Serious Men Read Online Free PDF Page B

the name of a man from their distant adolescence. Oparna Goshmaulik was an enchantment that was always beyond his fortunes, but despite theunscalable rungs of society, there were only so many types of people and once upon a time, he had rumbled with the type of Oparna.
    That was over a decade ago when he was a young salesman for Eureka Forbes. He would woo typists, secretaries and shop attendants, and mesmerize them with his general knowledge, the future rebellions he planned against the rich, and his jokes about the Brahmins. They would let him squeeze their breasts on the Worli Seaface. Then, misled by decency, they would ask for marriage. And weep through the pause. Traditionally on the Worli Seaface, infatuation fondled and love cried. He was terrified of that love.
    When they began to brush his hand away from their impoverished chests and talk about where it was all heading, and whispered to him the simplicity of marriage, he left them in the knowledge that they could cash in their virginity somewhere else. But some who made love to him in the bushes of Aksa beach, or in the cheap hotels of Manori, were the dangerous kind. It was them he saw in the deceptive calm of Oparna. After their coy nudity and uncontrollable moans that he had to muffle by stuffing his fingers in their mouths; after their easy compliments about how good a lover he was, how thoughtful and informed, how big his penis was (though they had not slept with too many men) came their madness. They would weep for no reason, talk about death, and with great sorrow that matched the despondence of the pale yellow walls of the cheap nocturnal rooms, ask for marriage. They made him fear love, and drove him to the hard mattress of a prostitute in Falkland Street, whose bedsheet was still soaked in the sweat of clients who had been with her before him. As he rocked her beneath him, he would always remember, she sang a song:
‘Joot Bhole Kauva Kate’.
It had no meaning. She meant no metaphors. When he asked her to shut up, she said, ‘But I have to while away the time.’ He threw some notes at her and ran. Her laughter echoed behind him. No wail he had heard in his life equalled the melancholy of her psychotic laughter.
    Often, he used to tell his girls, as they looked at him with growing affection on the parapet of the Worli Seaface, ‘What is the saddest sight in the world? A couple weeping together. At their failed love, or at the ruins of their home demolished by the municipality, or at the funeral of their child. There is something about a man and a woman weeping together. Nothing is more heart-breaking.’ But he knew that the laughter of that whore was far worse. He would never forget it. ‘Come back, hero,’ she had said.
    Unable to bear the promises he had to make merely to touch the breasts of girls who said they loved him, and the sudden sorrows of the broadminded women after they had brought their legs back together, and the wails of undead whores, he finally decided to place a matrimonial in the expensive classifieds of the
Maharashtra Times.
And he found a virgin who had none of the memories he had given other women.

A YYAN M ANI HAD just asked her to go in. Oparna rose from the tired black sofa. She did not know why her heart was pounding. There was something about the hermit who sat inside that unnerved her. Three months ago, Arvind Acharya had interviewed her in between reading something. And when he did look at her, it was with total indifference – as if thirty-year-old women were not regarded as people here. He had studied her gravely and said, ‘You were born after Microsoft?’
    She pushed open the inner door and remembered its unexpected heaviness. Acharya, his head bent over some loose sheets of paper on the table, always appeared bigger than she imagined. His desk was cluttered with heaps of bound papers and journals. And there was a curious stone which he used as a paperweight. Some said that it was a piece of meteorite he had