Portions of the toilet queues disintegrated and people gathered around Ayyan whose copy of the newspaper was now unfurled. At the bottom of the ninth page was an article that said, ‘Boy Genius Can Recite First Thousand Primes’. There was a striking photograph of Adi, beaming. In the picture, he was wearing what looked like a hearing-aid. When Ayyan had seen the item in the morning he had silently cursed the reporter and the photographer. But nobody noticed that Adi was wearing the earpiece of the hearing-aid on his right ear, the good ear. Not even Oja. It was not an easy thing to spot.
Some women set their buckets on the floor and jostled to get closer to the paper. ‘But I don’t understand what the boy has done,’ someone said.
So, in the faint stench of urine, shit and chlorine, and in the enchanting illumination of morning light, Ayyan explained what prime numbers were. And the people of the toilet queues looked at the father of the genius with incomprehension, affection and respect. Mothers asked him what they should do to make their children half as bright, what must they teach, what must they feed? Was Lady’s Finger really good for maths? Should boys be allowed to play cricket? Then matters moved beyond Adi.
‘Another offer has come from a builder,’ a man said. ‘What is your suggestion, Mani? Should we sell?’
‘How much?’
‘I hear he is offering twelve lakhs for a flat.’
‘We should sell,’ Ayyan said. ‘We should sell and leave this place. We should live in proper flats. How long must our children live in this hell?’
‘But we are used to this, aren’t we?’
‘Our lives, my friend, are over. For our children, we must move.’
Ayyan stood in the porch of the Institute, facing the blackboard near the main stairway. He wrote the Thought For The Day: If you want to understand India, don’t talk to Indians who speak in English — Salman Rushdie. Adi was standing at a distance, near the lifts. He was in his favourite outfit — a blue half-sleeve shirt, white jeans and fake Nike. The Brahmins had summoned him. They had read the article in The Times and they had called Ayyan on his mobile. They wanted to see for themselves a Dalit genius, though they had put it differently. Ayyan could not resist the entertainment of watching those great minds mill around his boy, expressing their grand acknowledgement of his infant brilliance. Genius to genius, they would make it all seem. But he was certain that this was the last day of Adi’s genius. He had told his son last night on the tar-coated terrace of BDD, the game was now over. He would not be given clever things to say in the middle of the class any more, quiz questions would not magically land on his lap, articles about him would not appear in the papers. Adi had nodded, a bit sadly, but he had understood. The game, his father made him repeat, was over.
Adi liked his father’s office, even though he found the word ‘Institute’ terrifying. The sea was so close here and only people with special passes could go to the black rocks. The garden was flat and green, and nothing happened there. Crows chased coloured birds in the sky. And everything was far from everything else. But what Adi liked the most was the lift. He loved the way the lights crept across the numbers. And he loved its hum, like an old man about to sneeze. His father said that the lift was a robot, which made him like the lift even more. He had been here many times. His father often brought him and his mother on Sundays. They sat on the rocks by the sea or walked around the building, or went up and down in the lifts. On Sundays the place was empty. But today was a working day. So it was full of people. That’s why he was silent in the lift though some people were smiling at him. They smelled very good. They smelled like the inside of a car. Not a taxi but a real car. He had been inside L. Srini’s car once. He liked the smell of a car.
They were on the third floor. The door opened and a lot of people waited outside to get in. He wanted to spend his entire life going up and down in the lift. But his father held his hand and they went down the longest corridor in the world. He had seen it before, on Sundays. He preferred the corridor dark and empty. Then it looked like a road in the comics. People on the corridor looked at him and smiled.
‘He is the guy, isn’t he? The genius,’ one man said.
Adi smiled. He liked being called a genius. It was different from being called special. All handicapped children were called special and he did not believe he was really handicapped. He could hear without the hearing-aid but only in the right ear. He was worried that if the game was over, as his father said, people would begin to call him special again. At the end of the corridor, his father stopped at a door on the left side that said ‘Deputy Director — Jana Nambodri’.
‘Ready?’ his father asked.
‘Ready,’ Adi said.
He saw Ayyan knock twice and then open the door. A man with a lot of white hair looked surprised to see them but he rose from his chair smiling. He was with three men who were younger and had black hair. They were all wearing jeans. They were standing now and smiling at him. He liked it when people looked only at him and nothing else in the room. They made him sit on the table though he wanted to sit on the chair.
‘Aditya Mani,’ someone declared to the room, without looking at him.
‘But that’s my name,’ Adi said, and the men laughed.
‘Tell me, Adi, why do you like prime numbers so much?’ the short man with white hair asked in English.
‘It’s unpredictable,’ Adi said.
‘What are the other numbers you like,’ the man asked.
Adi smiled coyly because that was what his father said he should do if he did not understand the question.
‘He is shy,’ his father said. ‘He doesn’t talk much at all.’
‘What do you want to be in the future, Adi?’
‘Scientist.’
‘Of course. But which field interests you the most?’
Adi smiled coyly.
‘You like maths or physics more?’
‘Physics.’
‘Physics,’ the men said happily, all at once.
Arvind Acharya was relishing the moment. He was imagining a giant balloon, twenty storeys high, soaring against a clear blue sky. The gondola that was carrying the four sealed samplers was such a meagre tip dangling at the bottom of the balloon. It was absurdly disproportionate, he thought, for the basket that was the very reason why the balloon existed, to be a few hundred times smaller than the balloon itself. It was not an aesthetic image. He had always loathed such disproportion. That’s why he had once despised the Zeppelins, and the sight of little white women driving long sedans. The device and its purpose had to be in proportion. But then he wondered if it was a reasonable demand. The device was physical and so it had a size. The purpose was actually abstract and so could not be described by size. The little white woman was not the purpose of the sedan. The sampler in the balloon’s basket was not the purpose of the hot-air balloon. The purpose of the sedan was that the little woman had to go somewhere, say, to a funeral. The purpose of the balloon was to confirm that there were aliens in the sky. So where was the question of disproportion? Also, if the goal of the universe were to manufacture life, as he secretly believed, then the universe was a giant device containing unimaginably vast nebulae and star systems that caused unimaginably large-scale cataclysms to make minuscule pieces of life here and there. So, even in his own version of the truth, the device was physically disproportionate to its purpose.