PART FOUR. The First Thousand Prime Numbers

IT WAS RAINING hard and the taxi driver could not see a thing. But he was racing down the wet road, honking. There were no wipers on the windscreen, but there was one lying on his dashboard. He grabbed it, muttering something, and holding the steering-wheel with one hand, he reached out through the window to clean the windscreen. He saw, just in the time, the tail-lights of a car standing at the signal. He almost stood on the break and screamed, ‘Motherfucker.’ The taxi stopped inches from the car. Adi asked his father what a motherfucker was.

‘Tell him,’ Ayyan said to the driver, who giggled coyly.

The boy, as always, was by the left window of the back seat, his good ear facing Ayyan. Despite the freak rains, the resurgent heat of September steamed in the ancient Fiat, and their shirts were damp with sweat. But even this was marginally cooler than home. Oja had had to put a bucket of water under the fan to cool the room. Adi did not pee in it any more after being slapped for that by his mother last summer.

Adi kept removing his hearing-aid and wiping it because the streams of sweat from his oiled hair were flowing into his ears. But he did not mind the discomfort. Maybe he did not recognize it as discomfort. The torment of the weather was also a type of game for him. He was licking his sweat from the cheeks.

‘Mercedes,’ he screamed. A long silver car had eased to a halt by the side of the taxi. The dim figure of a man was visible in the back seat. He was sitting cross-legged and thoughtful, elbow on thigh, finger on the lower lip. Adi imitated him perfectly. The man in the car smiled. Adi smiled back. Then the signal turned green.

‘How much is a Mercedes?’ he asked his father.

‘What model was it?’

‘C–Class. 22 °CDI.’

‘That’s a cheap one.’

‘How much?’

‘Thirty lakhs.’

Adi howled. ‘Expensive,’ he said in English.

‘Not that much.’

‘You should save money. We should not take the taxi to school.’

‘We do this only when it rains and it is only twenty rupees.’

Adi puffed out his cheek and made a fart sound, and they both giggled.

‘Now tell me Adi, what did you do?’

The boy put his hand on his head in exasperation. ‘How many times do I have to tell you? Nothing.’

‘Then why does the Principal want to meet me?’

‘I don’t know,’ Adi said. ‘Yesterday I didn’t do anything. The day before yesterday I didn’t do anything. Day before day before yesterday, I asked the maths teacher, “Is five to the power of zero equal to one, Miss?”’

‘So why is the Principal calling me?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘She had written in your handbook, “Come with the boy to my room.” ‘

‘I don’t like her,’ Adi said.

‘We will go and find out what you’ve done.’

‘I do only what you say I should do.’

‘Good boy.’

‘What if someone finds out?’

Adi’s face turned serious as his father fondled his hair playfully. ‘So much coconut oil your mother poured on your head.’ The oil made the boy’s forehead and ears shine. He was such a beautiful, healthy boy, Ayyan thought. Then he felt the lifeless hardness of the hearing-aid in the other ear.


Sister Chastity had a scowl on her face. She was sorting out some papers on her table and getting more entangled in the muddle. Behind her, the head of Jesus Christ appeared more tilted than Ayyan remembered, as if to get a better view of her. Across her table were seated two unhappy men and a young skinny woman in a cotton sari.

‘Good morning Sister,’ Adi said, and, turning to the three other teachers, he said quickly, ‘Good morning Sir, good morning Sir, good morning Miss.’

Sister Chastity looked up with a tired face, but she brightened up a little when she saw the father and son. ‘You have come,’ she said. She asked the teachers to leave them, ‘for exactly five minutes’. The teachers carefully gathered their share of papers from the table. The way they treated the loose sheets made Ayyan curious. All he could make out before they put the papers in a file was that every sheet contained numbered questions. The teachers gave a knowing smile to the father and son, and they left the room.

Sister Chastity pointed to the chairs and rubbed her hands in anticipation. She looked at the boy and at his father and then, in a more interested way, at the boy again. She was distracted by the stacks of paper between them. She pushed them away muttering, ‘They gave me a computer saying I’d never need to file papers again. But now, all I am doing is filing print-outs. Do you have a computer at home, Mr Mani?’

‘No,’ Adi said.

‘I am talking to your father, Adi. You must know how to behave.’

‘I am sorry, Sister, I have sinned.’

‘It’s “I am sorry, Father, I have sinned”. Genius and all that, and you don’t know simple things?’

‘I am sorry, Sister.’

‘Now what was I trying to say? Yes. Mr Mani, you don’t have a computer at home?’

‘No,’ he said.

‘St Andrew’s Church is selling old computers at unbelievable prices for its less fortunate parishioners,’ she said. ‘Just one thousand rupees for a Perinium 2.’

‘Pentium,’ the boy corrected.

‘Yes, Pentium. Adi, I am talking to your father.’

‘Nice thing the Church is doing,’ Ayyan said.

‘Isn’t it nice? Do you know where St Andrew’s Church is?’

‘No.’

Sister Chastity shook her head sadly. ‘The joys of Christian life are available to all but very few open their eyes before the Lord shuts them.’ Ayyan looked at her meekly. ‘Now, Mr Mani,’ she said, ‘I will come to the point. You are aware of the interschool science quiz we are organizing?’

‘No, Sister.’

