Serious Men (37 page)

Ayyan searched for a hint of fear inside him, but he felt nothing. What he had done, he himself could not believe. Adi was in every paper and on every channel. So too was Sister Chastity. And she was tirelessly recounting the boy’s extraordinary state of mind. Parents who had witnessed the quiz recalled the episode on news channels with happy inaccuracies. The whole country, it seemed, was in the trance of the Dalit genius, the son of a clerk, the grandson of a sweeper. ‘At the end of the oppressive centuries, at the end of the tunnel of time,’ Ayyan was quoted by newspapers, ‘my son has finally arrived at the edge of an opportunity.’

Waman clapped his hands and asked for attention. The room fell silent. Without a word, Waman handed a mike to the father of the genius.

‘I will certainly make a speech,’ Waman told the gathering, ‘but you will understand what I have to say only after you hear this man.’

Ayyan inhaled. The image of Oja sitting with a baffled face in front of the television crossed his mind.

‘Adi is not here because I thought his presence was not required,’ he said in Hindi. ‘My boy applied to the postgraduate course in maths in the Institute of Theory and Research. He wrote the Joint Entrance Test and he passed it. Only the interview is left. I am here to tell you that he will not be appearing for the interview. He will not be joining the Institute.’

A faint murmur arose, but it died fast.

‘There are reasons,’ Ayyan said. ‘One is that he might be very bright, but I think he has to finish school first like other boys. I think it was a mistake to let him sit the entrance exam. The other reason is …’ Ayyan looked at the minister, who patted him on his back.

‘I’ve worked as a clerk in the Institute for fifteen years,’ he said. ‘I started as an office boy and made my way up. I worked for a man, a great man called Arvind Acharya, who has now been shamed, as you all know. His life has been destroyed. He has almost gone mad. What actually went on there, most of you do not know. But I know. I have with me a CD of a recording I made which will explain exactly what happened. I was just a clerk and so nobody would have taken me seriously until this day. That’s why I have never revealed this before. I have another recording which is more shocking. Once you listen to that you will understand why I don’t want my son to be part of such an institute. It’s a scary place.’

The radio astronomers were in a sombre huddle around the low centrepiece. They were staring at the flat-screen TV on the wall near Nambodri’s desk. Someone was flicking through the news channels. They were no longer airing the poignant conversation between Oparna and Acharya. All the news channels were now playing the voices of the men in that room — their plebeian views about the intellectual limitations of Dalits, and of women, which made female reporters and presenters, of whom there were suddenly many, pass snide remarks about the kind of men who were
running Indian science. Nambodri had grown silent during the last hour. The phones on his table were ringing incessantly. He had long switched off his mobile.

These men were in the misery of two distinct fears. The Oparna tape would exonerate Acharya. His return was probably imminent. Nobody was in doubt that it was her voice, though Nambodri had said earlier, before he had lost the power of speech, that they could attack the credibility of the recording. The other fear was the fear of death. Whole cities had burned when Dalits felt slighted. In a matter of hours, the Institute would be under siege. Police vans were standing sentinel at the gates, but that only made the astronomers more nervous. The first wave of protest had already arrived. The peons had gone on strike. They had stopped working and were now gathered near the main lawn. Before that they had left all the taps on and had clogged up the toilets with broken cutlery.

As the regime sat in uneasy calm, Jal steamed in holding loose sheets of paper, an envelope and a newspaper. His excitement seemed unreasonable.

‘Where have you been?’ someone asked him. ‘You know what has happened, right?’

‘I know a lot more than that,’ Jal said, stopping for an instant when he heard his voice on the television describing Dalits as genetically handicapped. He put the things he was holding on the centrepiece and rubbed his hands. ‘You will not believe this,’ he said. ‘You will not believe this.’

‘What has happened?’ Nambodri asked. There was a faint ray of hope on his face.

‘Cheer up, my friend, we are going to war. These last few days, I’ve been checking up on that guy and his son. And what I’ve found is very, very strange. Here is Adi’s answer-sheet. It’s unbelievable. He got thirty-nine.’

The answer-sheet passed from hand to hand. Jal’s enthusiasm now infected everyone in the room.

