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  ‘What has he done now?’ Ayyan asked with a proud smile. Adi looked up at his father and gave a mischievous wink.

  ‘You are the one who is spoiling him,’ Oja said. ‘They are going to kick him out of the school one of these days.’

  She went to Adi and twisted his ear gently. ‘He asked one of those questions again in the class,’ she said.

  ‘What question?’ Ayyan asked, now chuckling. ‘I don’t know. I wouldn’t know even if you told me now. This boy is crazy.’

  ‘What did you do, Adi?’

  ‘The science teacher was saying that if you throw anything up it has to come down. Basic things like that. So I asked her if the acceleration due to gravity of any planet anywhere in the universe can make an object travel faster than light.’

  Oja looked distressed. ‘And he was reading one of your books in the class,’ she said in an accusing way. ‘I don’t know how he took it with him.’

  Ayyan made a conspiratorial face at his son and asked which book it was.

  ‘Brief History of Time,’ Adi said. ‘I don’t like it.’

  Oja was staring at her son with a mixture of fear and excitement. Ayyan loved that look on his wife’s face, that sudden awakening in her from the gloomy acceptance of a life in BDD.

  ‘He is just ten,’ she said. ‘How does he understand these things?’

  Last month, in the middle of the class, Adi had asked the science teacher something about arithmetic progression. A few weeks before that it was something else. Oja heard these stories from his teachers who were usually in some sort of happy delirium when they complained to her.

  That night, Adi was sleeping near the fridge, as always, and his father lay next to him, holding the glass-bangled hand of his wife. Ayyan wondered if he must build a wooden loft. He turned towards his son who was facing him, but he was fast asleep. After a few minutes the boy turned in his sleep and hid his face under the fridge. That was a heartening development.

  A pale light was coming through the rusted grilles of the kitchen window and Ayyan could see Oja in the blue glow. Her open palm, with its clear fatelines, rested loosely on her forehead. Her red nightgown was far less arousing than the saris she used to wear after marriage. She was always in a sari in those days because her mother had said that she should not come across as liberal. Oja’s legs were joined together and folded at the knees. Her silver anklets lay still. Ayyan ran his hand over her waist. She opened her eyes without confusion or protest. She lifted her head to check on Adi. The couple moved with skill. They could caress and even tumble and roll a bit without making a sound.

  They were in a sort of common entanglement, with Ayyan’s shorts hanging at his knees, Oja’s nightgown lifted, her legs parted, when she, yawning, decided to check on Adi again. He was sitting with his back resting against the wall.

  ‘They wouldn’t let me play that yesterday,’ he said.

  In the morning, when Adi was having his bath in the glass enclosure, Ayyan told his wife, his eyes dejected and voice deep, ‘I have something to say.’ Oja looked at him and then at the boiling milk. ‘For the sake of our son,’ he said, ‘we must stop seeking our own pleasures.’

  One hour later, as he was walking Adi to school, Ayyan thought of how Oja had readily accepted his decision. She had nodded, with one eye on the milk. It was an image that stayed with him till he reached a back lane in Worli and approached the tall black gates of St Andrew’s School. The decay of a man, he told himself, is first conveyed to him by his wife.

  Oja’s face, in the inconvenience of love, was now a cold face that did not seem even to register pain any more. Once she used to moan and make short gasps and turn coy. Now, when he made love to her, she looked as though she was waiting for the bus. When she first began to assume that hollow gaze, he used it as a device in a private game in which the goal was to extract a reaction from her – a yelp, a sigh, a moan, anything. Then the game transformed. He imagined he was a powerful tea-planter raping a worker who had come to him asking for a loan. But the blank stare of his wife continued to haunt him. Eventually he put an end to all his private games. And he accepted her detached love in the same way that he accepted her cups of tea.

  But her blank disenchanted face sometimes frightened him. It reminded him that the woman he loved so much was stranded in a dull life because of him. There was a time when he thought he could save her from BDD and everything else, that love alone could make him superhuman and somehow take them to a better life. But that did not happen, and it probably was never going to happen.

