Serious Men

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.’

O N 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.

T HEY 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,