What must a man do

What must a man do? is a recurring question in the novel, crystallizing the conflict between moral knowledge and the need to make an unbearable life feel larger. It first gathers force around Ayyan Mani’s invented genius myth about his son, Aditya Mani: Ayyan understands the damage his deception may do, but also fears losing the excitement and family closeness the fiction has created. When the question returns beside Arvind Acharya’s encounter with his wife, Lavanya Acharya, it resonates beyond Ayyan’s scheme, linking different forms of dissatisfaction with ordinary life.

The Question in Ayyan’s Dilemma

Ayyan’s question emerges from a contradiction he cannot resolve. He believes that deceiving Oja Mani about their son is a serious wrong, one that may permanently corrupt the trust between husband and wife. The lies have already taken root in Oja’s mind, and he fears she will never forgive him if she learns the truth. Yet the deception is not merely a calculation he can abandon at will: he loves the game and is frightened by how strongly its excitement has taken hold of him.

The story he is building around Aditya Mani gives the family a shared source of wonder in their one-room home. Ayyan compares his attachment to the myth with the addiction he saw in his alcoholic brothers: recognizing a danger does not necessarily make it possible to stop. The question therefore marks more than indecision about whether to tell the truth. It exposes Ayyan’s awareness that the fiction is both a betrayal and a sustaining pleasure, and that ending it would mean surrendering something his family has come to live inside.

Poverty and the Narrow Future

The question also carries the weight of Ayyan’s social and material circumstances. Born into severe poverty, he learned under municipal lights and used guile to feed himself and his family. He sees his prospects as restricted by being the son of a sweeper, and imagines a future of typing letters for Brahmins, taking their calls, and enduring their pursuit of truth. The routine would end each day with the steep climb through BDD Chawl to a cramped home of 180 square feet, including its illicit loft.

In that future, even domestic refuge seems diminished: Ayyan imagines returning to the perfunctory love of a wife who no longer really looks at him. The genius story interrupts this predictability. It offers excitement where he expects suffocation and gives his ordinary household an extraordinary narrative to share. The question does not absolve his deception; instead, it makes visible the pressures under which he chooses to continue it. His practical understanding of a world where cunning wins collides with his belief that marriage should not be reduced to rational calculation.

A Refrain Beyond Ayyan

The question recurs in the scene of Arvind Acharya returning home soaked by the rain. Lavanya dries him with a warm towel and teases him by asking whether he is Archimedes. He looks at her frailty, notices the tired skin on her forehead and her scant dyed hair, and counts thirteen lines on her neck; the narration then returns to the same question. The placement ties it to the intimate recognition of time and change within a marriage, rather than to Ayyan’s particular deception alone.

Across these moments, the refrain holds together radically different circumstances without offering a single answer. For Ayyan, it arises from poverty, the limits he sees around his future, and his attachment to a dangerous family fiction. Beside Acharya and Lavanya, it follows an ordinary domestic gesture and the perception of a wife’s aging body. Its recurrence makes the question a measure of the gap between knowing what is wrong and finding a livable course of action; the novel leaves that gap open.