She widened her eyes. ‘You haven’t seen the posters?’

‘No.’

‘The posters have been up on the main gate notice-board for over a fortnight now. You must always read the notice-board, Mr Mani. In three days, we will be hosting the quiz finals. Grand Finale, it is being called. Five hundred tenth-standard students from fifty schools went through the written elimination rounds. Six teams have been chosen for the finals. For the Grand Finale.’ Ayyan nodded with evident interest. ‘We were, in fact, finalizing the questions when you walked in,’ she said. ‘That’s the quiz committee waiting outside.’

‘I didn’t see anyone outside,’ Ayyan said.

‘The three teachers, Mr Mani,’ Sister Chastity said, making a face of immense patience. ‘They went out right now, didn’t they? They are the quiz committee.’

‘OK,’ Ayyan said. ‘Can parents come and watch the quiz?’

‘Parents have to come. We are having the event in our main auditorium.’ (She always said ‘main auditorium’ though the school had only one. She also said ‘main gate’ though there was only one entrance.)

‘We will be there,’ Ayyan said.

‘There is a reason why I asked you to come with Adi,’ she said softly. ‘The teams from our own school couldn’t make it to the finals. They were disqualified in the preliminary rounds. You know how fair we are. We wouldn’t do anything shady to favour our teams. We are the host school and we have graciously accepted that our teams were not good enough. But it is sad, isn’t it?’

‘It is sad.’

‘It’s very sad. But I have an idea,’ she said, now beaming. ‘I can still make a place for a special participant from our school who will not compete for the prize but for the honour.’

‘And you want Adi to be that special participant?’

‘Obviously.’

Ayyan looked thoughtful.

‘What’s the problem with that?’ she asked, looking at Adi. ‘A small brilliant kid competing against the brightest seventeen-year-olds in the city. It will be a sight. How old are you now, Adi?’

‘I am eleven. Eleven is a prime number.’

Sister Chastity imitated him fondly,’”I am eleven. Eleven is a prime number.” What an odd angel this boy is.’

‘He is just a little kid who is fooling around,’ Ayyan said feebly.

‘But he is a genius.’

‘He has stage fright.’

‘Stage fright?’

‘Yes. He becomes frightened when he has to face a lot of strangers.’

‘We will all be there to make him feel comfortable,’ she said, her face now beginning to lose its pleasantness.

‘But there is something we have to think,’ Ayyan said carefully in English. (Sometimes he spoke to her in English. For practice.)

‘You mean there is something we have to consider,’ she said severely, and looked with sympathy at the boy.

‘Yes, something we have to consider,’ Ayyan said.

‘What is it?’

‘Think: Adi is sitting on the stage. Sorry, imagine Adi is sitting on the stage. Then the questions come. Adi begins to answer those questions, it will be great.’

‘Yes. It’ll be incredible.’

‘No.’

‘No?’

‘It will be so unbelievable that people will accuse you of leaking the questions because he is from host school.’

Sister Chastity ignored the missing definite article. She saw his point. She nodded. ‘I didn’t think of it that way,’ she said.

Ayyan looked at the stacks of papers on her table. He wondered where the quiz questions were. Probably with the three teachers who were waiting outside. Or, probably right here.

‘You have a point,’ she said and exhaled. ‘OK, then. The classes are going to start now. Adi, you should get going.’

‘How many teams in the finals?’ Ayyan asked.

‘Six,’ she said.

‘Girls and boys?’

‘Yes,’ she said impatiently. ‘Mostly boys. But one team has only girls.’

There was something here, Ayyan knew. There was an opportunity. ‘The plan to expand the computer lab — any progress?’ he asked.

‘Yes, parents will be notified,’ she said, now overtly irritated.

‘Any increase in fees because of computer lab?’

‘We’ve not made any decision on that front. Now Mr Mani, if you’ll …’

One of her phones rang. ‘Hello,’ Sister Chastity said. ‘Oh dear. Where? I am coming.’ She put the phone down and rushed out. ‘A girl has fainted,’ she muttered on her way out.

The door shut behind her, but Ayyan could hear her fading footsteps. He counted them. She seemed to have gone far. He stood up and arched towards her side of the desk, and rummaged through the stacks of paper. He did not look at the door even once, but he listened for the slightest sound. He removed whole sheets of paper from of envelopes and went through them swiftly. There were bills and more bills and a lot of letters from the office of the Archbishop.

Adi looked at his father with his large keen eyes. ‘What are you doing?’ he asked.

‘Shhh,’ his father said.

‘What are you doing?’ Adi whispered excitedly.

Ayyan opened the drawers and looked in. There were invitations, rosaries and letters to the municipality. But nothing appeared to contain quiz questions. He found some mid-term question-papers though. He then threw a decisive look at the three land phones lying on her desk. He picked one and dialled his own mobile number. He took the call and put the mobile back in his trouser pocket. Very carefully, he placed the receiver slightly askew on its cradle.

He went back to his chair and waited for her. Adi looked at him with a bright smile. They heard the faint voice of Sister Chastity barking orders.

‘What’s wrong with girls these days?’ she said, as she entered the room. She sank into her swivel chair and said angrily, ‘A girl has fainted. Her mother says that after she has a meal she goes to the bathroom, puts her finger inside her throat and pukes out everything she has eaten. She is twelve you see. So Madam came to school having puked her breakfast at home. What happens? She falls down in the corridor. That’s what happens. Lord, what’s wrong with these girls?’

