Ayyan Begins Fabricating Adi’s Genius Image

Ayyan Begins Fabricating Adi’s Genius Image marks the point at which a father’s playful scheme begins to reshape his son’s identity. A year earlier, Adi’s perfect mathematics score and knack for recognizing cars had delighted Oja and caught Ayyan’s attention; Ayyan, however, did not initially see these abilities as proof of extraordinary genius. He saw an opening for a game. By turning ordinary cleverness into a public performance, he gave Adi a new kind of recognition, but also made the boy’s growing belief in the performance part of the danger.

The occasion and the first signs

The scheme began after Oja welcomed Ayyan home with tears and a joyous smile: Adi had scored 100 per cent on a mathematics test in a class of forty-two boys. Oja’s happiness was striking because she was usually described as lacking ambition or hope. The score made her feel that her son stood apart from the wealthy, fair-skinned boys around him, and that night Ayyan took Adi out for ice cream.

Walking along Worli Seaface, Ayyan watched Adi identify the makes of parked and passing cars from their fronts or backs. The boy’s recitation sounded impressive, but Ayyan judged it a familiar sort of childhood smartness, like the parental boasts he had heard on trains about young children using computers or memorizing lists. He did not discover a hidden prodigy; he decided to make more of abilities he considered commonplace. The contrast between Oja’s elation and Ayyan’s calculating amusement establishes the different meanings the family would attach to Adi’s intelligence.

A private game becomes a performance

Ayyan first imagined the plot as a diversion from the miseries of life in BDD Chawl. He made a pact with Adi and taught him questions to ask in class, including questions about gravity and why leaves are green. Adi was to raise them regardless of the lesson’s context. At first, teachers found the interruptions endearing: they took the boy for bright, curious, and unusual.

The questions then grew more elaborate. Adi might ask why nothing ate sound if plants could eat light, or announce a statistic about the ocean when a teacher used the word ocean. Yet when teachers tried to continue the conversation, he fell silent; he knew only what his father had taught him. His partial deafness also helped frame that silence for school staff, who could regard him as an odd, laconic little boy rather than immediately understand the limits of his knowledge. The performance depended not on sustained expertise but on a striking question, followed by an explanation for why the child did not say more.

Recognition, secrecy, and family tension

At first Adi told Oja that he and his father had a secret pact, but she dismissed this as ordinary father-and-son talk. As the classroom disruptions accumulated, teachers began sending notes in his handbook asking his parents to come in. These messages brought fear and entertainment into the home. Oja worried that Adi should be normal, yet she was also excited by the prospect that he might be a genius and told other people about his brilliance.

The new reputation mattered to Adi. He came to enjoy the attention and to understand that people treated him as extraordinary, rather than as special in the sense used for a handicapped child. He also began to grasp why the pact had to remain secret: he sensed that Oja would oppose the game, and that her opposition might cost him the status he was gaining at school. A private father-son conspiracy thus acquired a consequence beyond the classroom. Adi was no longer merely following instructions; the recognition produced by the scheme gave him a reason to protect it.

From classroom myth to public claim

Ayyan realized that the legend was easy to maintain around a naturally smart boy who wore a hearing aid. One odd remark a week could keep it alive. But he wanted more than the amusement of watching teachers react, so he arranged a fictitious news item about Adi. He still believed the whole game could be stopped before they were caught, and reassured himself that other parents had invented grander stories about their children.

He thought of Minou Drouet, whose childhood poems prompted uncertainty over whether she or her mother had written them, and Natasha Demkina, whose mother claimed the girl had X-ray vision. Ayyan imagined that he understood such mothers and their motives. These examples did not make his own fabrication true; they gave him comparisons with which to treat it as less exceptional. Yet he remained troubled by Adi’s readiness to play along. Some days the boy seemed to forget that the genius was a game, loved the word, and even mentioned it in his sleep. The episode therefore ends with the deception’s central reversal already underway: Ayyan means to invent a reputation for his son, but Adi is beginning to inhabit it.

Narrative significance

The episode connects a small domestic success—a perfect test score and an evening walk—to a deliberately constructed public identity. Its consequences emerge through repeated classroom questions, teacher notes, Oja’s mixed response, and Adi’s growing attachment to the attention. Ayyan sees the fabrication as controllable and temporary; the boy’s investment shows why control may be harder than his father assumes. The genius myth begins as entertainment, but its first cost is the growing distance between what Adi knows and what others believe about him.