Serious Men

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.
    ‘He is obsessed with prime numbers,’ Ayyan said. ‘You know something. He can recite the first thousand prime numbers.’
    Oja looked at her son with a grimace.
    Luthra became serious. ‘Really?’ he asked.
    ‘Really. But he is so shy with strangers. I can try to get it out of him though.’
    ‘This is what I am going to do,’ Luthra said excitedly. ‘Take my mobile number. When you think he is ready to recite the first thousand prime numbers, call me. I will send a reporter. What do you say?’
    ‘That’s very kind of you.’
    In the taxi, Oja asked, ‘What is this pime number?’
    ‘Prime number,’ Adi corrected, putting his hand on his head. ‘A prime number is a number that is divisible only by itself or one and no other number.’
    ‘So?’ she asked, looking worried.
    ‘So nothing.’
    ‘I don’t understand all this. Tell me, Adi. You know the first thousand prime numbers?’
    ‘No,’ Adi said.
    ‘He knows,’ Ayyan said. Adi looked at him and they smiled.
    ‘What is this sign language you both have?’ she asked angrily. ‘Sometimes you make me feel like a stranger.’
    ‘I am hungry,’ Adi told his mother. Somehow that consoled her.

H ER LARGE INSECT eyes were popping out of their sockets. Her hair was brown in patches, her cheeks puffy and, for some reason, Ayyan was certain that her double chin would feel cold if he touched it. She was in a thin red top through which he could see at least two layers of slips, and that her bra strap was astray. Her light blue jeans were stretched taut over her large tree-trunk thighs. The Feature Writer, as her card proclaimed, was in the discomfort of the peculiar humidity of BDD. She was wiping her face constantly as she sat on one of the two red plastic chairs in the house. Adi was on the other. Oja was not at home. She had gone to see the fourth baby of an aunt. The reason why this was even possible.
    A pale, somewhat detached photographer hovered in the background holding a camera.
    ‘Can we begin?’ Ayyan asked.
    The Feature Writer nodded.
    Adi was in a smart full-sleeve shirt and black jeans. His lush oiled hair was neatly combed. He looked intelligent and beautiful. The earpiece of the hearing aid was fixed to the right ear. A white wire ran from the earpiece and disappeared inside his shirt. Ayyan went to his son and playfully ruffled his hair. And gently eased the creases on his shirt. It was then that Ayyan felt a stab of cold fear. What am I doing? This is foolish. Everything is going to go wrong. He felt those familiar acidic vapours rise in his stomach. Until a few moments ago he was so certain that it was all going to be easy. Even when the reporter and the photographer had arrived he had not felt nervous. But it nowstruck him that what he was about to do was crazier than he had imagined. The world was stupid, of course, but not