‘Is she fat?’ Ayyan asked curiously.

‘She is a bit on the plump side.’

‘She wants to lose weight?’

‘Obviously.’

‘So she vomits the food she eats?’

‘Yes,’ Sister Chastity said.

‘You should give her one slap,’ he said.

‘She is all right now. We sprinkled some water on her face and gave her glucose.’

‘You didn’t understand,’ Ayyan said. ‘You should give her one good slap.’

‘No no, we don’t do that kind of thing here.’

Sister Chastity called the name of the peon, thumping the bell on her desk. The peon peeped from the doorway.

‘Ask them to come in,’ she said. ‘OK, Mr Mani. Sorry for wasting your time. I’ve to sit with the quiz committee now. Adi, go to your class.’

As the father and son left the room, they saw the three teachers enter. Cordial smiles were exchanged once again. Ayyan took his son to the base of the stairway that led to his classroom. He fished out a notebook from the boy’s bag and tore off several pages. Adi put his hand on his head. ‘What are you doing?’ he asked. Ayyan took a pencil from his box.

‘Adi, now go to the class,’ he said, giving him the bag. ‘And, remember, all this is our secret.’ Ayyan extended his little finger. Adi locked it with his.

‘But what is the secret?’

‘What I did in the room.’

‘Why should that be a secret?’

‘Adi, run now.’

The deafening sound of the morning bell startled them both. They looked at each other for a moment. And they laughed. ‘Go now,’ Ayyan said.

He watched as the boy made his way up the stairs. Then he put his mobile to his ear and poised the pencil against the pages he had torn from Adi’s notebook. As he walked towards the black wrought-iron gate, Sister Chastity’s room came alive in his ear. They were talking, and they were talking about the quiz. He stood in a peaceful back lane near the school listening to their conversation. But he could glean only six questions.


IT WAS AROUSING. Oja Mani’s hair was bundled into a thin white towel. The back of her red nightgown was wet. Her silver anklets lay feebly at her turmeric yellow ankles. It was a sight that always made Ayyan look furtively at what his son was doing. In the freshness of marriage, when he used to see her like this, he would pester her to take off all her clothes, except the towel. In time, she refused to yield. But that did not cure him. This post-bath image of the woman that disturbed his peace so easily was also the most enduring symbol of a housewife. He had seen it in the Tamil soaps that Oja was addicted to. Housewives shrouded their hair in a towel. Working women used hairdryers.

Oja opened the steel cupboard, aware that he was watching. The hierarchy in the cupboard had not changed ever since she had established it. The lowest rung was for the grains. Above it were the spices and pickles and then there were special plates for guests. The top three rungs were for clothes. In a blue plastic box were her ancestral ornaments that always reminded her of her good fate. ‘It does not matter if it’s with me or if it’s with you, my child,’ her mother had said before her marriage, ‘it will be his when he threatens to burn you with kerosene.’

Oja took out four of her best saris and showed them to him. He walked to her side to get a better look. She was surprised at how seriously he was taking this. He pointed to the only sari that did not shine. It was a blue cotton sari with small white squares.

‘There will be a lot of rich people,’ he said, ‘and rich women laugh at women who wear shiny clothes in the day.’

‘How do you know so much about rich women?’

‘And no fat gold necklace. What you are wearing is all right. It’s thin. It’s good.’

‘But it is an important day, you said.’

‘Important does not mean gold any more.’

She frowned, but conceded. In these matters, he was usually right. She studied her man. He was in a Rin-white full-sleeved shirt, smartly tucked into grey trousers. His black formal shoes were newly polished. And he was wearing a watch. He wore that only on special occasions. And he was smelling good.

‘You should wear that coat you have,’ she said. ‘You look like a hero in it.’

‘No, no. You are not supposed to wear a coat for something like this. You are supposed to look like you don’t care much.’

‘Adi,’ Oja screamed, ‘finish your bath.’

Adi was in the stained-glass enclosure in the corner of the kitchen. And he was singing aloud, ‘D-I-S-C-O. Disco, Disco.’

‘Adi, get out now.’

The boy emerged in a towel. Oja went hastily into the enclosure, giving him a foul look. ‘Disco, disco,’ Adi told her.

Ayyan dried him, glancing at the stained-glass bathroom he had once built with love. The boy showed the hearing-aid to his father. Ayyan helped him put it on. He bound the small white box around Adi’s stomach. A white wire ran out of the box. He blew into the boy’s left ear to dry it. Adi giggled. So Ayyan did it again. Then he fitted the earpiece into Adi’s ear.

When Oja stepped out of the enclosure, she looked at them for approval. This is a very beautiful young woman, Ayyan thought. He pouted his lips at her in a raunchy code. She smiled. She didn’t mind dirty thoughts because she didn’t have to do much beneath them. She went to the full-length mirror of the cupboard. Ayyan and Adi watched her closely as she bulged her eyes and drew around them with a black pencil.


They had an argument in the taxi. Oja had wanted to take the bus or walk. Ayyan wanted to take the taxi.

‘It’s going to rain,’ he told her.

Adi was squeezed in the back seat between his parents.