‘This means he is in the top five. A boy of eleven in the top five. Now, let me try to be coherent,’ Jal said. His glasses quivered
on his nose-bridge. ‘Let me begin at the beginning. Do you remember the day when Ayyan showed us a clipping of his son winning a science contest hosted by the Swiss Consulate? I checked with the Consulate. They have never held such a contest. Never. I managed to call the reporter. His name is Manohar Thambe. He said that the news was given to him by Ayyan. Apparently, some language newspapers officially take money to cover news.’

Nambodri began to pace the floor.

‘Are you listening, Jana?’ Jal asked.

‘Go on,’ Nambodri said, beginning to understand.

‘Then I noticed something strange,’ Jal said. He looked at the television screen. A commercial was underway. So he took the remote and started flipping through the channels until he arrived at one which showed the face of Adi.

‘Look, look. Look carefully. He is wearing the hearing-aid in his left ear.’ Jal then showed the picture of the boy in
The Times.
‘This picture went with the article about how he could recite the first thousand primes. His hearing-aid is in the right ear. The article clearly mentions that the boy is deaf in his
right
ear. But in every other image I have seen of the boy, he is wearing the hearing-aid in his
left
ear.’

‘What does that mean?’ Nambodri asked.

‘Think, Jana, think. How can a boy of eleven recite the first thousand primes?’

‘I don’t believe this,’ Nambodri said, sitting down slowly.

‘But what about the quiz?’ someone asked. ‘Hundreds of people saw the boy.’

‘Maybe his father had whacked the questions. Like he probably did with JET?’

‘He stole the JET, didn’t he?’ Nambodri said softly.

‘But that’s impossible,’ one of the astronomers said. A supportive murmur followed.

‘Listen to me. Listen to me,’ Jal said impatiently. ‘I called up our printers and asked them if there had been any enquiries from Aryabhata Tutorials recently. Two of them said that they didn’t
know, but one of them distinctly remembered someone calling less than eight weeks ago asking when the consignment was expected to be delivered. I don’t know how he got the JET, but I tell you, he did. An eleven-year old boy cannot score thirty-nine. Come on, we have seen geniuses; we know them. We know what is possible. Put it all together, Jana. Ayyan Mani is a con. His genius son is a fraud.’

Jal then appeared thoughtful. He chuckled.

‘What is it?’ Nambodri asked.

‘But that bastard did get into Mensa.’

The door opened. The astronomers looked with the eyes of the dead as Ayyan Mani entered with some faxes. He went to Nambodri’s desk and laid them out neatly. As he walked back to the door he told Nambodri, ‘I am sorry I’m late, Sir. I had to attend a press conference.’

‘That we know,’ Nambodri said.

‘I wish I could get you coffee, Sir, but I think the peons are missing.’

‘We know that too.’

Ayyan was about to leave the room when Nambodri asked, ‘Is your son deaf in the right ear or the left?’

The astronomers held their breath. They waited to see fear on the face of Ayyan. But he smiled.

‘Both the ears, Sir,’ he said. ‘But Adi likes wearing only one hearing-aid at a time.’

Nambodri put his hands on his hips and studied the floor. ‘I see,’ he said. ‘Ayyan, how did you steal the JET?’

‘I don’t know what you are talking about, Sir.’

‘We know that he did not win any science contest. We know that your son cannot recite the first thousand primes and we know that he is no genius. If you cooperate, we will ensure that you don’t go to prison.’

‘I forgot to tell you, Sir,’ Ayyan said, looking towards the window. ‘It is not safe for you to be here. Anything can happen. I suggest you go home.’

‘We will manage, Ayyan.’

‘Do you know what is happening at the gates, Sir? I think you should look.’

Nambodri first raised his eyebrows in defiance but the defiance slowly, inexorably, became curiosity. He went to the window and looked. A mob was standing outside the gates with metal rods, sticks and banners. They were standing calmly, as if waiting for a decisive sign.

Nambodri walked back to the sofa and said, ‘We will manage this, Ayyan. Why don’t you think of yourself?’

‘I’ve always thought of myself, Sir.’

‘Let’s make a deal, Ayyan. You confess that you have cooked up these recordings and we will not press charges against you.’

‘What charges, Sir?’

