St Andrew’s Inter-School Science Competition

St Andrew’s Inter-School Science Competition is the public stage on which Adi Mani’s supposed brilliance becomes both a family triumph and a strain on Ayyan Mani’s deception. Invited as a special participant after St Andrew’s School’s own teams fail to reach the finals, Adi answers questions addressed to the contestants. Ayyan’s covert encouragement helps turn each interruption into another performance, until the excitement of being admired gives way to his conviction that the game must end.

Invitation and Conditions

Three days before the quiz finals, Sister Chastity tells Ayyan that five hundred tenth-standard students from fifty schools had taken part in written elimination rounds, leaving six teams to compete. The event is presented as the Grand Finale, with its questions being finalized by the quiz committee when Ayyan arrives with Adi. Sister Chastity has already praised Ayyan as the father of a genius and pressed him to think about how he will support his son’s future, connecting Adi’s public image to the costs and prospects of education.

The invitation is not to join the contest as an ordinary competitor. St Andrew’s School’s own teams were disqualified in the preliminary rounds, and Sister Chastity insists that the school would not do anything shady to favour them. Instead, she proposes a place for a special participant who will compete not for the prize but for the honour. The arrangement gives Adi a conspicuous role without displacing one of the six qualifying teams. It also sets up an ambiguous distinction between a formal competition and a display: Adi is present as a celebrated exception, yet the questions directed to the teams become opportunities for him to answer.

The Quiz Becomes a Performance

Parents and teachers gather in the main auditorium as six student pairs take their places under the stage lights. Sister Chastity opens the event, silencing the students with a reminder that students of St Andrew’s do not whistle, before introducing the senior mathematics teacher as quizmaster. He explains the rules and begins with a physics question for Team A about the two scientists who set out to prove the existence of ether and instead discovered that the speed of light is constant regardless of the observer’s motion.

The decisive interruption comes in the next question, addressed to Team B: what discovery is Sir James Chadwick known for? A small voice answers, “Neutron.” The hall falls silent; the teams look confused, and Team B looks angry. When the quizmaster confirms the answer, laughter and applause follow. The interruptions continue over the next questions, with contestants glancing anxiously toward Adi and the audience waiting to hear what he will say. The quizmaster eventually reminds him that he may answer when a question is passed to the audience, and that otherwise he may have to leave the hall.

In the final question of the first round, the quizmaster begins describing a scientist who spent his later years trying to turn ordinary metals into gold. Before the question is complete, Adi calls out Isaac Newton. Sister Chastity stands in the aisle, and Oja Mani covers her mouth with trembling fingers. Ayyan rises and apologizes to the Principal, then makes his way down the aisle as children lift their legs to let him pass. Bending toward Adi’s good ear, he points a stern finger as though reprimanding him, but whispers, “Excellent, my son. Just one more time.” The gesture looks like discipline to the room; to the reader, it reveals that Ayyan is deliberately sustaining the performance.

Exit and Family Reaction

The next question asks who was the second man on the Moon. Adi shouts, “Buss Adrin.” The quizmaster looks at the floor, Sister Chastity stands again, and Ayyan jogs down the aisle. This time he takes Adi by the hand and leads him out through the narrow row. Behind them, the quizmaster supplies the correct name, Buzz Aldrin, and the hall rises in another standing ovation. Ayyan tries to look embarrassed; Adi beams. The scene lets the audience celebrate the boy while Ayyan and Adi leave together, their private understanding carried through the public commotion.

Outside the auditorium, the two laugh. Oja appears at the far end of the corridor, running and crying; she stops to compose herself, then hurries toward them and runs again. Ayyan reflects that her life is no longer ordinary. He recalls the distance between this moment and her earlier circumstances: she had grown up as a waiter’s daughter, entered a humid one-room home as a new bride, and learned that her son could not hear well in one ear. Her joy makes the spectacle feel worth its risks to him, but the pleasure is already mixed with fear and excitement. He recognizes that he has stretched the game too far and tells himself it must end now.

Oja drops to her knees beside Adi, holds him by the hair, hugs him, then holds his arms and asks how he knows all this. She calls him bright and weird, kisses his nose, and threatens to put an evil-eye mark on his cheek. Ayyan rejects the superstition, but her delight is plain: she has seen her son command a room that once seemed beyond the reach of their household. The performance’s emotional consequence is therefore not only public admiration. It gives Oja a moment of pride, while making Ayyan confront the cost of the illusion he has built around their child.

Recognition and Significance

In the corridor, a father named Anil Luthra introduces himself to Ayyan. His own son is in the tenth standard, and he says that he had heard about Adi before seeing him in action. Ayyan replies that Adi is only a little boy fooling around. The exchange shows how quickly the quiz converts a staged or exaggerated image into social currency: a stranger already knows of Adi, and now claims to have witnessed his ability firsthand. Ayyan’s modest dismissal cannot undo the attention the event has generated.

The episode is a turning point in Ayyan’s relationship to the genius game, though not an immediate end to every later scheme. In the corridor he decides that the performance has gone too far; later he describes ending Adi’s genius myth as the consequence of choosing to be a good father. His reflection sets the boy’s applause against the future he expects for a clerk’s son: engineering entrance examinations, competition against thousands of candidates, and the possibility that Adi’s place will be explained away through the Dalit reservation system. The quiz briefly makes talent visible and admired, but it cannot remove the economic and social barriers shaping the child’s prospects. Its final shift is intimate rather than triumphant: Ayyan sees Oja’s happiness, feels the exhilaration of the deception, and understands that protecting his son requires stopping the game.