AYYAN MANI SET the phone receiver down with a diabolic smile. The fate of every love story, he knew very well, is in the rot of togetherness, or in the misery of separation. Lovers often choose the first with the same illusory wisdom that makes people choose to die later than now. And in the deceptions of new love, they not only forget that this insanity is transient but they also, hilariously, imagine that they are clandestine. Their nocturnal nudity, they believe they have camouflaged in office clothes. Their private bond, they have spread thin in public as careful distances. They infect each other with the fever in their eyes and they believe only they can diagnose it. But in reality, love is like forbidden wealth. Its glow cannot be hidden. Sooner or later everyone comes to know. And two people become spectacles in a show they do not know is running to full houses.
Ayyan was not certain if the Brahmins who contemplated the universe were aware of it yet, but the security guards and the peons and the sweepers knew that the Big Man was screwing the basement item. The spectral presence that the lovers had sensed outside the basement door was the spirit of Ayyan’s long reach. The whole week, he was told about the moans and whispers that came from the lab. The time Acharya went to the basement and when the two emerged, and how he crouched fondly at her car window and said goodbye. Now the time had come for this romance to be shaken, and he suspected it did not have the good fortune to survive. Lavanya Acharya had just called from Chennai.
‘Is he there?’ she asked.
‘No, Madam,’ Ayyan said, after a deliberate pause. The pause, he knew, annoyed her. She suspected that her husband avoided her sometimes at work.
‘Where is he?’
‘I don’t know where he is, Madam,’ Ayyan said. (Acharya was in his room at that moment.) ‘Can I take a message?’
‘Tell him I’m on the seven o’clock flight. I will be arriving before nine. Is it raining heavily?’
‘Very heavily.’
‘Are the roads flooded?’
‘The trains are running.’
‘And the roads?’
‘The traffic is moving.’
‘Tell him he doesn’t have to come to the airport,’ she said. ‘A friend is picking me up.’
Ayyan collected the late mails and fax messages, and walked into Acharya’s room. He was scribbling something on a notepad. Ayyan peeped to see what he was writing. It was a long string of maths rubbish. Numbers and symbols. Pursuit of truth, apparently.
‘Any instructions for me, Sir?’ he asked. Acharya shook his head.
‘I’ll leave then.’
Ayyan did not tell him about his wife’s call. She would be home in a few hours and would try to call him. But then he would be in the unreachable depths of the basement, naked with his mistress. He would go home before dawn in the stupor of love and see the terrifying image of his wife. Why would Ayyan want to tell him about the call?
That night, the lovers lay curled on a purple blanket, like two brackets. A bowl of seedless grapes was by their side. ‘Have you ever wondered about Junk DNA?’ Acharya asked.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘98 per cent of the human genome is junk and does nothing apparently. It makes no sense that junk genes exist.’
‘There must be a reason,’ he said, reaching for a grape. ‘I have a hypothesis.’ He thought she would giggle because she usually found it funny when he said ‘hypothesis’. But she was listening keenly. He said, ‘Life travels through the universe as microscopic spores riding on asteroids and they fall on different worlds. Depending on the conditions in those worlds, different segments of the genome become useful. On Earth, only a fraction is needed.’
‘Where do you think the spores are coming from?’ she asked.
He took another grape and said, ‘I don’t know everything.’
It was around two in the morning when he made his way home. It was raining hard and he went unmindful, like a happy drunk. His light-blue shirt stuck to his soft body; his trousers lay precariously at his lower waist. (He had left the belt in the basement.)
He put the key in the latch and turned the knob. The light was on in the hall. He shut the door and stood near the couch. He tried to understand why the light was on. Then he noticed the tidiness of the room. The curtains and the tablecloth had changed. The books he had left on the couch had vanished. He went to the bedroom with a sinking heart. He could see a sleeping figure shrouded in a blanket.
Lavanya was dreaming, and these days, she knew she was dreaming. She was walking through a rain forest. She had never been inside a rain forest, but it was so obviously a rain forest. Gigantic tree trunks, black and wet, stood like creatures. The floor was a bed of wild creepers. There was also a board that said ‘Rain Forest’. It was raining so heavily now that when she stretched her hand she could not see beyond the elbow. But she was not wet. Because she did not like getting wet. She was carrying a maroon shopping bag and she was searching for a shop that sold cashews. From the dense mist of rain a huge elephant head appeared. The rest of its body was hidden in the rain. It was a wise lovable elephant. ‘Arvind,’ she said, ‘what are you doing here?’ And she opened her eyes.
She saw his huge silhouette lurking beyond the other side of the bed. She reached for the switch above her nightstand. ‘You’re wet,’ she said, getting out of bed. She opened the dresser sleepily and took out a towel. ‘I don’t know why you like getting wet,’ she said, reaching for his head with the towel. ‘The house was a mess, Arvind. Are you really mad, or are you doing this to annoy me? It was filthy when I walked in. I am going to give the keys to the maids now.’ He did not move as she wiped his head and his face.
‘You can say you are happy to see me,’ she said.
‘I missed you.’
‘You are working late these days? Is it the balloon?’ she asked. Her shoulders ached, so she stopped drying him. ‘Now go to the bathroom and change. Put the wet clothes in the washing machine.’ When he left the room, she wondered what the smell was. It was sweet and it reminded her of something she had known a long time ago. But she could not recognize it. The smell of rain on a man’s body maybe?
He walked in dry and tidy, in a loose tracksuit, his chest bare. He lay on the bed and stared at the ceiling.
‘What is worrying you, Arvind? What has happened?’
‘Nothing.’
‘And what is this? You sprayed deo?’ she said with a chuckle. ‘Two weeks I am away and you become totally crazy?’
His chest was still moist and she dried it, muttering that he was making the bed wet. And unknowingly, she dug her finger into his navel. ‘There is no lint at all,’ she said. She went to the corner of the room to put the towel away. ‘How can you not have any lint at all in that well of a navel? Are you having an affair or something?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ he said.
Lavanya wondered if she should go to the balcony and put the towel on the wire, or if she should just put it on the floor for the time being. She was too sleepy to go to the balcony, but the floor was not the place for a towel. And, obviously, she did not want to put it on the dresser. The thought of a wet towel on polished wood was repulsive. Then she wondered why the word was hanging in the air like sorrow. ‘Yes,’ he had said. She turned to him slowly.
‘Her name is Oparna,’ he said. ‘She works with me.’
Lavanya collapsed slowly and sat on the edge of the bed. ‘This is not a hiccup cure, is it?’
‘You don’t have hiccups.’
‘I am confused,’ she said. ‘What did you say? What was it that you had said?’
She went to the nightstand and searched for her glasses, as though that would make her hear better. ‘What did you say, Arvind?’ she asked, putting her glasses on. She sat on the edge of the bed again.