Manu Joseph - Serious Men

‘You come inside then, I will go out. OK?’ Ayyan told him, with a playful slap.

It took five minutes to evict all the neighbours and shut the door. In the sudden calm, the girl turned to Oja and smiled. The cameraman looked around and decided to squeeze himself between the cupboard and the fridge. He wore a headphone and turned on a light that blinded everyone for an instant.

‘Are you ready?’ the reporter asked the family.

They nodded.

‘Answer only in Hindi. Don’t use too many English or Marathi words,’ she said.

She turned to the camera. Her face transformed. She looked alert, smart and excited. She told the camera, ‘We are inside the humble one-room home of Aditya Mani, the wonder-boy who has cleared one of the toughest exams in the world. The eleven-year-old is only an interview away from joining the postgraduate course at the Institute of Theory and Research.’

‘Stop,’ the cameraman said. ‘Too much noise outside.’ He opened the door and screamed, ‘Keep quiet.’

The crowd fell silent for an instant. Then the murmurs grew about how a stranger whom they had helped find the way was now asking them to shut up. But they calmed down eventually.

The girl repeated what she had just said. She knelt down beside Adi.

‘How do you feel?’ she asked.

‘I feel hungry,’ he said.

She smiled kindly at him and asked, ‘How did you manage to do this, Aditya? At such a young age. How did you do it?’

‘I knew all the answers,’ he said, and smiled at his father.

‘Of course you did,’ she said.

‘What are your future plans?’

‘I don’t know.’

After a few more questions to Adi, the girl turned to Ayyan. ‘Sir, it must be a very special day for you.’

‘It obviously is,’ he said. ‘I cannot believe this.’

‘What are your plans for him?’

‘It’s too early to say.’

‘When did you know that he was a genius?’

‘He was always a bit different. He thinks differently.’

‘Will he be wearing shorts or trousers to college?’ she asked.

‘That has not been decided,’ he said, without a smile. ‘Actually, he has not got in yet. There is an interview process.’

The girl turned to Oja Mani and said, ‘You must be a very proud mother.’

Oja laughed coyly and looked at her husband. After a brief silence, she moved closer to the mike and said, ‘I want my son to be a normal child.’ She fell silent again. Then she asked, ‘Do you want some tea?’ That made the cameraman wince.

The girl tried to extract more information from the family, and when she was satisfied she signalled to the cameraman that the session was over. Ayyan told her that he was going to hold a press conference in Minister Waman’s office on Tuesday. ‘I am making an important announcement,’ he said. ‘You will not want to miss it.’ That made her curious, but he did not divulge anything more.

The girl walked out, followed by the cameraman who had resumed shooting. The crowd, which had grown further, greeted her with a roar, and a few whistles. She was quickly engulfed by giggling men. She shoved her mike at one of them, who turned serious. She asked, ‘What do you have to say about the boy’s achievement?’

‘He has made us all proud,’ the man said, swaying in the tugs and pushes of the crowd.

The girl suddenly yelped and jumped. Someone had pinched her.

AYYAN MANI SAT behind a table crowded with mikes. Waman was by his side. The conference room of the minister’s office was packed with journalists. Photographers were kneeling in the front, near the table. Cameramen at the back were screaming at some reporters who were standing. ‘Sit, sit,’ they were saying. A disconsolate girl was telling a man who did not stop nodding, ‘You should have separate press conferences for the press and for the TV. These cameramen are animals. They are not journalists.’

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.