‘I know that you too lived in a chawl once,’ Ayyan said.
‘Yes, in Grant Road. A long time ago,’ Waman said, with a smile that was proud of its old sorrows.
‘We have been trying to sell,’ Ayyan said. ‘Builders are interested.’
‘Of course they will be. This land is worth its weight in gold.’
‘I want to sell too,’ Ayyan said, ‘but a lot of people are resisting. There are eighty thousand people who live here. It’s hard to get everybody to agree. Builders want all or nothing.’
‘Obviously,’ Waman said, shaking his head, ‘People are afraid, aren’t they? They have lived here all their lives. They are comfortable with the things here.’
‘Yes. They want the same neighbours, the same lives.’
‘How much are the builders offering, Mani?’
‘Twelve lakhs for a 150-square-foot flat,’ Ayyan said.
‘Drive it up to fifteen,’ Waman said confidently. He looked at the vast real estate and appeared to make some calculations in his head.
The entourage went to the terrace of Block Number Forty-One, where a hundred others were already gathered. A table shrouded in a white cloth was at one end of the terrace. Waman made his way through the assembled crowd, smiling and bowing, and naming one hoisted baby who was already named.
When he sat at the table, Bikaji and his men formed a human cordon around the minister. The cordon parted to admit Ayyan, with his son and wife. Oja joined her palms and gushed.
The minister asked, ‘And this is the great Adi?’
The boy was more absorbed in the machine guns of the guards.
‘Can I hold?’ he asked a guard who shook his head.
‘Lock it and give it to the boy,’ Waman ordered. ‘It’s very light,’ he said with affection to Adi.
The guard did as he was told, and Adi felt the magic of holding an AK-47.
The family sat down next to the minister. The audience was on the floor or on the chairs they had dragged from their homes.
The minister gave a speech in which he narrated how when he was as old as Adi he was tied to a tree by Brahmin priests because he had committed the crime of entering a temple. ‘They left me
like that the whole night,’ he said. ‘Next morning, I ran away from my village and came to Bombay with nothing, not even ten rupees in my pocket. Not even a pocket actually.’
Ayyan had heard this story before, and many more that the minister would not recount. How he had once sold vegetables on a wooden cart near the Crawford Market and slowly become a thug, despite his small stout frame. He pelted stones and broke shop windows to protest against matters he did not understand and to mourn the deaths of leaders he did not know. He grew to become a coordinator of freelance goons and, in time, joined politics. His art lay in raising armies of angry Dalit youth at short notice who could turn very violent at times. The Untouchables, in modern times, had won the useless right of being touched by the high caste, but they remained the poorest in the city. Every time they felt slighted, as for instance when miscreants once garlanded the statue of their liberator Ambedkar with slippers, men like Waman used to lead a battalion of angry youth and loot whole lanes.
‘They go in rage and return with Adidas,’ Ayyan had told Oja on a day when from the kitchen window they had seen looters going home happily with huge cartons.
‘Who is Adidas?’ Oja had asked.
The entry of such a man into the innocuous game of erecting a boy genius made Ayyan feel afraid. He stared at the profile of this fierce orator whose panegyric of Adi now erupted in spangled silver spit that glowed momentarily against the twilight sky, like minuscule fireflies.
‘Such a boy, is a rare boy,’ the minister was saying, ‘Adi is a rare boy.’
The way the minister said ‘Adi’ sounded morbid to Ayyan. A man capable of murder now knew the name of his son and there was something disturbing about it. But Ayyan calmed his fear by the other stories he had heard about the minister which made him seem more endearing. When Michael Jackson had visited the city a few years ago, Waman had been part of the group of politicians who met him. The minister had later told the press, ‘He is a very
polite man. There is not a trace of arrogance in him. You don’t get the feeling at all that you are talking to a white man.’
Waman finished his speech by hailing Adi as the future liberator of the Dalits.
‘I’ve been hearing about him for so long,’ he said. ‘He is so bright that he has now been given the permission to take one of the toughest exams in the world. And he is just eleven. May we have many more like him. Let’s together show the world, the power that is locked inside all of us.’
The audience clapped and the minister sat down, wiping his face with his fingers. A guard advanced with a huge cardboard box.
‘It’s a computer,’ Waman declared to the crowd, which applauded again. Some women in the audience looked at each other, raised their eyebrows and curled their lips.
