Serious Men

on a wooden cart near the Crawford Market and slowly become a thug, despite his small stout frame. He pelted stones and broke shop windows to protest against matters he did not understand and to mourn the deaths of leaders he did not know. He grew to become a coordinator of freelance goons and, in time, joined politics. His art lay in raising armies of angry Dalit youth at short notice who could turn very violent at times. The Untouchables, in modern times, had won the useless right of being touched by the high caste, but they remained the poorest in the city. Every time they felt slighted, as for instance when miscreants once garlanded the statue of their liberator Ambedkar with slippers, men like Waman used to lead a battalion of angry youth and loot whole lanes.
    ‘They go in rage and return with Adidas,’ Ayyan had told Oja on a day when from the kitchen window they had seen looters going home happily with huge cartons.
    ‘Who is Adidas?’ Oja had asked.
    The entry of such a man into the innocuous game of erecting a boy genius made Ayyan feel afraid. He stared at the profile of this fierce orator whose panegyric of Adi now erupted in spangled silver spit that glowed momentarily against the twilight sky, like minuscule fireflies.
    ‘Such a boy, is a rare boy,’ the minister was saying, ‘Adi is a rare boy.’
    The way the minister said ‘Adi’ sounded morbid to Ayyan. A man capable of murder now knew the name of his son and there was something disturbing about it. But Ayyan calmed his fear by the other stories he had heard about the minister which made him seem more endearing. When Michael Jackson had visited the city a few years ago, Waman had been part of the group of politicians who met him. The minister had later told the press, ‘He is a verypolite man. There is not a trace of arrogance in him. You don’t get the feeling at all that you are talking to a white man.’
    Waman finished his speech by hailing Adi as the future liberator of the Dalits.
    ‘I’ve been hearing about him for so long,’ he said. ‘He is so bright that he has now been given the permission to take one of the toughest exams in the world. And he is just eleven. May we have many more like him. Let’s together show the world, the power that is locked inside all of us.’
    The audience clapped and the minister sat down, wiping his face with his fingers. A guard advanced with a huge cardboard box.
    ‘It’s a computer,’ Waman declared to the crowd, which applauded again. Some women in the audience looked at each other, raised their eyebrows and curled their lips.
    The minister presented the box to Ayyan with the boy standing in-between them as the nominal recipient. Photographers clicked through the din of ovation and Bikaji’s hysterical screams: ‘The leader of the masses.’
    As the minister left the terrace, cutting straight through the unmoving crowd, desperate voices filled the air, asking for jobs, money and welfare. He nodded many times, looking all around but never meeting an eye. ‘Go home. Have faith in the government,’ he said.
    Before he got into his car, he turned to Ayyan and said, ‘Come and meet me sometime in my office. We will figure out a way to sell this place.’
    Ayyan went back home, accepting a thousand greetings on the way, and the heavy gazes of appreciation and envy which wore the same face here. Adi was alone at home. He was trying to yank the monitor out of its carton. He smiled brightly at his father and said, ‘Now I have a computer.’
    ‘Yes, you do, but don’t break it. Let’s read the book and fix it. Where is your mother?’
    ‘Some women came and took her away.’
    Ayyan latched the door and sat on the floor beside his son. ‘Adi, now I want you to listen to me carefully.’
    The boy was trying to pull the monitor by its plastic hood.
    ‘Adi, sit down and look at me,’ Ayyan said sternly.
    Adi sat on the floor and looked at his father.
    ‘It was fun, wasn’t it?’ Ayyan said.
    ‘It was fun,’ Adi said.
    ‘Now, it’s over. I know I’ve said this before, but now it’s definitely over,’ Ayyan said.
    ‘OK,’ the boy said.
    ‘You’re not going to take the exam. You’re not smart enough for that. You and I know that.’
    ‘OK,’ Adi said.
    ‘Do you understand?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘All this will not happen again, Adi. Now the game is over. You’ll be like other boys and it’ll be a lot of fun too.’
    ‘I am not like other boys. They call me deaf.’
    ‘If