Ayyan and Nambodri’s superior–secretary relationship

Ayyan and Nambodri’s superior–secretary relationship is a study in unequal power that does not remain one-sided. Nambodri can offer Ayyan work, summon him, and order him to fetch coffee; Ayyan, officially a subordinate, can hear what the Institute’s leaders say when they believe he is beneath their notice. The relationship reaches its decisive reversal when Ayyan turns that access into a recording of their contempt for Dalits and women, then makes their private words public.

A Position Within the Institute

The connection takes shape against Ayyan’s long experience of institutional hierarchy. He says he has spent fifteen years at the Institute, starting as an office boy and working as a clerk. He also describes having worked for Arvind Acharya, whose public disgrace has made the Institute’s internal conflict impossible to ignore. Ayyan’s career has brought him inside the institution, but not into the circle of scientists whose authority defines it.

When Nambodri takes the large chair at a gathering of colleagues, he spots Ayyan and asks whether he would like to work with him. Ayyan accepts with formal deference, calling it an honour. The exchange establishes the apparent terms of their association: Nambodri chooses and directs; Ayyan serves. Even in this moment of new access, Ayyan is expected to respond correctly to a superior’s invitation, and Nambodri’s question about his son, the so-called genius, shows that Ayyan’s family has already become a subject of interest within the Institute.

That interest becomes an opening when Ayyan asks whether Nambodri will let Adi take the entrance test. He presents the request in the language of permission, while Nambodri studies him with a mixture of cunning and new respect and asks how many people know about it. The exchange hints that Ayyan is not merely a functionary carrying messages: he has information and plans of his own. The deferential form remains, but the balance within it is beginning to shift.

Deference and Caste

Ayyan’s subordination is inseparable from caste. In a conversation with Sister Chastity, he recognizes that upper-caste people may publicly use the name Dalits while privately applying degrading names to them. He describes a world in which Brahmin achievement is accumulated across generations, while he was born a Dalit in a one-room home to a sweeper. His bitter account of being expected to admire an inaccessible world gives the workplace hierarchy a social history beyond job titles: professional authority sits atop inequalities Ayyan knows intimately.

The relation to Nambodri does not make that inequality disappear. Ayyan’s position can place him close to powerful men without making him one of them. His service is treated as the natural limit of his capacities. During the later confrontation, Nambodri tells him to stick to his strengths, describing the work of bringing coffee as his proper contribution while the scientists figure out the universe. The casual command compresses the institution’s hierarchy into a small ritual: the men deliberate, and Ayyan is sent to serve them.

The Secretary as Witness

The Institute’s treatment of Ayyan changes from routine subordination to suspicion as its internal crisis deepens. When he arrives and sees Nambodri among a grim inner circle, he understands that something is wrong. Nambodri asks about a set of attributed thoughts, and Ayyan answers as a subordinate drawn into an inquiry whose terms have not yet been explained to him. The exchange reverses the usual emotional ease of command: Nambodri’s position remains powerful, but his unease is visible to the man whose work has often been to attend to others.

The deeper confrontation comes when Nambodri angrily tells Ayyan to stop speaking to men whose intelligence he cannot imagine. Ayyan answers that his own IQ is 148 and asks Nambodri’s. The retort refuses the inferior intellectual position assigned to him. Nambodri then tells him to fetch coffee, fruit, and meals, insisting that each man should stay within his strengths. Ayyan goes to his desk, takes a silver dictaphone from the top drawer, and connects it to a landline’s speaker mode. The servant’s errand becomes the means by which the room’s hierarchy is exposed.

The recording preserves Nambodri’s remarks about Dalit intelligence and reservations, as well as the scientists’ broader claims about the supposed intellectual limits of Dalits, Africans, Eastern Europeans, and women. Ayyan does not leave the recording as an abstraction or keep it for himself: he takes it to the pantry, plays it for the peons, and translates difficult passages into Marathi. He explains that the men are claiming inherited intelligence for Brahmins and inherited stupidity for those they demean, including himself, whom they consider fit only to clean toilets. In this scene, his position as an employee gives him access, while his choice to interpret and share the evidence makes him a mediator for colleagues kept outside the scientists’ circle.

Exposure and Reversal

Ayyan’s public disclosure makes the private relationship between superior and secretary part of a much larger crisis. At a gathering in the BDD chawls, he explains that he has a recording of what happened at the Institute and another that is more shocking. He says that, as a mere clerk, he would not have been taken seriously earlier; the admission clarifies both his former vulnerability and why he has chosen this public moment. He also connects what happened to his decision not to let his son become part of an institution he now calls frightening.

The tapes have consequences inside the Institute. News broadcasts carry the scientists’ views about Dalits and women, and Nambodri grows silent as the phones ring. The men fear not only the political response to the recording but also the possible return of Arvind Acharya, whose own recording may clear him. The conflict therefore does not end with Ayyan simply defeating Nambodri: it reveals an institution in which competing recordings, reputations, and claims to authority are all at stake.

In the final office encounter represented here, Ayyan enters with faxes, lays them neatly on Nambodri’s desk, and apologizes for being late because he had to attend a press conference. Nambodri replies that they already know. Ayyan adds that he would get Nambodri coffee, but the peons are missing. The line echoes the familiar service expected of him, yet now carries the knowledge that the peons have heard the recording and are no longer available to perform their customary work. Ayyan remains physically within Nambodri’s workplace and still addresses him as Sir, but he has changed what that subordinate role can mean: the man sent to fetch coffee has helped make the Institute answer for what its leaders said when they thought he was only listening.