‘It does not rain inside the bus,’ she said angrily.

‘And from the bus-stop to the school?’

‘We have umbrellas, don’t we? And anyway, I don’t think it’s going to rain.’

‘It’s just twenty rupees.’

‘Little grains make a fat man’s meal,’ Oja and Adi said together, and that made them laugh.

By the time the taxi approached the gates, Oja had fallen silent. She was nervous. The left side of the lane was completely taken up by parked cars. And there was a commotion near the gates. Drivers who couldn’t find a parking space were trying to turn around, and that was causing a jam. The guard looked at Oja, breast to toe, and beamed at Ayyan.

‘All the rich folks have come,’ the guard said.

‘I have to go to the class,’ Adi said, extricating his finger from his father’s fist. ‘Parents have to go to the hall. Students will come in a line,’ he said. Then he gave quick instructions. ‘Parents don’t have to walk in a line. They can walk anyway they want.’ He pointed to the main block to his right. ‘The main auditorium is here. Don’t call it “hall”. It is called “The Main Auditorium”.’

He walked briskly down the front path towards the stairway. After a few paces he turned and gave a knowing smile to his father. Oja waved at him, and for a moment tried to decipher what the stealthy smile between father and son was about. She went quietly with Ayyan towards the main block. Two little girls in blue pinafores, much younger than Adi, were walking in front of them and talking animatedly in English. Oja laughed. ‘So fast they speak in English,’ she said.

Outside the auditorium’s rear entrance, parents chatted above the din of the festive murmurs coming from inside. They directed occasional glances towards the students who were arriving in orderly lines and vanishing through the front door.

‘Should we go in now or later?’ Oja whispered to her husband.

‘Why are you whispering?’

‘I am not whispering,’ she whispered.

They were standing a few feet away from a group of parents, about a dozen of them, who were talking about the horse-riding classes in a new international board school that had sprung up in the suburbs. The mothers were in T-shirt and jeans, and trousers that reached just below their knees, and long skirts. Some were in salwars. All of them — they looked so expensive. Oja inched closer to her husband.

Ayyan studied the fathers. His own shirt, he knew, was good. It had cost him five hundred rupees, but there was something about the shirts of these men and their trousers and the way they stood, that made him feel that he looked like their driver. In the morning, when he had inspected himself in the mirror, he was certain that he measured up to them, but now, in their midst, he was somehow smaller. And Oja looked like their cook.

‘Let’s go and talk to them,’ Ayyan said.

‘No,’ Oja said, but he had already started walking towards them. She trailed behind him. They stood at the periphery of the group. Ayyan maintained a smile of being involved in their conversation and tried to make eye-contact with a man he remembered meeting earlier. The women surveyed Oja briefly. One of them looked at her feet, and Oja curled her toes.

When there was a brief pause in the conversation, Ayyan said to his acquaintance, in English, ‘We have met. I am Aditya Mani’s father.’

The acquaintance looked kindly at him and said, ‘Of course, I remember.’ He turned to the gathering and said, ‘Guys, this is the father of the genius.’ Oja did not realize it, but she was nodding like a spring-headed doll and smiling at the women.

‘Genius?’ a man asked in a whisper.

‘Yes. He is what, eleven or something. And he talks about relativity and all that.’

‘Really?’

‘Aditya, yes,’ a woman’s face lit up. ‘I have heard stories about him. So he really does exist.’ She told Oja in Hindi, ‘Your son is very special.’

Oja looked coyly at her husband and giggled. She whispered to her husband, but everybody could hear it, ‘Let’s go.’


Six tables were arranged in a semi-circle on the stage. On a blue background was a thermocol board that said, ‘St Andrew’s School. First Interschool Science Quiz’. The participants were yet to arrive but the hall was packed. On either side of a red-carpeted aisle, students sat on wooden benches. They filled most of the auditorium. Adi was somewhere in the sixth row. In the last rows, some boys had faint moustaches.

‘These boys are so big,’ Ayyan told his wife. ‘And these girls have breasts.’

They were towards the end of the hall, on cushioned chairs, with other parents and teachers. The little group of parents Ayyan had spoken to outside were in the row in front. Oja toyed with the pendant of her thin gold chain and studied the necks of the mothers.

The lights dimmed and the murmurs of the students grew louder. On the darkened stage, six pairs of students appeared. There were two beautiful adolescent girls in olive-green skirts and white shirts. Others were pubescent boys in various uniforms. They sat at the desks and waited. The stage lights came on and the audience clapped. There were a few whistles too. Sister Chastity appeared and she walked smartly to the middle of the stage holding a wireless mike.

‘Who was whistling?’ was the first thing she said. That brought about an absolute silence. ‘Students of St Andrew’s do not whistle.’ She then smiled at the gathering and said, ‘Good morning parents, teachers and students. Welcome to the first Interschool Science quiz of St Andrew’s.’

She spoke about the school, its recent achievements, its plans and then she introduced the quizmaster. He was the senior maths teacher of the school, one of the men Ayyan had seen in the Principal’s office the week before.

There was a loud applause when he walked on to the stage. He looked happier now and smarter in a black suit and blue tie. He too had a wireless mike in his hand. He had an amiable way of speaking, and he spoke very fast as if he were reading out the risk factors in a mutual fund commercial. He laid down the rules and asked the contestants to introduce themselves. Sister Chastity went down the aisle and sat among the parents and teachers. She was in the same row as Ayyan, but on the other side of the aisle.

