Serious Men

the Aryabhata file?’ That made Ayyan nervous. He looked around the room for any suspicious faces. ‘It’s in the petty cash shelf,’ a woman’s voice said.
    Unny went to the adjacent shelf, muttering how disorganized the place was.
    ‘Tell me, Ayyan,’ he said, standing on a stool and tapping the spines of files with his index finger. ‘How did Adi become so bright? Do you feed him something we don’t know about?’
    ‘He was born a bit strange,’ Ayyan said.
    ‘There it is,’ Unny yelped, and pulled out a thin file. He went through it with a confused expression and handed it to his friend. ‘I’ve always wondered what exactly is this Aryabhata Tutorials,’ Unny said.
    ‘Only God knows what it is,’ Ayyan said, trying to look as if he had no interest in the file, but his hands were trembling.
    ‘It is a separate company owned by the Institute,’ Unny said. ‘Why would the Institute own a tutorial? And where is this place? What does this tutorial do? I don’t understand. I’ve not seen a single board in the city that says Aryabhata Tutorials. I don’t know a single student who goes there. It’s very strange, you know.’
    Ayyan leafed through the file. His heart was pounding, but he tried to look relaxed, even bored. He photocopied three bills and gave the file back.
    Unny went through the file again and shook his head. ‘These last twenty years, Aryabhata Tutorials has made payments only to printers. Nothing else. It only makes payments and it pays only printers. It does not earn.’
    ‘God knows what these guys do,’ Ayyan said. ‘I never understood them anyway. I will see you in the canteen soon?’
    Ayyan went to his desk and collected the late courier mail andthe faxes, opened the inner door and walked in. As usual, the astronomers were sitting on the sofas by the window. Some of them stared unpleasantly at him. Eyes followed him as he went to Nambodri’s vacant table in the far corner. Normally, they did not register his presence but that had changed after their last encounter. He pretended to sort the courier mail and the faxes on Nambodri’s desk. His left hand slowly reached for the small gap between the table top and drawer compartment where he usually left his mobile phone. He put the phone in his pocket and walked out.
    He went down the corridor of the third floor and as he walked he took out the copies of the three bills he had made in the Accounts Department. He dialled the number on the first bill. A woman’s voice came on the line. Ayyan said, ‘I am calling from Aryabhata Tutorials. I want to know when we can expect the consignment?’
    The woman’s voice asked, ‘You said you are from Aryabhata Tutorials?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Hold on,’ she said.
    A man’s voice came on the line. ‘Who is speaking?’
    ‘Murthy,’ Ayyan said.
    ‘Which job are you talking about?’
    ‘There was only one.’
    ‘But the sample papers were sent a month ago,’ the man’s voice said with concern.
    Ayyan disconnected the line and called the second number, and then the third. The other two printers too said that the consignments had been dispatched a month ago. Ayyan had feared this. He was too late.
    The question-paper of the Institute’s Joint Entrance Test was a jewel and it was guarded not through the frailties of a written code, nor the dangerous inconsistencies of loyalty, but by the force of tradition. Its annual creation was a highly secretive process known to very few. Ayyan was not supposed to be amongthose few. He had learnt its rudiments over the years, listening carefully to the walls and piecing together bits of information.
    Every year, five professors and the Director met discreetly over three weeks to create the questions of the entrance exam. They never used the computer. They always wrote down the questions by hand in a single notebook. They made three question-papers and gave them to three different printers. Every year, one of the professors in the JET panel went personally to the printers, posing as a representative of Aryabhata Tutorials. So, even the printers did not know what they were printing. They probably thought that they were printing the study material of one of the thousands of tutorials in the city. Sometime before the entrance exam, the Director would choose one of the three printed versions of the question-paper.
    Ayyan had just learnt from the printers that the question-papers had been delivered. They were somewhere in the Institute, he was