Manu Joseph - Serious Men

‘But I don’t have a future, it seems.’

‘You do, Sir. I have come with it,’ Ayyan said, and he asked casually, ‘Will you tell me where the JET question-papers are stored?’

‘Why do you want to know?’

‘Because I know the rest. I know about Aryabhata Tutorials and the names of the three printers.’

‘That’s impossible. You know the printers?’

‘Magna, Lana and Scape.’

Acharya peeled a banana thoughtfully. ‘You want to steal the JET?’

‘Yes, Sir’ Ayyan said.

‘Because your son is no genius?’

‘He is, but the JET is too tough for him.’

‘So let him fail,’ Acharya said, eating the banana with swift bites.

‘That is not a good idea, Sir.’

‘But obviously, Ayyan, I can’t help you.’

Ayyan took out the dictaphone and played the conversation between Acharya and Oparna when she had come to tell him why she had contaminated the sampler.

‘Why, Oparna?’ the sad voice of Acharya asked.

‘What did you expect, Arvind?’ the voice of Oparna replied. ‘You sleep with me till your wife comes back from her vacation and then ask me to get out of your life.’

The conversation moved on with long excruciating pauses which Acharya recognized as the painful language of final separation. He then heard the voice of Oparna clearly explaining how, very early one morning, in a fit of love and vengeance, she had contaminated the sampler.

Acharya did not realize that he had been holding a half-eaten banana near his mouth for over five minutes. When Ayyan put the dictaphone back into his trouser-pocket, Acharya asked softly, ‘How did you get this?’

‘I used to listen,’ he said.

Acharya started laughing. ‘I always knew you were some kind of a bastard,’ he said. ‘Why didn’t you show this to the inquiry committee?’

‘We did not have a deal then.’

‘And we do, now?’

‘Let’s talk about your future, Sir,’ Ayyan said. ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if you got your old job back? Don’t you want to send balloons up and carry out all the other experiments? I know how we can do that.’

‘How?’

‘You leave that to me. I know what I must do. But you have to help me. I want the question-paper. Are you going to help me?’

Acharya ate the rest of the banana without uttering a word. Then he said, ‘There are three versions of the question-paper.’

‘I know. Where are they?’

‘And this time, the questions are really nasty,’ Acharya said, chuckling.

‘Where are the question-papers?’

‘We had just sent the questions to the printers when all the shit began to happen. All the three question-papers, they are classics. Jana may have already decided which of the three will finally go to the test centres.’

‘Where are the question-papers?’

‘You can’t get them, Ayyan.’

‘I can. Just tell me where they are.’

‘They are not here,’ Acharya said, with a triumphant chuckle. ‘They are never stored at the Institute. They are in a sealed and secured room in BARC. You can’t get there.’

The Bhabha Atomic Research Centre was a fortress that was beyond the methods of a clerk. And Ayyan knew that.

‘What do we do now?’ he asked.

‘Why do you need to see a question-paper,’ Acharya said, pointing a finger at his head, ‘when it’s all here?’

‘You remember all the questions?’

‘Most of them.’

Ayyan sprang to his feet and rummaged through the drawers of the main desk. He grabbed a bunch of blank sheets of paper and a pen, and put them in front of Acharya. ‘Write then,’ he said.

‘Tell me, Ayyan. Is your son a genius?’

‘He is, Sir.’

‘Really?’ Acharya said, looking amused. ‘Did he ever win that science contest? Can he really recite the first thousand primes? Is he really what people think he is?’

‘That’s not important to your future,’ Ayyan said. And that made Acharya laugh.

Acharya sat by the main desk and wrote down over two hundred questions from the three versions of the question-paper, occasionally exclaiming at the sheer brilliance of some of the questions. When he finished, he gave the sheets to Ayyan.

‘Write down the answers too, Sir,’ he said.

Acharya laughed. ‘I’ll do that,’ he said, ‘But there is something very important you must know. Forty correct answers out of hundred questions is a very, very good score. So your boy must attempt not more than forty. Anything more than that would be suspicious.’

ON THE DAY of the exam, Oja oiled her son and scrubbed him with a fistful of coconut husk. He wore the new clothes that she had bought a week ago. ‘Full pants’, as she called them, and a long-sleeved shirt. She gave the hall ticket to Ayyan, and in the same manner gave the boy’s hand to him. At the door, she hugged and kissed her son, and began to cry. Adi looked at his father with an exasperated expression. But when she bid a final goodbye and shut the door, the boy felt a pang of gloom. He could hear her crying inside and he did not like it when she cried like that, alone and for no good reason.

‘Can she come with us?’ he asked his father.

‘She has a lot of work,’ Ayyan said.

As they set off down the dim corridor, people standing in their doorways looked. Some smiled; some conveyed their best wishes. When he was halfway down the corridor Ayyan realized that a small group of men, women and children was following them. And this swarm grew as they went down the steps and into the broken stone ways of the chawls. By the time they reached the road, there were at least a hundred neighbours shadowing them in silence. From the windows of buses and cars, people stared curiously, trying to understand the sight.

Someone stopped a passing taxi.

‘Shouldn’t we save money?’ Adi asked his father.

‘Not today,’ Ayyan said.

THEY STOOD CLOSE together, looking blank, as if they had become a photograph. Ayyan Mani was in the best shirt he had ever worn. His feet were bare because he wanted to appear indifferent. Oja was in the sari she had worn for the quiz. She was once again forced by her husband to sacrifice lustre for the unreasonable requirements of elegance. Adi was in-between them, unhappy that he had to wear long trousers again. They were standing near the kitchen platform and staring at the door. There was a faint murmur in the air, which slowly grew. A crowd was approaching. Oja surveyed her home nervously. She spotted a strand of a cobweb under the wooden attic.

‘Is there time to clean?’ she asked.

‘Are you mad?’ Ayyan said.

‘At least the milk is boiled,’ she said, easing the creases of her sari. Ayyan tried to understand what she had said.

‘Why did you boil the milk?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘When I don’t know what to do, I boil the milk.’

Outside, on the corridor, a girl in a fitted shirt and jeans walked with an enormous man who was carrying a camera on his shoulder. Behind them was a mob. The corridor was so packed that the men and children at the edges were squeezed against the pale walls, and some fell festively into the open homes.

The girl was escorted by about a dozen men to the only shut door on the corridor. They knocked. It opened partially and the face of Ayyan tried to evaluate the situation. But the force on the door was too much for him and he yielded. The reporter and the cameraman were taken into the house by a tide of happy neighbours.

‘Not everybody,’ the girl screamed. ‘Who is Ayyan Mani?’ she asked.

Ayyan began to push the people out. ‘This is crazy. Let them do their jobs,’ he said.

‘You’ve already forgotten us, Mani,’ a tiny man said angrily, as he was being shoved outside. ‘You have become a big man, have you?’