‘Listen, Ayyan. If the boy is interrogated for one minute by any science graduate, it will become clear that he is no genius. I can publicly challenge him to recite the first thousand primes. The Swiss Consulate is going to make a statement this evening saying that it did not hold any contest. Your reporter Thambe has agreed to give it in writing that he was paid for the article about your son. The game is over, Ayyan. But we can help you, if you are willing to make a little confession.’

Ayyan left the room. The radio astronomers looked at each other. They were tense, but they could now see the first signs of hope. The way Ayyan had fled the room was consoling. Then he returned.

‘The minister wants to talk to you,’ he told Nambodri, handing the phone to him.

Nambodri held the instrument to his ear and said, ‘It’s a pleasure talking to you.’ He listened. Finally, he said, ‘I am sorry, this is not agreeable to me, Minister.’ He gave the phone back to Ayyan and said, ‘Ayyan, you have another five minutes to decide.’ Ayyan laughed and left the room, shaking his head in private mirth. That unsettled the astronomers.

‘He seems to know something we don’t,’ Jal said. ‘What did the minister say, Jana?’

Nambodri rubbed his nose and said, ‘He told me that if we don’t go public with what we have found out about Adi, he will promise us safety.’

‘Safety?’ Jal said nervously. ‘What did he mean by safety?’

‘Relax,’ Nambodri said. ‘I know how to play this game.’

He took out his phone and was about to dial a number when they heard a sound. The glass of the huge square window had cracked. The astronomers fell on the floor and lay on their stomachs. There was another sound and this time the window crashed. They could hear the roar of the mob down below. Five more stones landed in the room. They could hear other windows break and the sound of things being beaten to pulp, and the shrieks of women. They lay on the floor without moving. Then they heard the riot come closer. Things were exploding, men were screaming. The astronomers crawled closer to each other and stared at the door as the sound of death grew louder and louder.

The door finally burst open and about two dozen men rushed in with iron rods. They began to break everything in the room. Then they began to beat up the astronomers with the rods. The scientists screamed in mortal fear as they had never screamed before.

‘Not on the head,’ one of the goons screamed. He observed the assault keenly, academically and looked somewhat disappointed. ‘Stop,’ he screamed. The thugs stopped. There was the sound of men groaning and weeping. The leader of the raiders then placed his rod below the knee of Nambodri and told his men, ‘This is how you must do it.’

It took three hours for order to be restored in the Institute. Police carried away happy rioters who waved to the cameras. One car burned in the driveway. The windscreens of the other cars were broken. Windows dangled from the main block. Stunned inmates walked out in a silent file escorted by the police.

Across the city there were protests, but they were less violent. Later in the evening, outside the Bombay Hospital, mobs
paraded an effigy that was named after Nambodri. They beat it with slippers and finally burnt it. There were reports of stray violence in other parts of the country but after two days the riots receded.

L
AVANYA
A
CHARYA SURVEYED
the room with the autocracy of a wife. The last two weeks she had supervised the resurrection of her husband’s office. The textured walls seemed too empty, but he refused to allow any adornments except the framed poster of Carl Sagan.

‘They broke everything but this?’ she asked, looking at Sagan’s charming face. ‘Arvind, can’t you let me put up at least one painting? After all, you begged me to come back.’

‘I like the walls blank,’ he said stubbornly, looking at the sea through the new window.

‘OK, then,’ she said. ‘I’m too tired to argue.’

On her way out she smiled at the clerk, who was half standing, and she said to him in Tamil, ‘Take care of him, Ayyan.’

‘I always will,’ he said, touching his chest with the tips of his fingers.

That evening, Ayyan Mani and Adi were sitting on a pink concrete bench, one of the many benches on the Worli Seaface that were dedicated to the memory of a departed member of the Rotary Club. Adi was peering into the paper cone searching for hidden peanuts at the bottom. Ayyan studied the walkers. Young women in good shoes walked in haste, as though they were fleeing from the fate of looking like their mothers; proud breasts bounced and soft thighs shuddered. Newly betrothed girls went with long strides to abolish fat before the bridal night when they might have to yield on the pollen of a floral bed to a stranger bearing K-Y Jelly. Old men went with other old men discussing
the nation they had ruined when they were young. Their wives followed, talking about arthritis and other women who were not present. Then came Oja Mani, walking swiftly in slippers.