Serious Men

five, seven, eleven and tell me that he liked them. I later realized that he felt that way about all prime numbers. How he began to identity prime numbers is a mystery to me.’

I N THE GLOW of the morning light that illuminated the flies, people stood with their little buckets in two silent lines. Even though they never spoke English here, when they stood like this every morning, they regarded themselves as Ladies and Gents. The two arched windows high above the common toilets, some of their glass broken long before the memories of these people began, were ablaze in a blinding light as if God were about to communicate. Ayyan arrived at the end of the gents’ line, in loose shorts and an oversized T-shirt, holding a blue bucket and
The Times of India.
A man who was ahead in the line spotted him and said, ‘I saw the article today.’ Slowly, heads turned, and the news went round that Adi had now appeared in
The Times of India.
    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 theenchanting 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