‘So you do this?’
‘Try to understand. All my life, men have humiliated me. I don’t know why but that’s what I remember of men. Then I go mad over an old man. And he too dumps me. I wanted to kill you. I really did.’ She studied her palm and the slender fingers which she thought looked a bit too bony and aged.
He did not recognize this woman who was sitting in front of him. He felt an excruciating sympathy for her, and then he remembered that it was he who was on the verge of being destroyed. ‘What do we do now?’ he asked feebly.
‘We are finished. That’s all. Together. Your reputation is now over. And no one will hire me again,’ she said in an informative way. ‘It’s a mess, Arvind. Even if you scream from the top of the water tank that you are innocent, you’re finished. And there are enough vultures here who want you out. They already know what they must do.’
‘So there was nothing in the sampler?’
‘Is that what you are worried about? If there were aliens in the sampler? That’s very rude, you know.’
‘Tell me, Oparna, was there anything in the sampler?’
‘There was nothing in it. Just air.’
He found it ridiculous that what pained him more at the moment was that the Balloon Mission had completely failed. He turned to the window and tried to accept the shock of the failure. He had the courage to accept the punishment of Oparna, and the wisdom to understand that it is in the nature of love to be disproportionate with both rewards and retributions. But he was shattered by the fact that he had to now forsake the joy and relief of having found aliens in the stratosphere. He suspected that he might not get another shot. And for the first time in his life he understood the fear of a bleak, vacant future.
He went to the window and stood looking at the calm sea. He felt the presence of Oparna beside him. He did not find it strange that they stood there like that without a word, like an ancient couple who had no need for language. They stared through the window with unflinching eyes, but never before, not even during their first naked gazes in the basement, had they looked so deeply into each other.
When she finally spoke, it was another form of silence, like the sound of the sea, and the songs of the birds. He heard her tell him dreamily how excited she was when the sampler arrived, how she hoped there was something in it that would make him happy.
‘We ran all kinds of tests, Arvind,’ she said. ‘Then, when I began to realize that there was nothing in it, you know what I did? I did not leave the lab for four days. Four days and four nights, at a stretch, I ran test after test because I did not want to see you sad. I don’t know what happened on the fourth night. Something hit me. It was as if I had woken up from a stupid dream. And I was so ashamed. I asked myself why am I such a sucker for men. Here is an old bastard who hurt me so much and I was going mad trying to make him happy, trying like an idiot to find something in a stupid steel box. I was so angry with myself Arvind, and at you, and at everything.’
So, in the stealth of dawn she had contaminated the sampler with microbial cultures that were available in the lab. It consoled
her. The idea of taking him to absolute ruin, she said, made her feel powerful and, finally, smart.
They resumed the patient silence of an unnatural belonging. Then he heard her light footsteps leave the room. For hours after that he stood by the window. Pigeons that came in the excitement of landing on the ledge were stunned by his ghostly stare. Down on the pathways around the main lawn, small groups of scientists were gathering. In them there was an unmistakable excitement that masqueraded as shock, just like the entertainment of death fills funeral guests with grimness. Acharya began to understand the mysterious composure of men who are led to the gallows. Their even gait and the strength of their legs that took them unwaveringly to the hollow wooden pedestal had always fascinated him. Now, he almost experienced their condition. He felt a sick enfeebling fear inside him that had the smell of pus. But he too could walk.
By evening, the phones began to ring. Acharya let them ring. Ayyan walked in several times to say that old friends and journalists were on the line begging to know what had happened. Visitors were gathering in the anteroom and their murmurs began to grow in the first hums of a huge impending storm.
‘What must we do, Sir?’ Ayyan asked.