  He felt an irresistible urge to fall down and go to sleep, like the perpetual drunkards of the chawls. He felt like fleeing to some place far away where he would be single, where he would expect nothing from people and people would expect nothing from him. He would eat from the fruits of a tree owned by no man, and sleep under clear blue skies, lulled by the sound of the waves and the winds from faraway lands. He imagined himself on a giant hoarding, his back to the world, walking on a long tapering road towards an endless sea, and from the horizon of the sea rose the incandescent words – ‘Free Man ®’.

  But, he knew, the freedom of a bachelor is the freedom of a stray dog. On such days, when he felt stranded in family life, he always invoked the memory of the evening when Oja had first walked into his home as a terrified bride. She was so beautiful, and her fear was so arousing. But on the first night, when he sat beside her on the conjugal mattress that was filled with funereal roses left by neighbours and friends, he discovered that his new wife had cut her arms and legs with a Topaz blade. She had done it very carefully and methodically so that she did not damage her veins. She wanted an excuse to be left alone. It was her way of saving herself from being undressed by a stranger.

  ‘I was afraid’ was the first thing she ever told him.

  ‘Of what?’ he had asked. And she looked even more frightened.

  Ayyan had read that a woman had to be ready, whatever that meant. So he decided to wait. Sometime in the second month of their marriage, Oja’s cousin was sent by her mother under the guise of a casual visit to check if everything was all right. In the middle of churning curd, the girls talked about private matters.

  ‘He has not done it yet?’ the cousin screamed. ‘Something is certainly wrong with him.’ She spoke of the dark thing, ‘that looks half eaten,’ that nailed her even before she could give her man his milk on the wedding night.

  ‘It was big and it hurt,’ the cousin had said in a whisper. ‘I walked like a spider for two days.’

  Ayyan did claim his rights soon, one Sunday afternoon, when Oja was sitting on the stone floor cutting onions. When it was over, Oja looked up at the ceiling, an onion tear running down her cheek, and asked, somewhat disappointedly, ‘That’s it?’ Then, unexpectedly, she lifted both her legs and pressed her knees to her face in a curative exercise. The first year of their marriage went by in their endless chatter about things they no longer remembered, and in moments of loneliness that sometimes bore the gloom of exile and at other times the sweet isolation of elopement. And in their infrequent physical love through which Oja maintained a calm, interested gaze. And in Ayyan’s perpetual knowledge that a box of condoms in their home outlived a jar of pickles.

  During that time, he had a nightmare that he would never tell Oja. He dreamt that he was summoned by God, who looked exactly like Albert Einstein but highly illuminated. God asked him: ‘Why did you get married?’

  Ayyan answered earnestly, ‘To have sex any time of the day or night’.

  God looked at him with a thoughtful face for an instant, and the creases of a smile appeared. The smile became a laugh and the laugh burst into echoes. Men and women on the streets, too, looked at Ayyan and laughed uncontrollably. People who were dangling from the doors of a local train threw their heads back and laughed. The motorman stopped the train to laugh. Fish-sellers in the market covered their mouths and laughed. Even the framed portrait of Jawaharlal Nehru held his stomach and laughed until the rose fel
l from his buttonhole. Then Ayyan saw the face of his beautiful wife on a giant public hoarding, so embarrassed and so elegantly distraught by it all. That wraith woke him up because he could not bear to see her like that.

  When he realized it was just a dream he turned to her sleeping figure and hugged her. Though her eyes were shut, she accepted the embrace hungrily as though she too had arrived at the same scene in her own dreams.

  AT THE SCHOOL gates, Ayyan feasted on modern young mothers. Their faces were still youthful, loose flesh shuddered inside their small tops like water in the immoral pink beds of Tamil films; their trousers were aghast at the tightness of it all and their asymmetric panty-lines were like birds in the sky drawn by a careless cartoonist. These days many young mothers wore long skirts too. They looked nice, he thought. In the chawls, mothers never wore skirts. Two years ago, misled by aspiration, a woman had tried. By the time she reached the broken cobbled ways, so many people had laughed at her, so many eyes had judged her intent, that she ran back home, made peace with her fate and returned in a salwar.

