‘Where is Oparna?’ Acharya asked the Press Officer, who whispered, ‘She did not want to come, Sir. She wanted to be low-profile. She insisted, Sir. I tried.’
Acharya took the centre chair on the dais. He was flanked by the two white men.
‘Dr Arvind Acharya,’ the Press Officer said grandly, adding, more softly, ‘Dr Michael White is to his right and Dr Simon Gore is to his left. They are astrobiologists from Princeton. They assisted our research and independently supervised the analysis of the contents of the sampler. I leave the floor to the scientists.’ He went to a corner of the room and studied the journalists with a harrowed face. (He hated journalists.)
‘I’m sure you have been briefed,’ Acharya told the audience. ‘I’ve nothing more to add except this. Oparna Goshmaulik was the project coordinator. She was involved in the project before the launch and she was in charge of the analysis of the sampler. Unfortunately she could not make it today. Now, you may ask questions.’
There was a silence for a few seconds. Then a man asked, ‘What exactly has been found?’
Acharya shot a glance at the Press Officer, but answered patiently: ‘A rod-like bacillus and a fungus called engyodontium albus de hoog.’
‘Can you spell it?’
‘No.’
There was a brief silence which was broken by the squeaky voice of the Press Officer. ‘The exact spelling is in the printed material I’ve given all of you. If you can’t find it I will give it to you after the conference.’
A woman asked, ‘Dr Acharya, why have you concluded that this living matter has come from space?’
‘I have not concluded this. It is a reasonable guess supported by several facts. For example, it is difficult to see how the living matter got there because until now it was believed that bacteria and fungi do not exist at such heights. The chances of bacteria living at such heights due to space debris of defunct satellites are very, very small.’
‘Maybe the sampler somehow got contaminated in the lab?’ someone asked.
‘All precautions were taken to secure the samplers,’ Acharya said. ‘The bacteria and fungus we have discovered are very rare and difficult to culture in a lab environment.’
‘If these organisms really came from outer space,’ a voice asked, ‘how did they survive the extreme temperatures?’
‘In the spore form, microbes not only survive extreme conditions but are almost immortal. It is believed that in the hibernated state they can even live for millions of years.’
‘Dr Acharya, where do you think these microbes come from?’
‘I don’t know,’ he answered with a chuckle. He looked at his two friends and they smiled too.
‘Dr Acharya,’ someone asked, ‘what about the other three samplers?’
‘They are being studied in Cardiff and Boston. The results will be out in two or three months. Their processes are slightly different and so will take more time. We hope to find more interesting stuff in those samplers. In fact, we hope to find organisms that have no history on Earth.’
In the back lanes of the academic world the news of Acharya’s discovery was greeted with joy, and with the inadvertent compliments of scepticism. But in the real world of regular people, for which science pretended to toil, the event went across the day like an invisible epoch. Between the news of the stockmarket upsurge and Islamic terror and a man stabbing his lover twenty-two times, The Times hurriedly summarized an epic scientific labour. Rather as an epitaph tells the story of a whole life in the hyphen between two dates.
AYYAN MANI PELT a soporific gloom in his heart that reminded him of the widows of the BDD chawls who sat in the doorways, their cataract eyes baffled at the sheer length of time. These days, there was an excruciating stillness in his world too.
From behind the phones and heaps of transient mail, he stared at the ancient black sofa. Its leather was tired and creased. There was a gentle depression in the seat as though a small invisible man had been waiting there forever to meet Acharya and show him the physics of invisibility. The faint hum of the air conditioner made the room seem more silent than silence itself could have done. A fax arrived. One of the phones on his glass table rang for a moment and stopped abruptly. Voices outside grew and receded. A still lizard, high up on the stark white wall, looked back, needlessly stunned.
Ayyan felt like a character in an art film. Nothing happens for a while, and nothing happens again, and then it is over. There was no goal any more in his life, no plot, no fear. It was a consequence of choosing to be a good father. He had put an end to the myth of Adi’s genius. It had to end before the boy went mad. The game had gone too far. In the place of its nervous excitement was now the ordinariness of the familiar flow of life, the preordained calm of a discarded garland floating in the sewage.
Every morning he woke up in the attic, and went to stand in the glow of the morning light, among people and buckets that inched towards the chlorine toilets. He then bathed by the kitchen in the fragrance of tea and soap, and went to work in a melancholy train, stranded inside an unmoving mass of bleak, yawning strangers. All that to come here and bear the austere grandness of the Brahmins and their marvellous incomprehension of the universe, and take phone calls for a man who did not want to be disturbed. And finally to go home in the shadows of rows and rows of large grey tenements and eat in the company of a half-deaf boy who had lost all his ill-gotten glory, and a woman whose only hope was in the delusion of her son’s mythical genius. Then, in the morning, to wake up in the attic, again.
This, Ayyan accepted, was life. It was, in a way, a fortunate life. It would go on and on like this. And one day, very soon in fact, Adi would be an adolescent. An adolescent son of a clerk. A miserable thing to be in this country. He would have to forget all his dreams and tell himself that what he wanted to do was engineering. It’s the only hope, everyone would tell him. Engineering, Adi would realize, is every mother’s advice to her son, a father’s irrevocable decision, a boy’s first foreboding of life. A certainty, like death, that was long decided in the cradle. Sooner or later, he would have to call it his ambition. And to attain it, he would compete with thousands and thousands of boys like him in the only human activity for which Indians had a special talent. Objective-type entrance exams. Very few tests in the world would be tougher than these. So, in the enchanting years of early youth, when the mind is wild, and the limbs are strong, he would not run free by the sea or try to squeeze the growing breasts of wary girls. Instead he would sit like an ascetic in a one-room home and master something called quantitative ability. ‘If three natural numbers are randomly selected from one to hundred then what is the probability that all three are divisible by both two and three?’
He would have to answer this probably in thirty seconds in order to stand any chance against boys who were barely seven when they were fed iron capsules and sample-question papers for this very purpose; who had attended tuitions and memorized all the formulae in the world before they learnt how to masturbate; whose parents whispered into their ears every day of their lives the answer to the decisive question: ‘What do you want to become in life?’ Adi would have to fight them for a sliver of the future that men of God reviled without conviction as the ‘material world’, exactly the place that a father wishes for his son. Adi, despite the misfortunes of poverty, would somehow have to find a way to get into an engineering college. And then ensure that he did not spend a single day of his life as an engineer. Because everyone would tell him then that the real money was in MBA.
And so, even before the engineering course was over, he would start all over again, and prepare to battle thousands and thousands of boys like him in yet more entrance exams. When he finally made it and became a zombie who had entirely forgotten what he really wanted to do with his life, the light-skinned boys in the dormitory would look at him with a sad chuckle and whisper among themselves that he was a beneficiary of a 15 per cent reservation for the Dalits. ‘Lucky bastard,’ they would say.