‘Let’s begin the first round,’ the quizmaster said. ‘The first round is the physics round.’ He looked at Team A and said, ‘Are you ready for the very first question of the first Annual Interschool Science Quiz Contest of St Andrew’s English School?’

The grim boys of Team A did not nod.

‘All right. Here goes,’ the quizmaster said, looking at a card that he was holding. ‘These two gentlemen wanted to prove the existence of something called ether. Instead, they accidentally discovered that light travels at a constant speed irrespective of the speed of the observer. Who are these men?’

The boys looked perplexed and thoughtful. They passed. The next team too considered the question deeply, and also passed. The third team was the all-girls team. They passed immediately, without fuss. The question was passed by all the six teams.

‘Nobody?’ the quizmaster asked, with a touch of triumph. He looked at the audience. ‘The question passes to the audience.’

There was a silence that was heavy with embarrassment. Oja looked at her husband apologetically, as if she was ashamed she did not know the answer.

‘Albert Michelson and Edward Morley,’ the quizmaster said, and there were hisses of agony from the boys on the stage. One boy spread his hands in overt exasperation.

‘Michelson and Morley,’ the quizmaster said, ‘set out to prove an old theory that the universe was filled with an invisible thing called ether. As we now know the universe is not filled with ether. But they accidentally discovered through their experiments that light travels at the same speed irrespective of how fast or slow an observer is moving.’

The quizmaster looked at Team B.

‘Are you ready? All right. Here is the second question. What discovery is Sir James Chadwick known for?’ A small voice pierced the silence of the hall.

‘Neutron,’ it said.

There was a stunned silence and then murmuring. Everybody on the stage looked confused. Team B looked angry.

‘Who was it?’ the quizmaster asked, looking at the audience. The parents were looking at each other with soft chuckles.

Oja’s hands were trembling. She held the sleeve of her husband and asked in a frightened voice, ‘Wasn’t it Adi?’

Ayyan, breathing a bit hard, said, ‘Yes.’

A man in the row in front of them turned and looked impassively at Ayyan and Oja. Sister Chastity’s head peered from the row across the aisle and her eyes met Ayyan’s.

‘Who was that?’ the quizmaster asked.

Children in the front rows were pointing to the boy who was sitting in their midst.

‘You, Sir, was it you?’ the quizmaster asked, amused and disbelieving. ‘Aditya, will you please stand up.’ Adi stood up, his hands folded behind his back. There were murmurs among the parents. Several heads were turning and looking at Ayyan and Oja. ‘So it was you, Sir?’ the quizmaster asked.

‘Yes, Sir,’ Adi said smartly.

‘Well, I don’t know what to say,’ the quizmaster said, making a face of incredulity. ‘You are absolutely right. Now introduce yourself, Sir.’

‘Aditya Mani.’

‘And how old are you?’

‘Eleven. And eleven is a prime number.’

‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ the quizmaster said, pointing to Adi. And there was a round of loud applause. Parents stood, one by one in a standing ovation, and threw glances at the curious couple sitting in their midst. Oja had tears in her eyes as she stood with her husband and clapped.

Sister Chastity went down the aisle and stopped in the middle of the hall. The silence returned. She looked happy, but she spoke sternly. She did not need a mike.

‘While I greatly appreciate the brilliance of our students I request everybody in the audience not to answer out of turn. If none of the contestants knows the answer, the question will be passed to the audience. You can then raise your hands and the quizmaster will decide who will answer the question. Am I clear, Adi?’ She went back to her seat, shaking her head happily at Ayyan.

The quizmaster turned to Team B and was about to speak. Then he looked at Adi again and shook his head. ‘Wait till you get your chance,’ he said, and that made everybody laugh. ‘Now Team B, you get another question.’

Team B was still angry. The two boys made a face to suggest that they had known the answer.

‘Are you ready?’ the quizmaster said, ‘Here it is. What is the connection between Little Boy, Fat Man and Manhattan?’

Oja held her husband’s sleeve again. ‘I hope he keeps quiet this time,’ she said.

‘He will,’ Ayyan said confidently.

The silence was heavy with anticipation. Team B threw a nervous glance at Adi. They looked as though they were anxious to answer before the boy did. Then they appeared to hope that Adi knew the answer. The quizmaster too looked in the direction of Adi. Some children in the audience stared at the boy expectantly. Parents craned their neck to see what Adi was doing. Team B passed. The girls of Team C pounced on the question. One of them answered, as the other nodded furiously: ‘Little Boy and Fat Man are the names of the atom bombs which were dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The atom bomb project was called the Manhattan Project.’

‘Excellent,’ the quizmaster said, and there was a round of applause. He looked at Adi and said, ‘Sorry, Sir, they got it.’ A roar of laughter filled the hall.

Three more questions went this way, with the teams throwing anxious looks at Adi, the audience waiting for something from the boy and someone on the stage finding the answer eventually. The tension in the hall was now easing.