  In the mornings, the air was somewhat tense around the school gates. Boys in whites and girls in blue pinafores walked away from their parents with unhappy faces. In the evenings, they ran happily towards the gates, the way earthquake survivors in this country might run towards the BBC correspondent.

  Ayyan inspected his son. Adi was in a white shirt and shorts. And smart black boots. His bag, oversized for a boy of just ten, was in his father’s hand. The sight of the calm studious boy comforted him. And the secret game that they were playing, the mother of all games, filled Ayyan once again with anticipation. That’s all he asked from life some days, the exhilaration of anticipation.

  The solitary guard, in the khaki uniform and cap he was forced to wear, was looking at the backs of the departing young mothers as though his wife was morally superior. He gave a friendly nod to Ayyan, almost nudging him with his eyes to pay attention to one very fleshy young mother. Ayyan ignored him. He always did because he wanted the guard to know that they were not equals, that he must respect him the way he hurriedly saluted the fathers who arrived in cars. But the guard knew that he did not have to concede.

  The Principal was a tough Salesian matron. Her veil rested on half her scalp. She had a thick volatile face and severe eyes. She was square and muscular, and the calves that showed beneath the habit sported wiry hair. Her name was Sister Chastity.

  Jesus Christ, with a crown of thorns on his head, surveyed the room morosely with a hand on his visible heart, which was on fire. The Principal was environmentally conscious (uncharacteristically for a Catholic matriarch). Her table was littered with articles made out of paper and other recycled things. ‘Everything in this woman’s room was once something else,’ Ayyan had told Oja after he first met Sister Chastity.

  ‘So, we meet again,’ Sister Chastity said unhappily, pointing Ayyan to a chair. She usually spoke to him in Hindi with a faint Malayalee accent. ‘How come the mother never comes when there is trouble?’ she asked.

  ‘She is scared of you and very ashamed of the boy.’

  ‘Where is Adi? Already in class?’

  ‘Yes.’

  There was an uncomfortable silence, because Sister Chastity wanted it. She then said, ‘Mr Mani, I don’t know if your son makes me happy or sad. When he is asked to do addition, he talks about things that boys many years his senior do not even understand. He wants to know about the speed of light and the acceleration due to gravity and things like that. Obviously, he is some sort of a genius and we have to nurture him. He is very special. But his conduct in school, the way he blurts out things in the middle of class, questions the authority of his teachers, you know, we cannot tolerate these things.’

  ‘I am going to make sure that he behaves. It’s hard to control him but I am going to make sure he is disciplined.’

  ‘Discipline. That’s the word. And that’s all there is to education.’

  When it looked as if the meeting were over, she pushed two books towards Ayyan. They were about the life of Christ. ‘My small effort, as usual, to bring you closer to the Lord,’ she said, with a smile. Her eyes grew kind.

  ‘I love Christ,’ Ayyan said softly.

  ‘Why don’t you accept him?’

  ‘I accept him.’

  ‘Accept him in a formal way, I mean. There is no compulsion, obviously. We never compel. As you know, the fee waiver and other small things we can offer, purely as a concession laid out for financially backward Christians, will benefit you immensely.’

  ‘I am giving it some thought. I am trying to convince my family. You know, there is this mindset against conversion.’

  ‘I know, I know. The human mind is so ignorant,’ Sister Chastity said. She held him with her deep hard eyes. She loved pauses. With nothing more than silence she usually asked him either to leave, or stay right there. This silence now was the calm before a sermon. He wondered if she really was a virgin.

  ‘Mr Mani,’ she said, ‘in a way, you are a good Christian.’

  ‘I am?’

  ‘You are, Mr Mani. How beautifully you’ve forgiven the people who brutalized your forefathers. The Brahmins, the kind of things they did. The things they do even now. In private, they still call you the Untouchables, do you know that? In public they call you “Dalits”, but in private they call you such horrible things.’

