Serious Men

take money to write? Be direct. We are friends now. Of course he knows. You know how much my salary is? Eight hundred rupees. When he hired me, he said, “We don’t pay much.” Then he took out a press card with my photograph on it and said, “Now go out into the market and make whatever you want.” ‘
    They drank their tea silently. Then the reporter said, ‘I have to go now. So if …’ Ayyan took out his wallet and counted some notes.
    ‘This is for friendship,’ he said, as he handed the cash to Thambe. ‘The advance I gave you, that too was for our friendship.’
    ‘Friendship, of course,’ the reporter said. His face turned serious as he counted the notes. It was the same serious face, Ayyan remembered, that descended on the great minds of the Institute when they counted cash.
    ‘Friendship is everything,’ Thambe said, somehow finding space for the notes in his shirt pocket, which was already bulging. ‘I took your word, Mani. You said your son won the contest, I believed you. No questions asked. That’s friendship.’
    ‘Is there a way such a friendship can get English papers to write about my son?’
    On his way back home, a familiar gloom filled Ayyan. There was no getting away from it. He tried to fight it by imagining the face of Oja Mani, how jubilant she had looked when Adi’s teacher had sent the first frantic note about the boy’s insubordinate brilliance. But the gloom only grew into an acidic fear in his stomach. Fear worried him because it reminded him that life was not always a familiar place. This game he was playing was far bigger than the other plots of his life. The game, this time, was his son.
    The rise of Adi as a child genius had begun about a year ago when Ayyan had gone home late one evening and Oja had opened the door with tears in her eyes and a deep joyous smile that made him suspect that her demented mother had finally won a lottery.
    ‘My son got 100 per cent in the maths test,’ Oja had said. ‘There are forty-two boys in his class. All fair and rich and fat. My son was the only one who got 100 per cent.’
    Oja, who usually stared blankly at him without ambition or hope, and sometimes in the sorrow of being stranded in a humid hell, was so ecstatic that only tears could release the joy. That night he had taken Adi out for ice-cream. When they were walking down the Worli Seaface he heard the boy mutter the name of every car that was parked or was passing by. He had merely to look at a car, its front or its rear, and he would know its make. It seemed exceptional, but Ayyan knew there was nothing there more than a simple streak of smartness that most children possessed. He had heard a thousand times men chatting in the train about the brilliance of their children – ‘My son is just three but he knows how to turn on the computer and sendemails. He is a genius.’ Or, ‘My daughter is ten but she knows the names of all the lakes in the world.’ It was in that way that Adi was smart. ‘City, Ambassador, Zen, Esteem, City,’ the boy was saying on the promenade. The vigilant mind of Ayyan began to think of a simple plot, to achieve nothing more than some fun and a distraction from the inescapable miseries of BDD.
    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