Sister Chastity went down the aisle and stopped in the middle of the hall. The silence returned. She looked happy, but she spoke sternly. She did not need a mike.
‘While I greatly appreciate the brilliance of our students I request everybody in the audience not to answer out of turn. If none of the contestants knows the answer, the question will be passed to the audience. You can then raise your hands and the quizmaster will decide who will answer the question. Am I clear, Adi?’ She went back to her seat, shaking her head happily at Ayyan.
The quizmaster turned to Team B and was about to speak. Then he looked at Adi again and shook his head. ‘Wait till you get your chance,’ he said, and that made everybody laugh. ‘Now Team B, you get another question.’
Team B was still angry. The two boys made a face to suggest that they had known the answer.
‘Are you ready?’ the quizmaster said, ‘Here it is. What is the connection between Little Boy, Fat Man and Manhattan?’
Oja held her husband’s sleeve again. ‘I hope he keeps quiet this time,’ she said.
‘He will,’ Ayyan said confidently.
The silence was heavy with anticipation. Team B threw a nervous glance at Adi. They looked as though they were anxious to answer before the boy did. Then they appeared to hope that Adi knew the answer. The quizmaster too looked in the direction of Adi. Some children in the audience stared at the boy expectantly. Parents craned their neck to see what Adi was doing. Team B passed. The girls of Team C pounced on the question. One of them answered, as the other nodded furiously: ‘Little Boy and Fat Man are the names of the atom bombs which were dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The atom bomb project was called the Manhattan Project.’
‘Excellent,’ the quizmaster said, and there was a round of applause. He looked at Adi and said, ‘Sorry, Sir, they got it.’ A roar of laughter filled the hall.
Three more questions went this way, with the teams throwing anxious looks at Adi, the audience waiting for something from the boy and someone on the stage finding the answer eventually. The tension in the hall was now easing.
‘Team F, your turn now,’ the quizmaster said, ‘This is the final question of Round One. Are you ready? All right. An interesting one. This scientist spent his last days trying to convert ordinary metals into gold. He wasted his latter years in …’
‘Isaac Newton,’ said the voice of Adi, and the stunned silence returned to the hall. As the silence broke into murmurs, Sister Chastity stood, arms akimbo, in the aisle.
Oja’s quivering fingers covered her mouth. She looked frightened. Parents turned to her with smiles of regard and envy. Ayyan got up from his chair and said a loud ‘sorry’ to the Principal. He went down the aisle towards his son. All eyes were on him. In the sixth row, children on the wooden bench lifted their legs to let Ayyan through. Ayyan bent towards Adi’s good ear, his index finger pointed sternly, his face poised in a reprimand. And he whispered, ‘Excellent, my son. Just one more time.’
Ayyan walked back to his seat looking embarrassed. Never in his life had so many eyes been on him. He apologized once again to Sister Chastity, who nodded graciously. She shouted from the aisle, ‘Adi, now behave.’ When Ayyan sank into his chair, a man in the row in front turned to him and said, ‘Your son is unbelievable.’ Oja held the sleeve of her husband again. She did not make an effort to contain her tears any more, and they smudged her mascara.
The quizmaster said, ‘But was it the right answer?’ He looked blankly at the audience. He began to nod. ‘It’s Isaac Newton, of course.’ The applause was long, but nobody stood this time.
‘Now I have to find another question,’ the quizmaster said above the din. ‘We are running short of questions. Adi, as the Principal said, you have to behave. When the question is passed to the audience, you may answer. Or we may have to ask you to leave the hall. OK? Am I clear? Team F. Are you ready?’ Team F looked nervously towards Adi.
‘Easy question. If you know the answer, be very fast,’ the quizmaster said, and looked towards the boy. ‘Who was the second man on the Moon?’
‘Buss Adrin,’ Adi screamed.
The quizmaster looked down at the floor. Sister Chastity got up. Ayyan jogged down the aisle. The kids lifted their legs again to let him through. They were now enjoying this. Ayyan went to his son and led him out of the row and through the narrow aisle. Hand-in-hand, they walked towards the exit. They heard the quizmaster say, ‘Buzz Aldrin it was,’ and there was a standing ovation once again. Ayyan tried to look embarrassed. Adi was beaming.
They stood on the corridor outside the auditorium, laughing. Soon, Oja appeared at the far end of the corridor, crying and running. She stopped abruptly, adjusted her hair, looked to her left and right sheepishly, and walked hastily. Then she ran again. This woman’s life, Ayyan told himself, is not ordinary any more. For that moment alone, he knew it was all worth it. Did she ever imagine when she was growing up as a waiter’s daughter, when she walked into a humid one-room home as a new bride, or when she discovered one evening that her son could not hear well in one ear, that she would see a day like this. But he also felt the odd unnerving mix of fear and excitement. He was stretching the limits of the game. And it had to end. Probably right now. It was fun, we got away with it, but the game is over now.
Oja fell on her knees beside her son and held him by his hair, ‘Adi, how do you know all this?’ She hugged him and then pushed him back, holding his arms tight. ‘You are so bright, Adi. You are so weird,’ she said, kissing his nose fondly. She looked up angrily at her husband and said, ‘I am going to put an evil-eye on his cheek.’
‘Nobody does such things any more,’ Ayyan said.
‘I don’t care. Did you see how those women were looking at my son?’
‘How did they look?’
‘They were such diabolic women, all of them. Did you see? They coloured their hair.’
‘What’s the connection?’
‘I don’t know. All I know is that my boy is going to get a black dot on his cheek every morning when he goes to school.’
‘All I know is that my boy is not going to have any silly dot on his cheek. We don’t believe in superstitions, do we, Adi?’
A man appeared on the corridor. Oja rose from the floor and eased the large wrinkles on her starched sari. She joined her palms and smiled at the man as he stood beside them. He was a stout, harrowed-looking man with thick muddled hair, and his shirt was slipping out of his trousers. He shook hands with Adi.
‘You were brilliant,’ he said. ‘I am Anil Luthra,’ he told Ayyan, as he extended his hand. ‘My son is in the tenth standard. Amit, his name is. I had only heard about your son. Today, I saw him in action.’
‘He is just a little boy fooling around, really,’ Ayyan said.
‘Don’t be modest … sorry, what is your name?’
‘Ayyan.’
‘Ayyan, you are a very lucky man. For a moment out there I thought the school had leaked the questions to him,’ he said, and started laughing to emphasize that it was only a joke. Ayyan laughed sportingly. Luthra gave him his card. It said: ‘Metro Editor, The Times of India’. When Ayyan’s card was not forthcoming, he asked pleasantly, ‘And what do you do, Ayyan?’
‘I work in the Institute of Theory and Research.’
‘Oh,’ Luthra said. ‘Jal is a good friend. Jana Nambodri too. I have met Acharya once. Difficult man, isn’t he?’
‘Yes. But he is a good man,’ Ayyan said, because he did not trust strangers.
‘He is, he is,’ Luthra said without conviction. He studied Adi. ‘I am sure this boy is going to be famous very soon. What did he say out there? “I’m eleven. And eleven is a prime number”?’ Luthra laughed.