‘So God has just been playing an old film all this while?’ Oparna said. There was another question on the tip of her tongue, a more serious question, but she felt a little foolish articulating it. ‘Why do you think there is life?’ she asked, somewhat sheepishly. A naked woman sitting beside a naked man and asking, ‘What is the meaning of life?’ It was like a terrible moment from a porn film that aspired to be art. Yet she wanted to know what he had to say.
‘I have a hypothesis,’ he said, and the word ‘hypothesis’ made her arch forward and laugh, her loose hair falling over her face. He took it sportingly. He laughed too. ‘I have a hypothesis,’ he said again, and looked at her eagerly in the hope of making her laugh one more time. Then his grin slowly narrowed until it vanished entirely.
‘Through life, the universe saves itself the trouble of making whole star systems by concentrating vast amounts of energy as consciousness. Why make a Jupiter, when you can just create a frog.’
‘Jupiter and a frog have the same energy?’
‘I think so.’
‘That, Dr Arvind Acharya should never say in public.’
‘Of course not.’
She put her head on his shoulder. There was something healing about this closeness that reminded her of all her wounds. What this man had told her about his childhood and his interpretations of what it all meant should have shaken her. But somehow she imagined that only he could be a part of this
spring-toy universe where everything unwound in an inescapable, preordained way. Absolute truth was a gloom that happened to other people. Like him. It suited him. She could imagine Arvind Acharya, in the long pursuit of truth, wading through star systems across the aeons, trying to crack the game of life. The universe comprehending itself through him more than it probably did in other men. Now, after covering the vast stretch of space and the interminable ages, here he was by her side as a tired journeyman, to stay at this fortuitous crossing just for a fleeting night and proceed again on his solitary quest. So lonely he seemed. And then she felt a strange fear. It was the fatigue of loving another ephemeral lover. She did not want this one to leave.
When she finally found her watch on the floor, it was three in the morning. ‘I have to go now,’ she said. And they groped for the pieces of clothing that were strewn all over the floor. She crawled on the floor and searched under the tables for her hair-band. ‘There you are,’ she said, when she found it under a chair. She pulled her hair back and secured it in the loop.
He observed her as she put on her bra, very deftly, he thought.
‘It is the ugliest word in English,’ he said, ‘Bra: it sounds terrible.’
‘Be more sensitive,’ she said. ‘Oprah Winfrey says that 85 per cent of the women in the world live in the constant discomfort of wearing the wrong-sized bra.’ And she said in a mock concern, mimicking someone he probably did not know. ‘Poor women. We have to survive men, succeed in our professional lives and maintain good homes, and do all that in the wrong-sized bra.’
‘This one seems to fit you well.’
‘No, no, no,’ she said, with a grimace. ‘It’s horrible. My ambition is to live in a decent country where a woman does not have to wear a bra.’
‘You should have stayed back in Stanford.’
‘But, you know, I cannot live without maids,’ she said.
He was now standing up, fully dressed. She was sitting on the floor looking accusingly at him, holding her torn top. He was embarrassed by her stern look.
‘How do I go home now?’ she asked.
Ten minutes later, they were walking down on the driveway where her Baleno was parked. She was wearing his massive anorak that came almost to her knees.
‘Do I look like a scarecrow?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ he said.
When she got into her car, he bent his head like a benevolent father. She rolled down the window.
‘I will see you tomorrow,’ he told her.
‘We have a lot of work to do,’ she said.
‘Yes. A lot of work to do.’
‘Tell me something,’ she said, turning on the ignition. ‘This search for life in the stratosphere, does it have anything to do with … you know … the missing link in physics and all that?’
‘No.’
The guards opened the gates for her car to pass. Long after it disappeared, Acharya was standing on the driveway feeling the cool breeze and listening to the roar of the sea. He was relieved to be alone. There was a sense of joy in his heart and a feeling that he had done something endearingly mischievous. He imagined Lavanya smiling at him disapprovingly. It started to drizzle, and he made his way towards the gates. The night security scrambled to salute. As he passed through the gates, he and a guard exchanged a long glance of mutual suspicion.
Acharya’s simple joy vanished when he reached home and turned on the lights of the hall. He felt dirty and cheap. He sat in the leather armchair, too scared to go to the bedroom. The clothes Lavanya had discarded in a hurry before shutting her suitcase still lay there on the bed. Her bottles of homeopathic tablets were on the nightstand. There was her treadmill too. Her things. They would be looking at him. So he slept in the hall, in the
armchair, until he was awakened by the 7.45 alarm of his daughter. The alarm had an edge to it this morning. It was morbid. Like a little girl’s dismembered doll. The alarm was a voice from the other side of a fence, from where the severe wraiths of his wife and daughter looked at him with hurt and anger. But as the morning unfolded, he was filled with the anticipation of seeing Oparna again.
And that’s how he was in the days that followed. He would wake up in the despair of having murdered his wife and daughter, and then he would search impatiently for his clothes, to go and wait for Oparna.
In the common paranoia that afflicts lovers, Acharya and Oparna did not meet alone in his room any more, even when there was a professional need to meet. Eyes were watching, ears were listening. They feared the omnipotent gaze of Ayyan Mani and his smile that Oparna believed was replete with meaning. The scientists and research hands who were involved in the Balloon Mission began to feel that group meetings were suddenly frequent and long. In those meetings Acharya and Oparna would steal glances of forced grimness. They smiled with their eyes and spoke the language of love through dry enquiries. At night, she would wait for him in the abandoned basement and he would appear like a shadow.
This went on for a week, including a whole Sunday of love and dining in the dungeon. Oparna brought an electric toaster, bread, fruit and even blankets, and they lay huddled all day. On Tuesday, Lavanya called.
A
YYAN
M
ANI 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?’