Serious Men by Manu Joseph Page B

to renounce that cruel religion. We are Buddhists now.’
    ‘I can live with nothing,’ she mumbled, ‘I don’t even wantdreams. All I am asking is to let me have some gods. Our son is growing up. I want him to know the gods that other boys know. I want to take him to the temple. I want him to be aware of these things. I want real festivals in this house.’
    Ayyan considered what his wife had just told him about their son. He had thought about it before. In a way, Adi was growing up like an animal, without any influence of culture. The epics that his father believed were the propaganda of the Brahmins were also the only epics the boy had. And a boy needed those to understand fully that there was an eternal battle between good and evil, and that in an ideal world the virtuous triumphed over the bad. Superman was good, but Mahabharata was deeper. It had complexity. It made the good choose the wrong path, and there were demons who were fundamentally nice persons, and there were gods who ravished bathing girls. Ayyan wanted his son to know those stories. Even though he could not accept Hindu idols in his home, for some time now he secretly wished Oja would win that battle. He wanted to yield but yield grudgingly, so that the religion of the upper castes could be used in his home for entertainment and education, and nothing more. He wanted Adi to grow up knowing morals, patriotism and the gods. And when the boy turned twenty, may he have the intelligence to abandon them all.
    Oja wiped her tears and looked angrily at her husband. The way she looked, he knew what she was going to say.
    ‘His ear,’ she said, and wept, pressing her wrists on her eyes, ‘This might not have happened if we had had gods.’
    ‘Enough,’ Ayyan screamed.
    There was a time when Ayyan thought he might never become a father. Long before he had married Oja, he had once gone to a fertility clinic’s nascent sperm bank with the insane idea of donating his Dalit semen to the fair childless Brahmin couples. He had heard that sperm banks do not reveal the identity of the donor, and so his seed could impregnate hundreds of unsuspecting high-caste women. He hoped stout brooding Dalits would spring upeverywhere. But the doctors there told him that he had a defect and so his contribution could not be accepted. His sperm-count, they said, was just half the normal rate.
    He told Oja about the defect many months after their marriage. ‘Since my sperm-count is half the normal rate, you must be doubly prepared to sleep with me,’ he had said. She replied in a lethargic way, in the middle of folding clothes, ‘I don’t understand all this maths.’ Despite his fears, just three years after their marriage, Adi was born. In the insanity of her labour, Ayyan will always remember that Oja had screamed the filthiest abuse at him. He didn’t know any woman could mouth such words, let alone his wife. ‘My husband is a son of a whore. May his arse explode,’ she had screamed in Tamil. But it was a tradition. Women in her tribe had to abuse their men when they were in labour.
    As Adi grew up, they slowly learnt that he was almost entirely deaf in his left ear. Oja believed that the gods were angry. Buddha’s eternal smile, she had always interpreted as the peace of a cosmically powerless man. It was the other gods, the Hindu gods, who had all the magic. One night, she told her husband with a wisdom that baffled him, ‘You love this man who found God under a Peepal tree. Do you know that a Peepal tree is a Brahmin? Yes it is.’
    Ayyan could never bear it when he saw Oja cry. His heart grew heavy at the sight and his throat felt cold. He thought of what he could say about the elephant god whom he would fling by the wayside tomorrow. He searched for something entertaining. ‘You know, Oja,’ he said, ‘an elephant’s trunk has four thousand muscles.’
    There was a time when she used to love such facts. She would marvel at a world that was so strange and at her