  ‘I know,’ Ayyan said, trying to appear angry and moved, because that was what she wanted.

  ‘Hinduism is like that, Mr Mani. It has the upper castes and it has the Dalits. The Brahmins and the Untouchables. That can never change. People only pretend that it has changed.’

  ‘You speak the truth, Sister. The Brahmins ruined my life even before I was born. My grandfather was not allowed to enter his village school. They beat him up when he tried once. If he had gone to school, my life would have been better.’

  ‘Absolutely,’ she said. ‘Tell me, Mr Mani. In the great Institute where you work, all the scientists are Brahmins?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And all the peons are Dalits?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But that’s not because the Brahmins are smarter than the Dalits,’ she said.

  ‘No,’ Ayyan said, now allowing himself to be somewhat engulfed by rage even though that was what Sister Chastity wanted. ‘The Brahmins were three thousand years in the making, Sister. Three thousand years. At the end of those cursed centuries, the new Brahmins arrived in their new vegetarian worlds, wrote books, spoke in English, built bridges, preached socialism and erected a big unattainable world. I arrived as another hopeless Dalit in a one-room home as the son of a sweeper. And they expect me to crawl out of my hole, gape at what they have achieved, and look at them in awe. What geniuses.’

  ‘What geniuses,’ she whispered angrily.

  ‘They are murderers,’ Ayyan said, noticing that she smiled exactly like him. Invisibly.

  ‘That’s why you’re a good Christian, Mr Mani. You’ve forgiven them, the Brahmins, whose great fiction Hinduism is.’

  ‘I have not forgiven them,’ Ayyan said, ‘And you know that. I have long renounced Hinduism. I am a Buddhist.’

  ‘Mr Mani,’ she said with a tired face, pushing the two books she had gifted further down the table towards him, ‘Hinduism, Buddhism – all the same thing.’

  AYYAN MANI WALKED through the low, elegant gates of the Institute and sought the will to survive another day in this asylum of great minds. He waved in greeting to the dispirited guards in their glass box who smiled at him.

  ‘Run, you are late,’ one of them shouted with a fond chuckle, ‘the Big Man is in already.’

  Ayyan never understood why this place was so seriously guarded. After all, what happened here was merely the pursuit of truth.

  The Institute of Theory and Research stood on ten acres of undulating lawns and solitary ancient trees. At the centre of the plot was a stout L-shaped building that held its breath inside shut windows. It ran along two s
ides of a carefully pruned central lawn. Beyond the angular building, the backyard rolled towards moist black boulders. And then there was the sea.

  Here sanity was never overrated, and insanity never confused with unsound mind. Sometimes on the pathways calm men spoke to themselves when they needed good company. This was a sanctuary for those who wanted to spend their entire lives trying to understand why there was not enough lithium in the universe, or why the speed of light was what it was, or why gravity was ‘such a weak force’.

  Ayyan had a haunting desire to escape from this madhouse. Thirteen years was too long. He could not bear the grandness of their vocation any more, the way they debated whether universe must be spelt with a capital U or a small u, and the magnificence with which they said, after spending crores of public money, ‘Man knows nothing yet. Nothing.’ And the phoney grace with which they hid their incurable chauvinism and told reporters, ‘A physicist is ultimately judged through citations. She has to constantly publish.’ They were highminded; they secretly believed that their purpose was greater; they were certain that only scientists had the right today to be philosophers. But they counted cash like everyone else. With a wet index finger and a sudden meditative seriousness.

  Even though Ayyan was late for work that morning, it was inevitable that he would stand in front of the blackboard in the porch of the main block. It was a morning ritual that always cooled the fever in his chest. THOUGHT FOR THE DAY, the blackboard said in indelible white ink. Under it was an ephemeral thought, written in chalk:

  God does not play dice — Albert Einstein

  Ayyan took a duster from the top of the blackboard and erased Einstein’s famously abridged message. Then he pretended to look into a paper, just in case somebody was watching. And he wrote:

  It’s a myth that Sanskrit is the best language for writing computer code. Patriotic Indians have spread this lie for many years — Bill Gates