‘Team F, your turn now,’ the quizmaster said, ‘This is the final question of Round One. Are you ready? All right. An interesting one. This scientist spent his last days trying to convert ordinary metals into gold. He wasted his latter years in …’

‘Isaac Newton,’ said the voice of Adi, and the stunned silence returned to the hall. As the silence broke into murmurs, Sister Chastity stood, arms akimbo, in the aisle.

Oja’s quivering fingers covered her mouth. She looked frightened. Parents turned to her with smiles of regard and envy. Ayyan got up from his chair and said a loud ‘sorry’ to the Principal. He went down the aisle towards his son. All eyes were on him. In the sixth row, children on the wooden bench lifted their legs to let Ayyan through. Ayyan bent towards Adi’s good ear, his index finger pointed sternly, his face poised in a reprimand. And he whispered, ‘Excellent, my son. Just one more time.’

Ayyan walked back to his seat looking embarrassed. Never in his life had so many eyes been on him. He apologized once again to Sister Chastity, who nodded graciously. She shouted from the aisle, ‘Adi, now behave.’ When Ayyan sank into his chair, a man in the row in front turned to him and said, ‘Your son is unbelievable.’ Oja held the sleeve of her husband again. She did not make an effort to contain her tears any more, and they smudged her mascara.

The quizmaster said, ‘But was it the right answer?’ He looked blankly at the audience. He began to nod. ‘It’s Isaac Newton, of course.’ The applause was long, but nobody stood this time.

‘Now I have to find another question,’ the quizmaster said above the din. ‘We are running short of questions. Adi, as the Principal said, you have to behave. When the question is passed to the audience, you may answer. Or we may have to ask you to leave the hall. OK? Am I clear? Team F. Are you ready?’ Team F looked nervously towards Adi.

‘Easy question. If you know the answer, be very fast,’ the quizmaster said, and looked towards the boy. ‘Who was the second man on the Moon?’

‘Buss Adrin,’ Adi screamed.

The quizmaster looked down at the floor. Sister Chastity got up. Ayyan jogged down the aisle. The kids lifted their legs again to let him through. They were now enjoying this. Ayyan went to his son and led him out of the row and through the narrow aisle. Hand-in-hand, they walked towards the exit. They heard the quizmaster say, ‘Buzz Aldrin it was,’ and there was a standing ovation once again. Ayyan tried to look embarrassed. Adi was beaming.


They stood on the corridor outside the auditorium, laughing. Soon, Oja appeared at the far end of the corridor, crying and running. She stopped abruptly, adjusted her hair, looked to her left and right sheepishly, and walked hastily. Then she ran again. This woman’s life, Ayyan told himself, is not ordinary any more. For that moment alone, he knew it was all worth it. Did she ever imagine when she was growing up as a waiter’s daughter, when she walked into a humid one-room home as a new bride, or when she discovered one evening that her son could not hear well in one ear, that she would see a day like this. But he also felt the odd unnerving mix of fear and excitement. He was stretching the limits of the game. And it had to end. Probably right now. It was fun, we got away with it, but the game is over now.

Oja fell on her knees beside her son and held him by his hair, ‘Adi, how do you know all this?’ She hugged him and then pushed him back, holding his arms tight. ‘You are so bright, Adi. You are so weird,’ she said, kissing his nose fondly. She looked up angrily at her husband and said, ‘I am going to put an evil-eye on his cheek.’

‘Nobody does such things any more,’ Ayyan said.

‘I don’t care. Did you see how those women were looking at my son?’

‘How did they look?’

‘They were such diabolic women, all of them. Did you see? They coloured their hair.’

‘What’s the connection?’

‘I don’t know. All I know is that my boy is going to get a black dot on his cheek every morning when he goes to school.’

‘All I know is that my 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.


HER 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 now struck him that what he was about to do was crazier than he had imagined. The world was stupid, of course, but not so stupid. It was not too late yet to withdraw. He could end it right now. He could tell the reporter that Adi was not feeling very well.

But the fear somehow subsided and the chill in his throat was now the chill of excitement. He had thought carefully about this for many days and he knew in his heart that nothing could go wrong. ‘You look so smart, Adi, Ayyan said. ‘Now show them what you know.’

Ayyan took a few steps back. Adi waited for a little while, and began the recital: ‘Two, three, five, seven, eleven, thirteen, seventeen, nineteen, twenty-three …’

The Feature Writer listened with a keen face. The photographer took some pictures. Ayyan made a gesture to the photographer to suggest that he should not take pictures now. It was very important that the pictures were not shot at this point. Ayyan had not considered the possibility of the photographer jumping the gun, and he kicked himself for overlooking that. It could lead to disaster, Ayyan knew.

Adi went on, occasionally swallowing his saliva but without disrupting the pace of the recital: ‘One seventy-nine, one eighty-one, one ninety-one, one ninety-three, one ninety-seven, one ninety-nine, two hundred and eleven, two twenty-three, two twenty-seven, two twenty-nine …’

The reporter referred to a printed paper. It was a list of the first thousand prime numbers. She was checking if Adi was on the right track. Ayyan heard the clicks of the camera again, but when he turned, the photographer stopped.

Adi went on: ‘Six sixty-one, six seventy-three, six seventy-seven, six eighty-three, six ninety-one, seven hundred and one, seven hundred and nine, seven hundred and nineteen, seven twenty-seven, seven thirty-three …’

The reporter looked at Ayyan and raised her eyebrows.