The news of Oparna’s letter quickly spread across the world infecting everyone who was remotely interested. Copies began mysteriously to fall into the inboxes of journalists and scientists, with a subject message that said ‘India’s Woo-Suk’, comparing Acharya to the disgraced South Korean scientist Hwang Woo-Suk, who had fabricated breakthroughs in stem-cell research. Blogs were besieged by self-righteous laments at the increasing fraud in science, and more compassionate analyses of why a great scientist might have stooped so low, and the impassioned defence of old hands who refused to believe Acharya was capable of such deceit. They saw in Oparna’s letter the obvious revenge of an enraged woman. But the story everyone wanted to believe was that Arvind Acharya had fallen. Sombre television reporters
stood outside the fortified gates of the Institute and spoke of how the scientific community was in a state of shock.
An astronomer in the glory of having discovered aliens, now interrupted by a beautiful associate who claimed she had falsified the research on his instructions. It was a great story.
T
HE TRIAL WAS
arranged in a windowless room. It had a beige carpet that was somehow perfect, and there was an air of silent estrangement. Unlike the other conference rooms in the Institute of Theory and Research where large oblong tables conveyed the intention of equality to all chairs, at least before they were occupied by incurable egos, this one was designed for the unambiguous purpose of lecturing. Behind a reddish-brown oak table with a solitary rose peeping out of a narrow white vase, five men sat in a solemnity they had granted themselves. All the chairs in the room had been removed except for two that looked particularly austere without armrests, and they bleakly faced the jury.
Oparna entered with a premeditated smile that was poised between gloom and courage. She was in a sky-blue salwar kameez. Her hair fell in languid curls. When she saw the men behind the table, all seated like a diminished Last Supper gathering, she felt an irrepressible urge to laugh. Basu, in a black suit and red tie, was at the centre; Nambodri was to his right. She did not know the other three men. They must have been in their fifties.
One by one, the men rose to greet Oparna.
‘Please sit,’ Basu said graciously. She sat in one of the two austere chairs, wondering how these men knew this was the way it had to be done. Such an inquiry had no precedence, yet they knew they had to arrange the table that way and the chairs this way. She tried to imagine what would happen when Acharya arrived. She and he, together in this room on these chairs, would look like a terrible couple undergoing counselling. She tried, once again, not to laugh.
She wondered how women would have handled this situation. What if the jury had been comprised of menopausal women? That was a disturbing thought. They would have butchered her in a minute. But this jury of ageing men was going to be easy.
‘You, of course, know Dr Jana Nambodri,’ Basu said smartly, and introduced the other three as senior scientists who were attached to various institutes in Delhi. From the way they looked at her, almost in appreciation or gratitude — she could not tell — it was evident to her that the jury shared a common grievance.
The men examined some papers in front of them. Basu said, without looking up, ‘You have stated everything very clearly in your letter. Is there any change in your statement?’
‘No,’ she said.
‘When Acharya arrives you will have to repeat your statement in front of him. Is that all right with you?’
‘Yes,’ she said.
The jury appeared a bit lost now, as if they had nothing more to say.
‘Are there any other statements you would like to make?’ Nambodri asked, one hand on the table, leaning back a bit in what he imagined was a charming way.
‘No,’ Oparna said, trying to think of the day her grandmother died so that she did not burst out laughing.
‘Acharya had considerable power over you,’ Nambodri said, trying to remind her gently of something she might have missed. ‘Did he misuse his power in any way apart from instructing you to falsify the report?’
‘No,’ she said, offering not even the curiosity of confusion.
‘What I am trying to say is, you are an attractive woman, a very attractive woman, and he was a powerful man who forced you to do something unethical. There must have been other moments when he used his position and made you feel vulnerable? Something that you were embarrassed to mention in your letter?’
‘If you are talking about sexual harassment,’ she said, ‘it is not he who I have a complaint against.’
That inspired Nambodri to fall silent. The other men, too, had nothing more to say to her. They whispered among themselves. Two men looked at their watches. Basu pressed a bell and a clerk appeared at the door.
‘Has he come?’ Basu asked.
‘No, Sir,’ the clerk said, and vanished.
