Serious Men by Manu Joseph Page B

cultural force of the Professors’ Quarters.
    Nambodri was visiting after a long time. She hoped he had come in peace. She let him in muttering, ‘Don’t worry, Jana, I am going to turn that thing off.’
    ‘It’s “Nessun dorma”,’ Nambodri said, ‘You cannot turn it off like that. It’s disrespectful.’
    ‘In my house you can,’ she said, and went away.
    The two men stood in the living-room staring at each other. They heard Pavarotti perish abruptly, somewhat violently, and the sudden silence made the distance between them seem greater.
    ‘I’m sorry,’ Nambodri said, ‘The Round Table was not the place for that. I am really sorry.’

O PARNA G OSHMAULIK WAS still not granted the peace of anonymity, but she was now an insider. Those cold gazes when she went down the corridors in the wooden beat of her low heels, the number of old scholars who wanted to show her the right path while staring at her breasts, and their wives, some of them, who arrived to have an accidental meeting with her and see for themselves the talk of the Professors’ Quarters – those days were over. Only minor assaults remained. Some wiry postdoctoral students still gaped at her with infatuated eyes, an ancient professor of Number Theory who inhabited the corridors these days waylaid her and showed her his nature poems. Jana Nambodri continued to observe her in a way that he thought was wise and knowing. He wanted to sustain a mild tension between them. A cultured animosity, probably, was the second best thing he sought from a woman. Other radio astronomers still came down to her lab for what they said was just a chat and went back with the news of all that they surveyed – the looming shelves, chromatographs, spectrometers, the eager research students on hire from affiliated universities, the unmoving attendants who waited for something to happen and the many cartons, still unopened, that said ‘this side up’, including the cardboard box of a new coffee machine that they refused to believe was just that. But all this, the attention, malice and affection, she did not mind. Her situation was now improving. She even found the courage to paint her lips. (In pale shades.) Her thick healthy hair was still tied fiercely in the imagined modesty of a pony-tail, but these days she let some curls fall on her cheeks.She could not abandon the reassurance of unremarkable clothes though. Usually, a long shapeless top over blue jeans. But in the sea breeze, the flowing top sometimes hugged her figure, and she feared she was then a feast.
    She ran up two flights of stairs from the basement, humming a tune she could not recall hearing for the first time. She took in the breeze at the porch and the smell of the moist grass and wet earth. A gardener, who somehow did not look naked in just his underwear, was watering the main lawn. She made her way to the canteen: a gracious room with bare wooden tables and metal folding chairs, and large square windows that opened out to the undulating backyard. Here, the sound of the sea was another form of silence. Waiters in dark-brown shirts and trousers were emerging from an inner door carrying plates on their forearms and palms, or were just standing still at various points in the canteen.
    She saw Nambodri huddled together with four other radio astronomers whose names she had forgotten. He was speaking into his mobile and the others were looking at him keenly. One of them, a bald man with quivering spectacles on his nose-bridge, reminded her of a college professor who had once asked her in his cabin, ‘Do you respect me?’
    Nambodri put the phone in his shirt pocket and said in a soft, serious way, ‘Not today, But he is going to get it soon.’
    ‘I’m thinking of taking an off this week,’ one man said. ‘He is going to go crazy.’
    ‘No,’ Nambodri said calmly. ‘We are all going to be there. It’s very important that we are all there.’
    ‘Look, I’ve had a bypass. I can’t handle these