The minister presented the box to Ayyan with the boy standing in-between them as the nominal recipient. Photographers clicked through the din of ovation and Bikaji’s hysterical screams: ‘The leader of the masses.’
As the minister left the terrace, cutting straight through the unmoving crowd, desperate voices filled the air, asking for jobs, money and welfare. He nodded many times, looking all around but never meeting an eye. ‘Go home. Have faith in the government,’ he said.
Before he got into his car, he turned to Ayyan and said, ‘Come and meet me sometime in my office. We will figure out a way to sell this place.’
Ayyan went back home, accepting a thousand greetings on the way, and the heavy gazes of appreciation and envy which wore the same face here. Adi was alone at home. He was trying to yank the monitor out of its carton. He smiled brightly at his father and said, ‘Now I have a computer.’
‘Yes, you do, but don’t break it. Let’s read the book and fix it. Where is your mother?’
‘Some women came and took her away.’
Ayyan latched the door and sat on the floor beside his son. ‘Adi, now I want you to listen to me carefully.’
The boy was trying to pull the monitor by its plastic hood.
‘Adi, sit down and look at me,’ Ayyan said sternly.
Adi sat on the floor and looked at his father.
‘It was fun, wasn’t it?’ Ayyan said.
‘It was fun,’ Adi said.
‘Now, it’s over. I know I’ve said this before, but now it’s definitely over,’ Ayyan said.
‘OK,’ the boy said.
‘You’re not going to take the exam. You’re not smart enough for that. You and I know that.’
‘OK,’ Adi said.
‘Do you understand?’
‘Yes.’
‘All this will not happen again, Adi. Now the game is over. You’ll be like other boys and it’ll be a lot of fun too.’
‘I am not like other boys. They call me deaf.’
‘If anyone calls you deaf, tell him, “But I can hear you, but I can hear you.” Keep saying it till he stops talking. OK?’
That made Adi smile. ‘I can hear you, I can hear you, I can hear you,’ he said.
‘If he still calls you deaf,’ Ayyan said, ‘tell him, “But I heard your mother fart, but I heard your mother fart”.’ That made Adi roll on the floor laughing. He went breathless for a second and only the fear of dying made him stop laughing.
There was a knock at the door. When Ayyan opened it he found Oja caught in a moment of self-important haste. She was standing at the doorway, about to enter but hurriedly imparting final instructions to four women who stood meekly in the corridor.
‘People can’t keep throwing garbage from their windows,’ Oja was saying. ‘We have to introduce fines to control this. Or, we should collect the garbage and throw it back into the house of the person who has flung it. If we don’t take care of our chawl, who will?’
Then she walked into her house and shut the door. Ayyan noticed that she was holding a wedge of lemon. She went straight to Adi and squeezed it on his head. He tried to run but she held him tight and said a quick prayer. And she ran her palms over his cheeks and cracked her knuckles on her ears.
‘Evil eyes, all around,’ she said.
T
HE LIGHTS DIMMED
and a hush fell over the auditorium. Every seat was taken. There were people sitting on the edges of the aisles. The blood-red curtain went up in somnolent folds and revealed seven empty chairs on the stage. ‘There is a seat, grab it,’ someone in the aisle said, and the hall erupted in laughter. A banner on the black backdrop of the stage said ‘Indian Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence’. Ayyan was standing at the foot of a short flight of wooden steps that led to the stage. His hands were folded and he surveyed the audience. He had decided to disregard his assignment, which was to ensure that the special dignitaries in the front row – mostly scientists, bureaucrats, one failed actor and other friends of Nambodri – were given a steady supply of whatever they wanted.
A girl who was preoccupied with her own glamour arrived at the podium in a dark-blue sari that fluttered in the gale of the ceiling fan. She looked at the audience with one eye, the other was hidden behind her cascading hair.
‘A mysterious character of UFOs is that they are sighted only in the First World,’ she said, ‘and no alien conquest of Earth begins until the Mayor of New York holds an emergency press conference. When Mars attacks, it attacks America.’