Adi went a bit faster now: ‘4943, 4951, 4957, 4967, 4969, 4973, 4987, 4993, 4999, 5003 …’ He went on and on like this and raised his voice as he finally said, ‘7841, 7853, 7867, 7873, 7877, 7879, 7883, 7901, 7907, 7919.’ And he stopped.

The reporter lifted her head from the sheet and clapped.

Adi removed the earpiece and threw a quick glance at his father when he realized his mistake. He put it back. The photographer started clicking.

‘Actually,’ Ayyan said, standing between the photographer and his son, ‘Can I make a request?’ He removed the earpiece from Adi’s ear and pushed it inside the boy’s shirt, ‘Can you take pictures of my son without the earpiece? You see, we don’t want him appearing as though he is handicapped in any way.’

‘I understand,’ the reporter said.

‘Could you please ensure that he does not appear in the paper with the hearing-aid?’

‘Don’t worry about that,’ she said, kindly.

The photographer asked Ayyan to stand by his son. And he started clicking.

‘How many pictures are you going to carry?’ Ayyan asked, somewhat amused.

The photographer did not respond. He continued to click and then stopped abruptly. He put the camera back in his bag and left without a word.


The reporter set her scribbling-pad on her lap, poised a pen in the air and smiled at Adi.

‘You are really brilliant, Aditya,’ she said in English. ‘Can I ask you some questions now?’

Ayyan put the earpiece back in the boy’s good ear. It was a Walkman earpiece, fixed to the shell of the hearing-aid. The Walkman was inside the boy’s shirt, taped to his stomach.

‘Can you hear?’ Ayyan whispered to his son. The boy nodded.

‘I’d like to ask you some questions now, Aditya,’ the reporter said.

‘OK,’ Adi said, gulping down a glass of water.

‘Why are you interested in prime numbers?’

‘Prime numbers are unpre … unpredictable. So I like prime numbers.’

‘How are you able to recite all these numbers, so easily, from memory?’

The boy lifted his finger as though to point to the earpiece. Then he started giggling. ‘I don’t know,’ he said.

‘What are your future plans?’

Adi shrugged and looked at his father. ‘He is very shy, you know,’ Ayyan said.

‘What do you want to become?’ the reporter asked, ignoring Ayyan.

Adi looked at his father again and giggled coyly.

‘He is not very easy to talk to,’ Ayyan said. ‘I can answer for him, if that makes it easier for you.’

She considered the offer.

‘About a year ago,’ Ayyan said anyway, his voice soft and conspiratorial, ‘When I was teaching him numbers, I observed that he was seeing patterns. He would select numbers like three, 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.’


IN 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 the enchanting 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 rocks by the sea or walked around the building, or went up and down in the lifts. On Sundays the place was empty. But today was a working day. So it was full of people. That’s why he was silent in the lift though some people were smiling at him. They smelled very good. They smelled like the inside of a car. Not a taxi but a real car. He had been inside L. Srini’s car once. He liked the smell of a car.

They were on the third floor. The door opened and a lot of people waited outside to get in. He wanted to spend his entire life going up and down in the lift. But his father held his hand and they went down the longest corridor in the world. He had seen it before, on Sundays. He preferred the corridor dark and empty. Then it looked like a road in the comics. People on the corridor looked at him and smiled.

‘He is the guy, isn’t he? The genius,’ one man said.

Adi smiled. He liked being called a genius. It was different from being called special. All handicapped children were called special and he did not believe he was really handicapped. He could hear without the hearing-aid but only in the right ear. He was worried that if the game was over, as his father said, people would begin to call him special again. At the end of the corridor, his father stopped at a door on the left side that said ‘Deputy Director — Jana Nambodri’.

‘Ready?’ his father asked.

‘Ready,’ Adi said.

He saw Ayyan knock twice and then open the door. A man with a lot of white hair looked surprised to see them but he rose from his chair smiling. He was with three men who were younger and had black hair. They were all wearing jeans. They were standing now and smiling at him. He liked it when people looked only at him and nothing else in the room. They made him sit on the table though he wanted to sit on the chair.

‘Aditya Mani,’ someone declared to the room, without looking at him.

‘But that’s my name,’ Adi said, and the men laughed.

‘Tell me, Adi, why do you like prime numbers so much?’ the short man with white hair asked in English.

‘It’s unpredictable,’ Adi said.

‘What are the other numbers you like,’ the man asked.

Adi smiled coyly because that was what his father said he should do if he did not understand the question.

‘He is shy,’ his father said. ‘He doesn’t talk much at all.’

‘What do you want to be in the future, Adi?’

‘Scientist.’

‘Of course. But which field interests you the most?’

Adi smiled coyly.

‘You like maths or physics more?’

‘Physics.’

‘Physics,’ the men said happily, all at once.


