Read Online Serious Men by Manu Joseph - Free Book Online Page A

monthly Round Table. She had missed the last two and so this was her first. There was a massive oblong desk at the centre of the room around which men were sitting in agitated concentric circles. Some were standing and chatting. Cheerful peons were passing biscuits and tea. There was much gaiety and jostling. Like sperm under a microscope. Most of the scientists were in light shirts worn over loose comfortable trousers. They were austere men who knew they were austere. Some of the younger ones were in jeans. Despite the overwhelming informality of this place, the loose shirts, the tempestuous white hair and the leather sandals, they were so clearly the masters in the room, their special status differentiated from the final concentric circle where the secretaries stood silently, sullen and unspeaking, as though the biscuits were stale. In the eye of the room’s gentle commotion was the solid figure of Arvind Acharya. The men either side of him were turned away, talking animatedly with others. Once again, he was a rock in the stream. All turbulence went around him.
    When Oparna walked in, a silence grew. She made her way nervously through the outer rings. Grey balding heads turned, one after the other. There were two female secretaries somewhere on the fringes, but she felt as though she were the only woman in the room because she knew the men felt that way too. Jana Nambodri, with that cloud of stylish silver hair, short-sleeved shirt neatly tucked into corduroy trousers, was at theoblong table, directly facing Acharya. Nambodri stood up, and with an elaborate sweep of his hand showed her an empty seat in the second row. She inched her way delicately towards the chair. Old men in her path moved their legs and made way. Some of them turned away uncomfortably as her back almost grazed their tired faces. Some pretended to continue chatting while looking at her rear in respectful nonchalance.
    ‘She is a Bengali?’ a man intended to whisper, but the silence was so deep that everybody heard it. (The man probably was a Bengali.) Faint chuckles filled the air.
    ‘Historically,’ Nambodri said aloud, ‘the only just punishment for a Bengali male has been a Bengali female.’ A round of laughter went through the room. ‘We forgot to mention it before, gentlemen, she is our first female faculty,’ Nambodri declared.
    One man clapped. The solitary applause was about to die prematurely, but the others joined in to reinforce the compliment. The applause faded into a long comfortable silence.
    And that was how the evening would unfold, with festive commotion giving way to silences, and silences broken by profound questions about the universe, and questions easing into laughs. It was a long tradition here for the scientists to meet on the first Friday of every month and chat.
    Ayyan Mani surveyed the room with his back to the wall, as he had done many times, and tried to understand how it came to be that truth was now in the hands of these unreal men. They were in the middle of debating the perfect way to cut a cake and were concluding that carving triangular pieces, as everybody does, was inefficient. Then they made fun of a French scientist, who was not in the room, because he had said that man would never devise a way to predict the highest possible prime number. After that they began to wonder what the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva would reveal.
    Ayyan could not bear it. This never-ending quest for truth. In the simpler ages, wise mendicants, metaphorical zens, sons of God, sages who turned into anthills, all such types could not sayin crisp clear copy that
The Times of India
could publish, the reason why life existed or why there was something instead of nothing. They could have just said it in a neat paragraph and solved the mystery once and for all. But they didn’t. They told fables instead. Now, truth was in the hands of the men in this room, and they were more incomprehensible than the men of God. Ayyan was certain that