Aryabhata Tutorials

Aryabhata Tutorials is a company owned by the Institute of Theory and Research whose educational-sounding name conceals an unusual role in the Institute’s most sensitive examination process. In the records Ayyan Mani investigates, it appears not as an ordinary tutorial centre but as a financial and logistical intermediary for printing the Joint Entrance Test papers.

Ownership and Uncertain Public Presence

The company is described as separate from the Institute but owned by it. Its existence puzzles Unny, who cannot identify a location for it, has seen no signboards bearing its name, and knows no students who attend it. His uncertainty leaves its public educational function unconfirmed: the story presents the name and corporate structure, but not a visible teaching operation.

The payment file makes that uncertainty more pointed. Unny finds that, over the previous twenty years, Aryabhata Tutorials has paid printers and no one else; it has made no earnings. Ayyan copies three bills from the file while trying to appear indifferent, though his hands are trembling. The records make the company’s lack of ordinary commercial activity a clue rather than a resolution: its payments are connected to printing, but its purpose is not apparent from the file alone.

Role in the Joint Entrance Test

Aryabhata Tutorials provides the cover identity for printing the Institute’s Joint Entrance Test papers. Each year, five professors and the Director work discreetly for three weeks to prepare the examination. They write the questions by hand in one notebook rather than using a computer, then produce three versions and send them to three different printers.

A professor personally visits each printer while posing as a representative of Aryabhata Tutorials. The printers therefore believe they are producing study material for one of the city’s many tutorial businesses, not confidential entrance papers for the Institute. The company name helps keep the real purpose of the print job from the people carrying it out; later, the Director chooses one of the three printed versions.

Ayyan’s Investigation

Aryabhata Tutorials becomes a lead in Ayyan’s attempt to locate the examination papers. Jana Nambodri urgently asks him to obtain copies from the company’s payment files. Ayyan approaches Unny, who searches an open steel shelf and finds a thin file. After photocopying three bills, Ayyan returns it and goes back to the Institute’s offices, where he retrieves his mobile phone from its usual hiding place in Nambodri’s desk. His careful manner reflects the need to pursue the inquiry discreetly.

The bills direct Ayyan toward the printers, but not quickly enough to intercept the papers: when he calls them, they say their consignments were dispatched a month earlier. He believes the three versions must now be somewhere inside the Institute and begins searching locked rooms and questioning guards and peons. Aryabhata Tutorials thus links a sparse, puzzling payment record to the Institute’s elaborate examination secrecy, while the trail it supplies arrives after the printing has already been completed.