Ayyan Mani appears to be just another man in Bombay, stranded in the rot of a good marriage, an unremarkable life and a dead-end job as personal assistant to an insufferable astronomer called Arvind Acharya at the Institute of Theory and Research. But Ayyan is not as simple as he appears. To entertain himself and to give his wife the hope that they are heading towards a spectacular future, he embarks upon a secret game, weaving an outrageous fiction around his ten-year-old son. As he builds the small plots to promote the myth, he sets in motion a chain of events that soon threatens to overtake him. Alternately funny and poignant, Serious Men is a savage satire on class, love, relationships, and our veneration of science.