Serious Men
by Manu Joseph
Award: PEN/Open Book Winner 2011
Nomination: Dublin Longlist 2012
Date Read: March 9, 2025
From The New York Times:
“To the list you can add Arvind Acharya and Ayyan Mani, the hero and antihero (you decide which is which) of Manu Joseph’s smart and funny first novel, “Serious Men.” Arvind is a legendary astrophysicist, a perennial Nobel candidate banned from the Vatican for having whispered something naughty in the pope’s ear. He lords over the faculty at the Institute of Theory and Research in Mumbai like a cantankerous octogenarian enduring a horde of particularly ungrateful grandchildren. The man’s idea of sentimentality is using his wife’s name as his e-mail password.
Ayyan is Arvind’s personal assistant at the institute, a wily sweeper’s son of the untouchable caste with an affinity for mischief equaled only by his aptitude for it. He eavesdrops on all of Arvind’s conversations, subverts every order he’s given and posts, each morning at the institute’s entrance, a “Thought for the Day” that’s often absurdly fraudulent. (“Rebirth is the most foolish mathematical concept ever.” — Isaac Newton.)
I know what you’re thinking here. The pompous Brahmin and the streetwise Dalit: buddy-cop via Bollywood? Don’t worry. These Serious Men may be clichés, but they’re thoughtfully realized, interestingly conflicted and surprisingly sympathetic clichés. For one thing, each has a higher purpose.
Ayyan’s aspirations revolve around his son, Adi, a geeky child (even by Indian standards) afflicted with a hearing aid, a mother who only wants him to seem normal and a father who will go to tremendous lengths to have him seem anything but. Through a little subterfuge and some low-grade electronics, Ayyan eventually has the faculty at the institute, the local press and a good part of the nation believing that the boy is an unsurpassable prodigy (again, even by Indian standards).
This “little game” is a risky business in which to involve a child, but it has to be better than life as usual in the Worli chawls, a slum built by the colonial powers as housing for textile workers in which each family is consigned to a room the size of a modest shipping container. The oppressive no-way-outness of the chawls makes Dharavi, the across-town setting of the film “Slumdog Millionaire,” seem in comparison a paradise of opportunity.
As for Arvind, he has a mortal enemy of the same scope as his own ego: Big Bang theory, which he considers a Western plot. “The Vatican wanted a beginning,” he thinks, “and the Big Bang provided one.” Arvind has his own theory: “If the goal of the universe were to manufacture life, as he secretly believed, then the universe was a giant device . . . to make minuscule pieces of life here and there.” He is convinced that some of these pieces can be found floating in the upper atmosphere and plans to send a great balloon into orbit to collect them, to prove that life on earth came not from the primordial soup but from the cosmos. In his quest he faces two hurdles: his envious minions and Oparna Goshmaulik, a shapely astrobiologist with the mother of all daddy complexes.
In the end, naturally, our odd couple become mutually dependent — Arvind needs Ayyan’s wiliness to resurrect his career; Ayyan needs Arvind to bring the Adi con to its pinnacle — and in the end they develop a modicum of respect for each other. Ayyan’s is expressed internally, after the boss is disgraced and the underlings take over the asylum, in this wise turn of phrase: “And Ayyan felt the impoverishment of serving a lesser regime.” For a man whose workday ends with a return to the Worli chawls, it simply will not do.”
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