Under the influence of an uncle whose asthmatic speech lent him a certain intensity, Acharya decided to quit his studies and join the Indian space programme that had been birthed in secrecy in a small town called Thumba in Kerala. But he soon realized how impoverished the Indian government was, and how the whole space ambition was just a pathetic attempt of a miserable nation to find respect in a world that had moved ahead. On unpaved roads that ran between tall palms, he had to carry rocket parts on a bicycle from a clandestine shed to a launch-site. Life was so simple at the time that one day Acharya even brought a rocket-cone home to show his wife. She wrote their names on it and without detection it was later fixed on a rocket, which was among the several of the first generation that failed and crashed into the sea. The simplicity of it all, and the red boiled rice of Kerala, disillusioned Acharya. After just a few months with the space programme, he went to Princeton to study cosmology, taking Lavanya with him. He would eventually become obsessed with gravitation. ‘It attracts him,’ his father would often say in a joke that relatives never fully understood.
For many years now Acharya had accepted that he had gone past the age of love. But here he was, almost at the door of Oparna Goshmaulik who could have got any man with the mere lowering of her gaze (or whatever the language was these days). He could not wait to touch her and hold so close her bare body and take in her citric smell that he had once pitied as the odour of youth. He was at the door now. His hand was on the silver knob. He waited for a moment. Then he turned back and walked away.
He took the stairway up, to the porch, went down the pathways that circumvented the main lawn, and towards the gate where the guards stood up smartly and saluted him. He crossed the road without looking and entered the Professors’ Quarters. In the lift, two senior scientists were with him. They smiled politely. He wondered if they could smell Oparna on him. And would Lavanya tell from his eyes that he had held the silver knob of a door that would have ended something between them, whatever that something was. As he walked from the lift towards his flat, he did not understand why his heart was thumping. In an importune moment of clarity he guessed that there must have been species in the prehistoric days whose hearts were so loud that they echoed in the forests, and whose blood flowed through their veins with the hush of rivulets washing over pebbles. Life then must have been a concert. But all that visceral sound would have given them away to their predators. So the species that made it through the ages were the ones whose hearts were not loud enough to hear and whose blood flowed in silence.
As he held the knob on the door of his home he thought of what Oparna was doing at that moment. Just then the door was flung open violently. Lavanya stood there with tears in her eyes and a box of tissues in her hand. ‘Where were you?’ she said.
He walked in and shut the door so that they could settle the matter in a discreet way.
‘I was trying your phone,’ she said and wiped her nose. ‘Anju is dead, Arvind.’
‘What?’ he asked.
‘Anju is dead,’ she repeated.
Lavanya’s frail shoulders shook and she began to weep. She looked incomplete, like the handless urchin he had once seen walking on a tense rope. She needed his hand around her, but he felt too dirty to touch her. He let her cry alone.
‘I just checked,’ she said, almost inaudibly, ‘There is a flight to Madras in two hours. I have to go.’
‘Do you want me to go with you?’
‘I know you don’t want to come.’
‘I will come.’
‘No. It’s all right. She was dying anyway. I am crying because it seems right to cry. I am OK otherwise.’
‘I will go with you.’
‘Actually, I want to go alone. It’s like a holiday for me.’
‘Holiday?’
‘Yes. I am such a sick woman.’
They took a taxi to the airport because Lavanya said he should not drive in the rains, and the black-and-yellow taxi was anyway the same ancient Fiat they had. He had insisted on driving but, as always in these matters, she prevailed.
‘You don’t know this, but you cannot see very well,’ she told him, when they had squeezed themselves into the back seat.
‘I can see very well,’ he said.
‘I will be thinking in the plane how you are going to get back. Today I feel everybody around me is going to die.’
‘When are you back?’
‘Ten days,’ she said, ‘Maybe more. There will be ceremonies. And I want a break.’
‘From what?’
‘From you,’ she said.
The windows of the taxi were rolled up because of the rains. It was hot inside and there was the smell of damp cotton.
Acharya felt invisible creatures biting his buttocks. He moved in a jive as if to crush them angrily, and that made Lavanya chuckle. ‘What?’ he asked, thinking that she had gone mad with sorrow.
‘Nothing,’ she said. They travelled in silence for a while. Then he reached out and held her hand. As though it were a mystical martial art technique, her languid head fell on his shoulder.
The concourse that led to the departure terminal was a gentle gradient. Acharya walked up like a benevolent genie carrying a suitcase that appeared small in his hand. He felt odd holding a single suitcase. It had the austerity of elopement.
As a boy, he had once gone with friends to count the steam trains from a footbridge. He had seen a pair of fleeing lovers on the narrow-gauge track running towards the railway platform, fearing that the world was chasing them. The man was holding a black briefcase and the girl was carrying a small cloth bag. For many years after that, even now on this rainy night, in a corner of his mind Acharya associated love with lightness, and marriage with extra luggage. Usually, when he and Lavanya arrived at the airport, he was pushing an overloaded trolley like the hotel housekeeping arriving at a door. There was another reason why he felt odd as he walked up the gradient. This was the first time he was sending Lavanya off. Normally it was she who sent him off. Or, she travelled with him, and that was always an event. She never let him take shoulder-bags. Suitcases it had to be. ‘Clothes don’t get crumpled that way,’ she would say. He secretly admired her logic, and even conceded that she was right, but a bag to him was a symbol of nomadic freedom, an imperfection that said the journey was not important, the destination inconsequential. A suitcase, on the other hand, was a sign of grand departures and self-important arrivals. It was a confession, like the shirt of a dandy, that life was important. Once, when he had told Lavanya this, she screamed, ‘My god what a poet, you travel business class don’t you?’
They reached the glass doors of the terminal where three guards were checking the tickets of passengers in the middle of bad-mouthing a senior who was not present. Acharya fumbled for Lavanya’s ticket in his pockets. He had just purchased it from the counter. He was pleased when he found it and gave his wife a wide grin. She looked at him with worry. How was he was going to take care of himself?
‘Open the door for the maids,’ she said. ‘I have Meenu’s mobile. I will call her every day.’
‘Who is Meenu?’
Lavanya looked exasperated. ‘She is our cook.’
He pulled up the tow handle of the suitcase and gave it to her with a deep, grim face, as though it was a lifetime achievement award. She dragged the suitcase, sniffling, holding a kerchief to her nose which was now red. Before she entered the terminal she turned to look at her husband. He waved at her. A young couple behind her mistook her tears for the romantic distress of separation. They gave the seniors an exaggerated look of approval. ‘So cute,’ the girl said.