Arvind Acharya was relishing the moment. He was imagining a giant balloon, twenty storeys high, soaring against a clear blue sky. The gondola that was carrying the four sealed samplers was such a meagre tip dangling at the bottom of the balloon. It was absurdly disproportionate, he thought, for the basket that was the very reason why the balloon existed, to be a few hundred times smaller than the balloon itself. It was not an aesthetic image. He had always loathed such disproportion. That’s why he had once despised the Zeppelins, and the sight of little white women driving long sedans. The device and its purpose had to be in proportion. But then he wondered if it was a reasonable demand. The device was physical and so it had a size. The purpose was actually abstract and so could not be described by size. The little white woman was not the purpose of the sedan. The sampler in the balloon’s basket was not the purpose of the hot-air balloon. The purpose of the sedan was that the little woman had to go somewhere, say, to a funeral. The purpose of the balloon was to confirm that there were aliens in the sky. So where was the question of disproportion? Also, if the goal of the universe were to manufacture life, as he secretly believed, then the universe was a giant device containing unimaginably vast nebulae and star systems that caused unimaginably large-scale cataclysms to make minuscule pieces of life here and there. So, even in his own version of the truth, the device was physically disproportionate to its purpose.

It was inevitable that he would then wonder, not for the first time of course, if the universe needed a goal. But he liked the idea. A whole universe churning violently inside to create the seeds of what would eventually become a state of being: little disjointed minds that would look back at the sky and acknowledge that yes, it is there, there is a universe. Why must the universe do it? It had enough real estate to create large lifeless bodies. Why must it pack enormous amounts of energy in a type of electricity called consciousness? It was simpler for the universe to make a Jupiter than a frog, or even an ant. All this was leading to an unavoidable question, but he tried to delay it because its philosophical nature embarrassed him, and philosophers were such third-rate bastards. But he asked anyway — So, why is there life? What’s the whole game? It was the sort of moment that frustrated him and made him wish that someone had left the answer in his drawer on a neatly typed piece of paper, so that he could just read it and say, ‘Oh yes, I thought so,’ and go back home for a nice long nap.

The door opened and he was annoyed to see his secretary. For some reason, he was more annoyed at the sight of him today than ever before. Such a terrible apparition Ayyan Mani was. So fresh, so eager, so much of an insider in this world. So hopelessly obsessed with living. Always busy, always up to something. Acharya found it funny that he must think a man was an insider in this world, because he did not know the function of an outsider. But he knew there were the insiders and there were the outsiders. He asked himself where he himself truly belonged.

‘Sir,’ Ayyan said, for the third time.

‘Yes.’

‘I’ve brought my son.’

Adi had by then appeared at the door, and he was looking curiously at Acharya from behind his father’s back. A pleasant smile appeared on Acharya’s face and that surprised even Ayyan. After the end of the Oparna affair, Acharya had become more moody and introspective than ever. Some days, he rocked in his chair excitedly for no apparent reason, but on the whole he had simply withdrawn into himself. He was once again the mammoth ghost that was either arriving or departing.

‘There you are,’ Acharya said. ‘Come in.’

Adi did not move. He opened his mouth wide, put out his tongue and gave a silly laugh.

‘Put your tongue, in Adi,’ Ayyan said sternly. ‘And come in.’

The boy walked in gingerly. Acharya stood up and went to the white couches in the far corner.

‘Let’s sit here,’ he said.

Adi, now more confident, sat facing him across the small centrepiece where the glass jar that was once an accomplice in illicit love now lay bearing fresh orchids. The boy looked at his father and tapped the couch asking him to sit. But Ayyan did not move.

‘Sit down,’ Acharya said impatiently. And for the very first time Ayyan Mani sat in the chamber of the Director.

Acharya studied the boy carefully and said, ‘He is wearing it in the other ear.’

‘What, Sir?’ Ayyan asked.

‘In the picture that they carried in the paper today, he was wearing the hearing-aid in the right ear. But now he is wearing it in the left ear.’

‘Oh, that,’ Ayyan said with a chuckle. ‘By mistake, they flipped the picture in the paper, Sir.’

Acharya did not suspect anything. He was merely struck by the visual anomaly. He did not pursue the matter further. He was more interested in the boy. ‘He seems completely normal. Is this how geniuses are made these days?’

‘He is just an ordinary boy who is fooling around, Sir,’ Ayyan said.

‘I am a genius,’ the boy said defiantly.

‘You must be,’ Acharya said. ‘Tell me, Aditya, how do you remember so many prime numbers?’

‘They are unpredictable.’

‘Adi,’ his father said, with an edge in his voice, ‘he is asking how you remember the first thousand prime numbers.’

‘I hear it in my head.’

‘You do?’ Acharya said with a look of amusement. ‘You like prime numbers?’

‘Yes. They are unpredictable.’

‘They are, they are. But I always found prime numbers ugly. When I was your age I used to love even numbers. Do you like even numbers more than odd numbers?’

Adi shrugged.

‘You should say “yes” or “no”, Adi,’ his father said. ‘Don’t just sit there and make a face.’

‘What do you want to become, Adi?’ Acharya asked.

‘I want to join the Institute of Theory and Research.’

‘You should then. Maybe you should take our entrance test,’ Acharya said jovially.

‘OK,’ said Adi.

‘Ten thousand students from all over the country take the test. But only one hundred pass. Do you want to take it?’

‘OK.’

‘Grow up fast then.’

Acharya’s keen twinkling eyes then surveyed the boy through a comfortable silence that to him was always a form of conversation. Adi turned nervously towards his father and raised his eyebrows. Acharya’s eyes then slowly became lost and distant. ‘Of all human deformities,’ he said softly, ‘genius is the most useful.’

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