The jury stared at Oparna with the embarrassment of having to wait for the accused. It was an awkward pause that began to disturb the confidence of Nambodri. He imagined the unrelenting presence of Acharya in the room and what it might do to the composure of everyone. Oparna might not be able to sustain the lie. He wanted her to be strong and play a decisive role. But he suspected that she did not fully understand the seriousness of the trial. He tried to draw her into the mood of the moment.
‘There were two American professors in the lab when you were studying the contents of the sampler,’ he said, ‘Michael White and Simon Gore. We spoke to them on the phone this morning on a conference call. They expressed their shock, and refused to believe that Acharya could have instructed you to tamper with the sampler. How did you manage to contaminate the sampler when they were around?’
‘They were not around when I did it,’ she said. ‘I did it around four in the morning.’
‘You were in the lab that early for the purpose of contaminating the sampler?’ Nambodri asked in an educative way, like a lawyer preparing the client for trial.
‘Yes.’
‘Acharya asked you to do it around that time, before the professors arrived?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you think it’s possible that the Americans too were involved in Acharya’s conspiracy?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘What proof do you have that Acharya asked you to tamper with the sampler?’ Basu asked.
‘I don’t have any proof,’ she said. ‘But, obviously, I have no motivation to make this revelation. Except on moral grounds.’
‘Obviously,’ Nambodri said. ‘But why are you making it now? Why not before?’
‘I was aware of the implications. I needed time to decide.’
‘We understand that,’ he said kindly, and then looked surprised to see the man at the door.
Ayyan Mani was holding a note in his hand.
‘Dr Acharya asked me to give this to you,’ he told the jury, and held the folded letter in the air. He had started walking in when Basu said ceremoniously, ‘Come in.’ That made Ayyan stop for a moment before resuming his entry.
He handed the note to Basu who read the contents to the gathering: ‘It’s beneath my dignity to react to an allegation of this nature or to present myself before a committee of this composition. I will not be interrogated by bureaucrats and subordinates. In my defence, I present my whole past – Arvind Acharya.’
For a brief moment, Oparna thought Basu was an endearingly formidable man. Then she realized that she felt that way because he was reading out the words of a man who really was.
Basu tore up the letter and handed the shreds to Ayyan.
‘You may give this to him,’ he said, and threw a look at Oparna to see if she was impressed. ‘I interpret this as a direct challenge to the Defence Minister himself,’ Basu said. Ayyan left the room holding the shreds in a tight fist. He looked forward to giving the shreds to Acharya.
Basu studied Oparna with what must have been wisdom, and said, ‘What you did, even though you did it under duress, was wrong. It has brought disgrace to the Institute. But you have done the right thing by offering to take responsibility and resign.’
Oparna, once again, forced herself to think of the sudden demise of her grandmother.
He paused and nodded at the other members. ‘We have
nothing more to say to you except that without your courage this matter would never have surfaced. Would you reconsider your offer to resign?’
‘No,’ she said. The briskness with which she replied surprised him and he forgot what he wanted to say.
Nambodri narrowed his eyes and looked sideways at her. ‘Maybe we can find a post for you in one of the other institutes run by the Ministry of Defence?’
‘I am not in a position to think about my future right now,’ she said, standing up. The men rose to bid her farewell. She collected her handbag from the floor and walked out without a word.
Ayyan Mani was certain that after this day Oparna would never be seen in the Institute again. In the tumult of the coming days as the scandal unfolded on television screens, she would be missing. And she would be missing long after people stopped trying to find her. She would become a distant memory to be invoked with mirth – ‘Remember Oparna?’
She would wander through life beseeching men to love her, frighten them with the intensity of her affection, marry one whose smell she could tolerate, and then resume the search for love. And she would suffer the loneliness of affairs. And on some mornings, in front of men who thanked their luck for such an easy fling, she would endure the shame of putting on her clothes, somehow more demeaning than undressing for them. She would wander this way every day of her life until she found shelter in the peace of age.
Ayyan saw this in his mind and waited to feel the glee. But it did not come. There was only an unfamiliar ache in his heart. For a beautiful woman whose hurt nobody fully understood, whose anguish the vultures now used in their larger game.