Twenty floors above the sea, Oparna stood in her room staring through a wide open window. The thin purple curtains flapped wildly in the wind. She was in blue jeans and a T-shirt with a jovial amoeba embroidered on it. She was holding her mobile in her hand, and she was smiling. The smile became an insane chuckle every time the phone rang. She stood that way as the evening turned dark and the million windows in the monstrous buildings outside became illuminated. Then, as though a mystic cue had appeared in the starless sky, she reached for her car keys.
Ayyan Mani had left for the day and the anteroom was deserted. Orphaned phones on his table rang intermittently. Oparna stood outside the inner door for a moment before she opened it. Acharya was sitting with his elbows on the table, chin cradled in his palms. He did not move as she walked in and stood in the middle of the room. She heard the door shut behind her. ‘It’s OK, I am here now,’ she said.
‘Where were you?’ he asked calmly.
She sat in a chair across the desk and returned his stare. ‘Are you angry with me, Arvind?’ she said. ‘Do you want to hurt me?’
They looked at each other through the heaviness of a silence that they somehow comprehended as a tired acceptance of love.
‘Arvind, I came here to say that you should not search for me tomorrow. I won’t be here. At ten in the night, come down to the basement. There won’t be anyone there. Just me and you. Do you understand what I’m saying?’
‘Yes.’
She left a blue envelope on the table. It was sealed and scented. ‘These are my pictures,’ she said. ‘I got them for you. Keep them safe. Not all men are allowed to see me like this.’
He took the envelope with great care, as if it were a piece of bread that had drowned in tea. He opened the second drawer of his desk and put it with the recent readings of interstellar dust-clouds.
‘Tomorrow at ten,’ she said, and went to the door. He looked at her back, the firmness of her shoulders, the imprint of her bra strap, so strained by tension, the succulent buttocks that were hoisted by high heels.
‘Were you looking at me?’ she asked from the door, her face lit by a shy smile.
It was around midnight when Acharya finally rose from the huge leather chair. He felt as if he had cried the whole day. His throat was dry and his eyes hurt. And there was peace in his lungs. He went down the long corridor of the third floor in the spell of a silence so perfect. The enchantment of this silence and the mystical way in which the deserted corridor lay in front of him, foreground approaching, the far end receding, made him walk faster. He enjoyed this eerie spectacle. But he felt a sudden pain in his left knee, and he slowed down. He turned back to see if the spectre of Oparna was lurking somewhere, watching his ache.
He wondered what it was that made a person old. This body that he was carrying right now, the aches in its joints and the weakness of its flesh, was not what he felt inside. An old man was in every way a young man but in the guise of a body that would look ugly and undignified if it tried to do what the young did. The elegance of age, like sanity, was an expectation people had of him. But at that moment, as he was walking down the corridor, he could not feel the antiquity that others had thrust upon him. He felt as if he were just another man accepting the affections of a woman. Just another young man. It was important to be young. Only the young can love, because the imbecility of youth is the only spectrum of love. He could see it so clearly now. Like every ray of light with a wavelength of 700 nanometres is always red, everyone who is in love is young.
At the porch, in the hush of the sea and the fragrance of wet earth, he stood looking at the rains. A guard came running to him with an umbrella. He was a tiny man, about a foot shorter than Acharya. He held the umbrella high, hoping that the monster would have the grace to hold it in his own hand. But Acharya walked in a trance as the guard, exhausted already by the effort of stretching his hand so high, got fully drenched.
He let himself into his flat, changed and went to sleep in the fumes of Lavanya’s herbal remedies. He slept well that night. He dreamt of a beautiful girl. The sound of her silver anklets filled the spectral spaces of his reverie. Her face, somehow naked, looked at him in an amused way as if she were the master and he a no-talent apprentice. It was the face of Lavanya from another time.
He woke at dawn and sat on the bed like a mammoth infant, refusing to look at the figure of his wife lying next to him. The clarity of last night when he had walked down the deserted corridor and granted himself the spirit of youth in a body paralysed by illusory age, was now gone. He felt afraid because he knew his descent into the basement at ten that night was an inevitability. He went to the bathroom to stare at his naked body. It was, in a way, from an angle, if you looked carefully, a beautiful face. Twinkling eyes, affluent skin, succulent royal lips, not much hair on the head of course, but a lot of face. He had a cold bath, and furtively shampooed his crotch. He went back to the bedroom with light steps and gingerly opened the cupboard. He wanted to leave before Lavanya woke up. He did not want to see her that morning.
It was seven when he reached the office. He sat in his chair and heard the ghostly sounds of a world that was suddenly alien. The desolation of morning was so different from the desolation of night. Strange birds sang, distant objects fell loudly and echoed, and there were faint tremors of laughter. Even the smell was unfamiliar. There was this odour of wet rugs and wood. He was about to open the window when he heard boys shouting and singing in the anteroom. Four cleaning boys burst into his room in a private festivity. Their happy faces fell when they saw him. They fled in shock, but one of them came back with a transparent bucket and started mopping the floor, throwing discreet glances at the giant. Acharya stared at the boy. Once, their eyes met and held each other for a few seconds. He didn’t know the Institute had cleaners.
Slowly, the morning unfolded and the world become familiar. Ayyan Mani walked in, neat and tidy, smelling like a room freshener, his thick black hair oiled and combed into an unflappable mass.
‘Coffee,’ Acharya said.
The whole day, he sat in his room, avoiding calls and dismissing visitors. He wanted the world to spare him, just for a day, but he was under siege. The forces of little men were outside his door. They infiltrated first as ominous telephone calls, and then they sent their dark messenger with clear white eyes who seemed to know something, who had a disturbing smile at the edges of his lips. Ayyan kept walking in and saying, ‘They have come, Sir,’ or ‘They have been waiting, Sir.’ By noon, Acharya yielded.
The Balloon Mission had proceeded into a frenetic stage and there were people on the black sofa outside whom he could not avoid. He called them in reluctantly and conducted meetings that collapsed into long silences when he stared blankly at the visitors, not knowing that a question had been put, a clarification sought, an opinion expected. By evening, the siege eased and he tried to find respite in Topolov’s Superman. But he could not concentrate. He opened the table drawer and looked at the blue envelope that Oparna had left last night. He had not opened it. ‘These are my pictures,’ she had said. ‘Not every man is allowed to see me like this.’ To open the envelope was to accept the affair, and the thought of Lavanya tortured him.
THREE HOURS BEFORE his confirmed appointment with love in the basement, it was inevitable that Arvind Acharya’s mind would wonder if Time flowed continuously, like a smooth line, or in tiny jumps like a dotted line. In the crisis of being seduced by a disturbing woman with real black hair, he needed the distraction of a problem that he knew he would not solve in three hours. But he could not take his mind away from the thoughts of touching the forbidden body of Oparna that would lie in wait for him beside microscopes and transilluminators (and, probably, perfumed candles which were not part of the Astrobiology department). But he also felt a morbid sorrow. For his wife of four decades who was at that moment, possibly, in the habitual melancholy of folding clothes. He had never felt this kind of sorrow before. He found it strange that the grief was not in his heart but somewhere in the stomach. And it was a dark, hollow kind of feeling. As if Lavanya had died, leaving him widowed in a pleasurable world. It was not a stab of conscience. It was, in fact, the emptiness of enjoying something all by himself without bringing her to share it. Without her presence, even the pleasure of adultery was not complete. And that was absurd. He could not bear it any more. This gloom in his stomach that hung just above an unexpected joyous swelling.