She then asked very seriously, with a faint tilt of her head that partially exposed her other eye, ‘Is this because of an intergalactic understanding of the balance of power on our planet?’ She smiled modestly when she heard some chuckles. ‘Whatever the reasons are, “we are not alone” is a western anthem. But today, we present the first attempt of our country to formally understand
what extraterrestrial life is all about.’ She invited seven men to the stage.
The first was a very old man whom Ayyan had to help up the stairs. He had a thick mop of furious silver hair, bushy bristles peeped through his nostrils and ears, and his hands were trembling as Ayyan held them. Then came a mountainous white man. There always had to be a white man in such a gathering. ‘The whites are the Brahmins of the Brahmins,’ Ayyan often told his wife. And every year, they grew taller. Jana Nambodri followed, in a Chinese-collar black shirt and black trousers, and with four of his satellites.
Ayyan stood in his dark corner and listened to these men as they heralded, as they always had for centuries, ‘A new dawn’. Nambodri spoke about how the array of radio telescopes called the Giant Ear was finally liberated. He announced, in the midst of a great applause, that the Ear would now scan the skies for signals from advanced civilizations.
The white man came to the podium, and joined his palms together. It was his first visit. ‘Namaste,’ he said. He welcomed India to ‘mankind’s search for company’. Later, other radio astronomers spoke about the importance of youth in Seti. After them came the old man. He was introduced by the announcer as a retired scientist from Bangalore. He arrived feebly at the podium and was startled by the squeal of the mike. When he recovered, he began to talk about the greatness of ancient Indians. The crowd applauded every compliment he gave their imagined ancestors. Ayyan laughed. Yes, yes, Indians were the oldest civilization on Earth, the greatest, the best. And only Indians had culture. Others were all dumb nomads and whores.
Ayyan detested this moronic pride more than anything else about the country. Those flared nostrils, those dreamy eyes that people made when they said that they were once a spectacular race. How heaps of gems were sold on the streets, like berries. How ancient Brahmins had calculated the distance between the Earth and the Moon long before the whites; how ayurveda had figured everything about the human body long before Hippocrates;
how Kerala’s mathematicians had discovered something close to the heliocentric theory long before Copernicus. In this delusional heritage of the country, his own ancestors were never included. Except as gory black demons in the fables of valiant fair men.
The old man now began to speak about the mysteries of the cow, and the wisdom of Indians in granting the creature an enduring holiness. He attributed his longevity to the consumption of a glass of cow’s urine every morning. That brought about a polite silence. But Ayyan saw some aged people in the audience nod wisely.
‘Ghee, it has been proved, is good for the heart,’ the man said. ‘And in Jaipur, scientists have proved that a paste made out of cow dung, when spread on the walls and roofs, blocks nuclear radiation.’ He cited the work of an astrophysicist who had investigated the effects of cow slaughter. ‘The cries of the cows go down to the core of the Earth through Einsteinian pain waves and cause seismic activity, especially after Muslim festivals when there is a mass slaughter of cattle. That’s why, a few days after every Muslim festival, somewhere in the world there is always an earthquake.’
Finally, he came to the point: ‘How did the ancient Indians know so much? How did they know about the secrets of the cow, about the human anatomy, and the distances between heavenly bodies? I believe, very early in the life of the Indian civilization, in the vedic age, there was an alien contact.’ Mahabharata’s great war, with its flying machines and mystical missiles, he said, was fought using extraterrestrial technologies that were later mistaken as the hallucinations of poets. ‘Sometime in the great past of our country, there was a technology transfer from an advanced civilization. Our gods are, in reality, artistic representations of extraterrestrial visitors. I really don’t care what you think, but I know that Krishna was an alien.’
The audience erupted and gave him a long round of applause. The men on the stage rose, one after the other, yielding to the force of the moment, and clapped somewhat sheepishly. In the din, Ayyan felt a strange affection for Arvind Acharya. He missed
him. This was the kind of rubbish Acharya had fought against all his life. The pursuit of truth seemed less ridiculous when he was at the head of the quest. And Ayyan felt the impoverishment of serving a lesser regime.
In the days that followed, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence assumed the character of a revolution whose time had come. Scientists from other institutes landed in the euphoria of finally being granted rights over the Giant Ear. There were seminars and lectures. Journalists, who did not have to wait in the anteroom any more, came to learn about the exotic future of Seti. School teachers, who had to wait, came to ask for excursion trips to the array of giant radio telescopes.