Fine and private places

From descending aliens to upwardly mobile PAs, Serious Men takes a magnifying glass to the class struggle, modern science and other things.

Manu Joseph’s debut novel Serious Men contains so many dryly funny moments that it’s difficult to hold up a specific one as representative of the book’s tone. Take the scene where the veteran cosmologist Arvind Acharya is walking down a corridor with a young astrobiologist, Oparna. She’s in awe of the famous scientist and tries to make small talk.

“This corridor is endless,” she says — a safe enough ice-breaker, you’d think.

“That’s not true,” Acharya says tersely, and they continue walking in silence.

The joke isn’t underlined, it’s quietly slipped in, and it’s typical of the book’s matter-of-fact contemplation of people (in this case, a man of science who is too literal-minded to engage in casual chatter). Elsewhere, we are told that when Acharya’s little daughter brought him a poem she had written titled “Infinite Stars in the Sky”, he ruined the moment for her by patiently explaining why stars are not immeasurable, and introducing her to the much less poetic word “finite”.

In other words, Acharya is a serious man. He’s preoccupied with his firm ideas about the direction that scientific research should take, and impatient with colleagues who are trying to make science glamorous for the lay person. He has a magnificent obsession of his own: convinced that extraterrestrial microbes enter the Earth’s atmosphere on meteorites, he wants to send sterilised containers to a height of 41 km to catch them.

But the science in Serious Men is a pretext for other explorations. We see Acharya and the other scientists mostly through the eyes of the book’s protagonist, Ayyan Mani, a lower-class, low-caste man who works as Acharya’s personal assistant. Ayyan lives in a chawl with his wife Oja and their 10-year-old son Aditya, and he has high ambitions. Sensing that the friction between the scientists will soon lead to a power struggle (he thinks of it as the “war of the Brahmins”) and that he might use this to his advantage, he starts spinning an elaborate story about Aditya being a child prodigy.

What I liked about Serious Men is that though it has some obvious talking points — the class and caste struggle, social aspiration, the role of science in today’s world, the many ways in which human beings go about keeping themselves busy and rationalising their lives — one never feels pressured to classify it or to define what it’s “about”. It’s enough to enjoy Joseph’s sharp, precise prose, to follow the characters around and to let themes and ideas gently float around your mind, like the descending alien bacteria of Acharya’s fancies.

Humour and perceptiveness are the twin strengths of this novel. Its knack for detached observation is visible right from the first page where Ayyan, strolling near the Worli seaface, contemplates a sea of humanity. It never loses its drollness, though it comes close at times, when we are made privy to Ayyan’s bitterness about the peculiar injustices of the world: when he watches a shampoo commercial and sneers about privileged people who think hairfall is a big problem, or when he thinks black thoughts about the “moronic pride” of Indians who boast about the country’s glorious past. There is plenty of darkness in these passages when one steps back to consider it, but it doesn’t become too polemical because Joseph repeatedly finds a way to lighten the tone, and to do it in such a way that the original thought isn’t drowned out. Unexpected deadpan sentences intersperse with moving passages such as the one where Ayyan and Oja, attending a quiz at their son’s school, stand on the periphery of a group of upper-class parents, knowing that they don’t quite fit in but reticently participating in the conversation.

Also skillful is the juggling of the stories of the three central characters. A liaison between Acharya and Oparna might have been no more than a convenient plot-mover, but it gives us insights into the characters’ arcs and personal histories, notably when Acharya, in the newfound intimacy of the relationship, recalls a childhood incident — a brush with the idea of predestination — that forever changed his life.

On one grand, absurdist level, all the people in this book (including Ayyan, the puppetmaster) can be seen as comic figures, as all of us ultimately are; self-importantly serious about the things that personally matter to them, willing to scoff at the things that don’t. But they are also believable people. It’s possible to care about them, and that eventually is what makes Serious Men such a winning novel.

SERIOUS MEN
Author: Manu Joseph
Publisher: Fourth Estate
Pages: 326
Price: Rs 499