He got up from his chair and steered his trousers. The air in the room had become too still. But he forgot why he had risen. He stood rooted near his chair and contemplated the acoustics in the basement, and why men married, and the exalted place of fidelity on a dwarf planet that went around a mediocre main-sequence star somewhere in the outer arm of just another whirlpool galaxy. Eventually, he opened the window and breathed the first rush of sea breeze. It was dark outside, but he could hear the sea. It was violent. And there was something about the wind that portended the mother of all rains. He heard the door open behind him.
‘I wanted to see you,’ said the voice of Jana Nambodri, somewhat meekly. He was subdued these days after the defeat of the mutiny and the humiliation of being pardoned.
Acharya was about to turn and face the intrusion when he realized, just in time, that the youthful swelling caused by the thoughts of Oparna had yet to be tamed.
‘Jana,’ he said, without leaving the window, ‘Come tomorrow.’
Nambodri had already walked into the room when he heard this. He stood there a bit confused, but went away without trying to understand.
When the door shut, Acharya went hastily to his chair and for a fleeting moment, he felt like a gaping radio telescope. He sat behind the reassuring expanse of his desk and waited for time, whatever it might be, to pass. He tried to squeeze the erection with his massive thighs, suffocate its blood flow and release the tension. It might have been unprecedented, he suspected, for a man of advanced age to kill such a serendipitous unmedicated vigour, the pursuit of which, even among the young, was a billion-dollar industry. He briefly remembered Nicolaus Copernicus, at a moment in history, throttling his own heliocentric theory and conceding to the Vatican that the Earth was indeed the centre of the universe.
But Acharya’s problem did not subside. It protruded in a sort of sculptural defiance. Complicating the situation was a sudden urge in him to urinate. He did not have a private bathroom. He had dismissed past proposals by Administration because of the disruption that the creation of a washroom would have caused. He cursed himself for not having foresight. Now, he had to go halfway down the long, busy corridor. He grabbed The Times of India that was lying on the desk and went out reading, the paper unfolded to its full length.
Ayyan Mani looked at the giant figure walking away from him, and he wondered if the delirium of love could really make someone behave so strangely. Acharya went to the washroom that was called ‘Scientists’. There he kept The Times carefully on the hand dryer because he feared he might need it on the way back. There were five urinals on the blue-tiled wall and three senior astronomers were standing side-by-side, each separated from the other by a free pot. Acharya stood in between two of them. An insane wish came to him then to startle them, for boyish fun. He put his hands around the nape of his neck, elbows pointed up, as though he were stretching, and stood that way. His brisk manly spurt shot above the urinal. One by one, the other men turned to see the spectacle. Acharya always humbled them, but never like this.
He resumed the wait in his room, patiently rearranging objects on his desk. He reached for the drawer where he had hidden the perfumed envelope of Oparna. He no longer had the strength to resist the offer of love in the basement. So he thought he might as well open the envelope. Two black-and-white photographs slipped out. A little girl was in a bathtub. She must have been four years old.
At five minutes to ten he walked out of his room. Like an elephant, as always. He was disappointed to see people in the corridor. He was hoping that the Institute would be deserted because of the rains and, well, the pursuit of truth could bloody well wait some days. The lift was packed and he stood in its grim silence with his head bent. When the lift door opened at the ground floor, nobody moved because he was closest to the door and he was standing still, blocking half the way. They waited for him to step out, but he did not move. They went around him, like a stream around a boulder. The lift emptied, and that comforted him. He pressed the button that said B.
The basement labyrinths, flanked by stark white walls, lay in the drone of invisible ethereal motors. At the dead end of a narrow corridor was the lab. He thought of what she must be wearing, how she must be sitting, what plans she had. In a preordained darkness, was she waiting as an unmoving silhouette? The swelling that had long subsided grew again and was now leading him down the path, like the proboscis of a foolish rover on Mars that was right now searching for water and beasts.
As the lab door approached him, the grief in his stomach grew. The wraith of Lavanya appeared. He pictured her folding clothes, with an accusatory face. He saw the distant days of their life when she used to walk like a doe. And how her long thick hair used to tickle his nose during the interminable flights over the Atlantic. And the way her head would rest on his shoulder as she slept like a child. He thought of the first beautiful months of their marriage. And their love that they never ever called love. Because it was not necessary to name it then.
He could see those days so clearly now, a whole lost age. How beautiful she had looked as a bride. He was still a student then. After their wedding in Sivagangai, when the time came for him to take her to Madras, he would always remember, a silent crowd of lachrymose relatives had shadowed them to the station. As he stood nervously waiting for the train to arrive, one of Lavanya’s aunts said, ‘Is he taking his new bride to his hostel room?’ And the weeping entourage used the ruse of tears to laugh heartily.
Lavanya, in the isolation of her new home in Madras, began writing long morose letters to her mother. He had read the first without her knowledge. ‘He wants to find out why things fall,’ she said in the letter. He was researching gravity in the Annamalai University and his wife found it ridiculous that it was a whole subject. ‘But he is a useful man,’ she wrote. ‘He can put rice sacks in the loft without standing on a stool. And he is so calm and obedient that I keep asking him to do things just for fun. I know I should respect him but I find him so funny. Yesterday, at the temple, I tried to fall at his feet; he jumped in the air. He has western ideas.’
They could never hold hands in the street because those times were different. But how much they had wanted to. Not merely for love, but to heal. In the by-lanes of Madras, shopkeepers, taxi drivers and pedestrians laughed at them mercilessly. The couple was so tall, especially for that time, and most Tamilians so tiny and genetically predisposed to believing something is wrong with the others, that Acharya and Lavanya when taken together were always a sight. Mothers with crying babies stood at the iron gates of their houses and pointed at them. That always silenced the babies. Gangs of eunuchs sang to Acharya, and they sang that if he liked Lavanya he would like them too. Urchins ran behind them screaming, ‘LIC, LIC’ (the fourteen-storeyed Life Insurance Corporation building was the tallest in the city then, and it was to remain so for many years to come).