Free Serious Men by Manu Joseph Page B

her alarming height. But by the time she was eighteen, she had grown to unmarriageable levels. The elite of Sivagangai observed her sadly because tall Brahmin boys were rare then. The only tall types were loitering residues of the British, chiefly old enduring white men who were known to cohabit with servant maids, or Anglo-Indian boys who were terrible at studies and worse, good at sports. The entire family of Lavanya would rather consume Senthil Rat Poison than marry her off to a white man or to the ‘coffee’ as Anglo-Indians were then called. But the elders need not have worried so much. Somehow, they found a twenty-two-year-old boy from a very good family, who too had the deformity of height. He had graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology, but was still studying something inscrutable in the Annamalai University in Madras. Whatever it was that he was studying did not appear to ensure a government job. But Lavanya’s condition made them overlook all the faults of Arvind Acharya. It was a marriage that was ordained not by the frivolity of love, or even its naïve expectation, but by the more reliable bond of equal handicap.
    Acharya was now distracted by the excitement of the impending Balloon Mission. He looked up at the clear blue sky. Somewherethere, not very high actually, he knew there were millions of microscopic aliens in a gentle descent. He was going to find them. The glare returned, the morning burned in his eyes, and he was slipping into a pleasurable trance once again. Then he felt something cold touch his legs. He almost jumped. The maid was crouched like a giant frog and mopping the floor. She looked at him with fear and suspicion. She always did. The day she had joined the household, she was shaken by the sound of death that came from his room. It was the voice of Luciano Pavarotti.
    Acharya used to listen to the angelic tenor every morning. Pavarotti was his ethereal accomplice in his incurable quest to solve the remaining mysteries of the universe. But Lavanya decided to ban the music in the mornings after she realized that it was terrifying not just the maid but also the cook. He resisted and even began to increase the volume until Lavanya proved that the days he played Pavarotti, the dosas looked baffled and tasted raw. ‘Women are sensitive,’ she had told him, ‘and women cook your food.’
    The maid scrubbed the floor near his feet and threw another glance at him. The way she looked at him, he was certain that she suspected he was Pavarotti. ‘Move,’ Lavanya said, ‘she has to clean.’
    As he walked around the maid carefully he muttered, ‘All that happens in this house is cleaning.’ He went to the kitchen without knowing why. There the cook was squatting on the sink and doing the dishes because she was too tiny to reach the tap. She turned and looked at him with one eye. It was all so terrible. So ugly.
    He marched to Shruti’s abandoned bedroom. It was now used to store the useless gifts that the young kept sending them in the moronic benevolence of keeping in touch. Lavanya saved all the presents and recycled them as wedding gifts.
    He went to the huge bookshelf that covered one half of the wall. There was a delicate promise of peace here. But he saw the shadow of Lavanya approach. ‘Arvind,’ she said with a smile that she had initially wanted to hide, ‘Are you going to just walkinside the house? You are supposed to walk outside, you know.’ He did not say anything. He studied the spines of the books. Then he heard her shriek.
    ‘They haven’t gone,’ she screamed. The way she said ‘they’, he knew she was talking about cockroaches. Lavanya and cockroaches had a special relationship. On the second day of marriage she had confessed that she had the ability to hear them. She was inspecting the floor carefully now, holding a rolled copy of a postdoctoral thesis on Large Molecular Structures in Interstellar Gas.
    ‘Just last week we had sprayed the whole kitchen. I