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stolen from a lab many many years ago. Four fresh orchids stood in a cylindrical glass jar and she knew he was not responsible for them. There was an unnaturally large waste-paper bin near his table, four feet high. Behind him was a long sliding window that was like a living portrait of the Arabian Sea. The walls were stark and empty. No pictures, no framed citations, no quotable commandments that men so loved. Nothing. In the far corner of the room were four white sofas that faced each other around a small centrepiece. The sofas offended her every time she entered the room. White sofas? Why?
    She sat across his massive table, wondering whether to clear her throat. That would be too cinematic, so she decided to be silent and look at him carefully. Silver strands of hair on his pink bald head rose and fell in the draft of the air conditioner directlyabove him. His thick capable hands rested on the table. His tranquil elephant eyes usually looked directly into the heart of the intrusion. Sometimes they stared like an infant’s.
    Occasionally, Oparna googled Acharya late into the night. She searched for stray pictures from his youth. He was always in badly stitched suits then, and seemed much angrier; his severe eyes appeared to survey the changing times somewhat baffled as if physics were in crisis. And it really was, according to the young Acharya. He spent the best years of his life in the passion of mauling the Big Bang theory, the world’s favourite idea – that everything began from a microscopic point, that most of the universe was made in about three minutes after an inexplicable moment of beginning called the Big Bang.
    How much this man had hated the theory. He accused the Big Bang of being Christian. The Vatican wanted a beginning and the Big Bang provided one. According to him, the Big Bang was that moment in the history of white men when God said, ‘Try to understand from here.’ He did not accept it. Acharya’s universe did not have a beginning, it did not have an end. ‘Because I am not Christian,’ he had famously said. He hated the Big Bang theory so much, and considered it such a repulsive influence of religion, that during a niece’s wedding to an American in San Francisco, when he heard the priest say solemnly, ‘In the beginning was the Word,’ he threw his shoe at the altar.
    Around that time (it must have been about thirty years ago) he was at the height of his intellectual powers. Many believed that his work on gravitational collapse would fetch him the Nobel if he behaved and tempered down his embarrassing opposition to the Big Bang. As it was, the odds were stacked against cosmologists. An old rumour had it that Alfred Nobel’s wife had had an affair with an astronomer and the cuckold laid out in his will that those associated with astronomy must be considered to share his money only under exceptional circumstances. Oparna believed that rumour. It was absolutely possible.
    Acharya was the type of man who would believe first and then spend the rest of his life seeking that little matter called evidence.Oparna liked such men. They were obsolete in a world where something as low grade as practicality was increasingly mistaken for wisdom. When they spoke, their words had so much power because they knew there was such a thing called the truth. They just believed, blindly. And for many years Arvind Acharya believed in his heart that microscopic aliens were falling all the time on Earth. To prove it he was finally going to send a hot-air balloon to a height of forty-one kilometres with four sterilized metal containers that would capture air at that altitude. The containers would come down, and in her basement lab Oparna would study their contents. If there were any microbes in the containers it would mean only one thing. They came from space. Mankind would have finally found aliens.
    Oparna craned her neck to see what Acharya was reading, but from that angle it was hard for her to figure it out.
    He