Ayyan and Waman’s political partnership

Social Ground and Political Use

Ayyan’s dealings with Waman sit within a social order that Ayyan understands as persistent rather than repaired. When Sister Chastity speaks to him about the treatment of his ancestors and the private slurs still used against Dalits, Ayyan performs the anger and injury she expects, then describes the distance between generations of accumulated Brahmin advantage and his own beginning as the son of a sweeper in a one-room home. His bitter account of people who write books, speak English, build bridges, and preach socialism is not an abstract complaint: it names the cultural and material power that leaves a person like him expected to admire those who have already inherited opportunity.

That account helps explain why Waman’s political language can appeal to Ayyan even when he is wary of the man himself. Ayyan also rejects the religious order associated with Brahmin authority, arguing that Ambedkar showed Dalits a way out of a religion that had treated them as less than human. At home, however, Oja Mani says she is Hindu and claims the gods of that tradition as her own. Their disagreement makes visible that Dalit identity is not a single political or religious position. Waman can speak to collective injury and liberation, but that does not mean his rhetoric resolves the different ways people in the community understand belonging.

The Neighborhood and the Public Alliance

The partnership takes visible form at a crowded gathering outside the BDD Chawl. A towering banner presents Waman as a dynamic personality, while a massive rose garland and a festive crowd turn his arrival into a public occasion. Asked where the boy’s father is, Waman is met with the crowd calling Ayyan’s name. Ayyan comes forward, clasps the minister’s hand in both of his, touches his own chest, and walks with him through the broken lanes as photographers move ahead of them. The exchange gives Waman a public audience and brings Ayyan into the minister’s company as the father of the celebrated boy.

Ayyan’s request is rooted in housing as well as status. He wants to leave the chawl and move his family into proper flats, believing that the children should not inherit the same conditions their parents have endured. He tells Waman that builders are offering twelve lakhs for a 150-square-foot flat. Waman immediately advises him to push the offer to fifteen lakhs, looking across the real estate as if calculating its value. The advice is concrete evidence of what Ayyan hopes the alliance can provide: not simply praise, but access to someone who can influence the terms on which residents negotiate with builders.

The minister’s visit also gives the supposed prodigy a public stage. On the terrace of Block Number Forty-One, Ayyan and his family are admitted through a human cordon around Waman. Oja joins her palms in greeting, while Adi is more interested in the guards’ machine guns than in being introduced as the great boy. Waman then tells the crowd that, as a child, he was tied to a tree by Brahmin priests for entering a temple and later came to Bombay with nothing. His account supplies the gathering with a personal history of caste humiliation and escape, connecting his own rise to the community he now addresses.

Patronage, Spectacle, and Unequal Leverage

Waman’s story is also a political instrument. Ayyan knows of the minister’s path from selling vegetables near Crawford Market to coordinating freelance goons and entering politics. He knows, too, that Waman can rapidly mobilize angry Dalit youths, sometimes into violence. The minister’s presence in the family’s ostensibly harmless genius-making game therefore frightens Ayyan: a powerful politician now knows his son’s name. Waman’s remembered kindness toward a white celebrity softens Ayyan’s impression somewhat, but it does not erase his awareness of the force behind the minister’s public performance.

At the gathering, Waman calls Adi a rare boy and hails him as a future liberator of the Dalits. He presents him as an eleven-year-old already permitted to take one of the world’s toughest examinations, and asks the audience to imagine the power contained in children like him. The speech turns Ayyan’s private fabrication into a collective emblem. The crowd applauds, a large box is presented to the family with Adi as its nominal recipient, and Waman leaves through people calling out for jobs, money, and welfare. He responds by urging them to have faith in the government, without meeting anyone’s eyes. The contrast is telling: the boy receives a ceremonial gift and sustained public praise, while the crowd’s immediate material requests remain unanswered.

Before leaving, Waman tells Ayyan to meet him at his office so they can work out how to sell the place. The promise makes their cooperation more than a photo opportunity, but it is still an offer to figure out a route, not proof that the residents’ desired outcome has been secured. Ayyan returns home to greetings and looks of appreciation and envy. Adi, alone with the box, is trying to pull out the monitor and tells his father that he now has a computer. The family’s new possession and public recognition are real consequences of the visit; so is the greater visibility of the invented genius on which the occasion depends.

The Partnership Under Pressure

When Ayyan later appears at a press conference in Waman’s office, the alliance again gives him a public platform. Waman stands beside him in a room packed with journalists and photographers, then hands him the microphone and asks the gathering to hear the father before the minister speaks. Ayyan announces that Adi passed the Institute of Theory and Research’s Joint Entrance Test but will not attend the interview or join the Institute. He says that his son should finish school like other boys and that allowing him to sit the examination was a mistake. The announcement begins to withdraw the boy from the future that the earlier spectacle had promised.

The stakes extend beyond one examination. Ayyan imagines the ordinary pressures awaiting a poor Dalit child: engineering presented as the only practical ambition, repeated competitive examinations, and the eventual suspicion that a student admitted under the reservation system did not earn his place. Against that future, the brief elevation of Adi as a genius has offered the family recognition and possibility, but it has also made a child carry an adult political story. Waman’s support gives Ayyan reach and protection in public; it cannot make that story harmless or true.

The limits of their alliance become clearest when the astronomers confront the truth about Adi. Ayyan takes a telephone call from Waman and hands it to Jana Nambodri. Nambodri reports that the minister has offered the astronomers safety if they do not go public with what they have discovered about Adi. The offer reveals Waman trying to manage the consequences of the scandal through a private bargain, rather than simply standing behind Ayyan. Ayyan has brought the minister into the affair, but the call does not establish that he accepts the offer or controls what follows. Their partnership remains a negotiation between Ayyan’s need for political leverage and Waman’s capacity to trade access, public attention, and promised protection.