and became a mirror, Oparna studied it carefully. Her hair was dishevelled, and her long top looked so terrible that she felt like some sort of activist.
When she let herself into her flat she did not know why she became so furtive, as if she had done something delightfully wrong. She tiptoed towards her parents’ bedroom and peeped through the door. They were snoring. Father had a longer hiss. She went to her room, which was in a faint purple glow, its flimsy curtains flying in the wind. She felt shy as she undressed. And smiled to herself when she tried to read.
She lay awake for much of the night, thinking of his infant face and innocent rage. And how easily he understood the world of microbes. Just a silly crush, she thought — it would go away in the morning.
So it is with all sudden lovers who believed that their torments would vanish in the morning, but inevitably it is already morning when such a convenient consolation comes to them.
She was woken by her mother who usually had an ulterior motive when she did that. After ensuring that she had disturbed her daughter’s sleep, she came back with a cup of tea and said, ‘An alliance has come.’ Oparna’s eyes which had just opened shut tight. ‘The boy is not in software,’ her mother said encouragingly, and added, with an edge in her voice, ‘Now don’t say you are a lesbian.’
IN THE ‘FINITE’ corridor of the Institute, four astronomers were huddled together, questioning whether twin-star systems were indeed the norm in the universe. They were then distracted by the distant sound of heels. They fell silent and looked in the direction of the prospect.
Oparna appeared. Her hair flying, face glowing, in a sky-blue shirt that for the first time introduced them to the real shape of her breasts, their study in the coming days destined to be called topology. She was wearing a long black denim skirt which had a flower, or something similar, embroidered around the thigh. She passed by them with an innocent smile. They stared at her back. The sound of the heels faded and died. They knew that here as the Doppler Effect.
‘Birthday?’ asked Ayyan Mani.
‘Yours?’ Oparna enquired.
‘No. Is it yours?’
‘I don’t think so,’ she said. ‘Is there anyone with him?’
‘No.’
She pushed open the heavy door that once used to terrify her. She knew what she had to do. She could be a woman and wait for him to collapse, but she could not endure the game that she now realized she had been unknowingly playing for many months. Acharya lifted his enormous head and for a moment he looked as though he had found the Unified Theory by mistake. He looked down and appeared to study some material on the table. She sat on the chair facing him, crossed her legs, arched her body and looked at him fondly. He looked into her eyes and tried to understand her special glow.
He toyed with the paperweight and spoke of how the cryogenic sampler was still stuck in America. ‘We need to get the Ministry involved,’ he told the paperweight.
Ayyan Mani knew something had changed. He could see Oparna had arrived at a decision. And there was a force in her that morning, a calm arrogance that beautiful women usually had. He recognized it as her real face. The shadow she had pretended to be in this kingdom of men, in her long shapeless top and jeans, that subdued acceptance of all situations, he always knew was just a farce. He lifted his intrusive phone receiver and listened.
‘Contamination is a serious problem,’ Acharya was saying. ‘We have to ensure that there is no way the sampler can be contaminated before or after the mission. If it’s so difficult for the cryosampler to be a hundred per cent sterilized, imagine how vulnerable spaceships are to contamination. When we landed on the Moon or sent the rovers to Mars, we left Earth microbes there.’
‘Are you trying not to look at me?’ Oparna asked.
The insubordination of women, he would understand in time, is often a consequence of infatuation, but that morning her question registered as an anomaly. He answered nervously, feeling an unfamiliar excitement in his stomach, ‘What do you mean by that, Oparna?’
‘You can look at me as long as you want.’
‘I don’t understand your behaviour. It’s strange.’
‘Did you sleep last night?’ she asked.
‘How is that important?’
‘To the Cosmic Ancestry Theory? No it’s not important. Just felt like asking. Should everything always be important?’
‘No.’
‘I could not sleep,’ she said.
‘So?’
‘Because of you.’
‘I don’t understand what you are trying to say.’
Acharya’s mind went to a distant day in his childhood when he had seen, for the first time, a fish die. The final frantic palpitations of the fish was the condition of his heart right now. He toyed with the paperweight and through the silence that Oparna granted he heard faraway phones, stray horns, even crows and some orphan sounds he could not recognize. The silence approached a point after which it would cease to be part of the conversation and become a deafening diabolic force. But he did not offer to speak. Oparna got up to leave. The demented mirth of mischief and insolence had left her face. She walked to the door and looked at him with an affection that was at once hopeful and melancholic. Like light was both particle and wave.