From that night, he drew Adi into a pact. ‘Our secret,’ he would tell his son, and make him memorize questions that he should ask his teachers. Ayyan devised simple questions, like, ‘What is gravity made of, Miss?’ Or, ‘Why are leaves green?’ He asked Adi to raise these questions any time during the class, never mind the context. ‘It’ll be fun,’ he told his son.
At first, the boy’s questions in the class seemed endearing. Teachers found him cute and, of course, bright and curious. Slowly, Adi’s questions became more complex: ‘If plants can eat light, why aren’t there things that eat sound?’ Or, when he heard a cue word like ‘ocean’, he would yell in the class, ‘The average depth of the ocean is 3.7 kilometres, why aren’t lakes so deep?’ When his teachers, still enamoured with his oddness, tried to engage him in a conversation about light, or sound, or the ocean, Adi clammed up because he did not know anything beyond what his father had taught him. But his silence did not surprise the staff. He was, after all, just a little boy. An odd, laconic little boy who was also partially deaf.
When it all began, Adi used to mumble to his mother about having a secret pact with his father, but she dismissed it as the prattle between father and son. In time, Adi began to enjoy the attention he was receiving at school. He began to understand that he was considered extraordinary, and not ‘special’ which was what they called the handicapped. He began to attach a certain importance to the pact with his father and even understood the reason why it had to be a secret. He vaguely knew that his mother would not tolerate the game he and his father were playing, and her opposition would deprive him of the status he was beginning to be granted in school.
He looked forward to disrupting every class. The disruptions began to annoy his teachers. They were increasingly baffled by his questions. They began to write notes in his handbook summoning his parents, and that created moments of fear and entertainment at home. Oja was concerned, but she was also excited by the prospects of a genius. ‘I want him to be normal,’ she would say, but she told everyone about his brilliance. She circled fire around his face and stained his cheek with black powder to exterminate the evil eye. The myth of a child genius was surprisingly simple to create, Ayyan realized, especially around a boy who was innately smart and who wore a hearing-aid. Adi had simply to say something odd in the class once a week to keep the legend alive.
It was easy and it was fun, but Ayyan wanted something more. So he arranged for the fictitious news item about Adi. It was still simple. The whole game could be called off at any moment. It had to end some day anyway. And it had to end before they got caught. He believed in his heart that he could get away with it. He found some comfort in the fact that he was not the first person to create the myth of genius around his child. There were people, mothers especially, who had spun far greater yarns. He had once read the incredible story of a French girl called Minou Drouet, a name he could somehow never pronounce. She published her poems when she was just eight. Her poems stunned the giants of French literature until some people began to say that it was her mother who was writing them. Little Minou was tested. She was asked to write poems in front of people. And she did. But the whole matter was never resolved. Even today people did not know if she were a child prodigy or her mother’s fraud. Then there was another girl, a Russian child called Natasha Demkina, whose mother claimed that the girl had X-ray vision. Many doctors even confirmed that Natasha had that ability, but there were many who said she was a fraud. Ayyan wanted to meet those marvellous mothers. He believed he understood them, and understood why they did what they did.
But he would not go too far. His game would end soon. It troubled him sometimes, the readiness with which his son was playing the game. Some days, Ayyan noticed that the boy chose to forget that it was all just a game. He believed that he truly was a genius. He loved the word. He mentioned it in his sleep.
The innocent face of Oja, in the glow of her overnight turmeric treatments and the illusion of a sudden extraordinary life, haunted Ayyan. She must never know the truth because she would never forgive him. The lies he had told her had already taken root and created a fable in her mind. It was too late to retract them. She must live with those lies forever. It frightened him, the thought of living with a woman for a whole lifetime without telling her that he had once fooled her. Even though he survived the world through unambiguous practicality, he believed that a man’s bond with his wife should not be corrupted by too much rationality. Marriage needed the absurdity of values. In the world that lay outside his home, there was no right or wrong. Every moment was a battle, and the cunning won. But his home was not something as trivial as the world. To fool Oja into believing that her son was a genius was a crime, a crime so grave that it did not have a punishment. But the game was also a magnificent lure. He loved it.
That’s what frightened him. Despite his own disgust at the cruelty of the myth he was creating around his son, Ayyan feared that he might not be able to stop. He was falling into the intoxication of the game, its excitement that was so potent. He thought of his alcoholic brothers, in whose eyes he had once seen the desperation to live, but who could not escape the powerful addiction that triumphed over the spirit of life. The thrill of erecting the story of a boy genius and the tales that drew his small family in a cosy huddle in their one-room home — he did not want to lose all that. Because that was all they had. So, what must a man do?
An ordinary man wants his wife to feel the excitement of life. Ayyan had been born into poverty that no human should have to endure; he absorbed the rudiments of knowledge under the municipality’s lights; he learnt the guile to feed himself and his family; and he was now stranded because there is only so far that the son of a sweeper can go. Ayyan had no exceptional talent, but he was bright enough to see so clearly the futility of hope and the grimness of an unremarkable life ahead. So what must a man do? Without the sport of his son’s genius, Ayyan knew that the routine of his life would eventually suffocate him. The future, otherwise, was all too predictable. He would type letters for the Brahmins, take their calls and suffer their pursuit of truth. Then, every single day of his life, he would climb the steep colonial steps of BDD, wade through its undead, and find refuge in the perfunctory love of a woman who did not really look at him any more. He would live out his whole life, so unspeakably ordinary, in a one-room home that was a hundred and eighty square feet (including the illicit loft).
Ayyan began to walk briskly now because that always abolished his sorrows and fears. He appeared so purposeful when he entered the BDD chawls that the defeated eyes of drunken men on the broken walkways looked at him with envy. Here, a man with purpose was a fortunate man. He went through the yellow walls of the top floor and felt the stares from the open doors. Children were playing and screaming on the corridor. Dreamless women combed their hair slowly. Silent widows, ancient and bent, sat on the doorways, their gazes transfixed at a past.