“Why don’t you ever take me seriously, Mukundo Babu?” She had started the question angrily, but in the tiny span of time it took her to utter all those words, only a heavy cloud of melancholy remained to envelope her mellifluous voice and large, round eyes.

It wasn’t an extraordinary question. A lot of people could have asked that to Mukundo and it would have made sense to him. But it was Piyali asking that question. Piyali? Piyali wanted him to take her seriously? What for? Why would she care for him? She was —

He was so dumbstruck that Piyali quickly lost hope of any answer from him and turned on her heels. She walked away. Not quickly, rather listlessly. But Mukundo’s feet seemed glued to the ground and it didn’t occur to him to go after her. His mouth also seemed to have forgotten how to make sounds. He didn’t even call her; didn’t ask her to stop.

It was only after he found himself staring at nothing, because Piyali was out of sight, that he came to.

Piyali had always been a precocious child. She was speaking clear and complete sentences by the time she was two. In an extraordinary feat she had started reading both Bengali and English when she was three, to the surprise – almost shock – of the adults around her. They had worried if the child was meeting someone they didn’t know, because nobody around her remembered ever trying to teach her to read. She was too young for that. Children her age had only started going to playschool, that too only if their parents were too busy. But this mousy girl was already reading fluently. Otherwise extraordinarily communicative, she had no clear answer to how she had learned to read. After keeping an eye on her for a few days, everyone had satisfied themselves that there was no dark stranger lurking around meeting her unsupervised; it was only then that they had relaxed, patted her back and congratulated themselves for knowing such a brilliant child.

The moment of realization for Mukundo had come a couple of years later. Piyali was five-years old then, Mukundo seventeen. He was practicing solving some mathematical reasoning questions for the entrance exams he had to write that year. Piyali had come to his room as she often did. She had peered into the questions he was working with.

“Answer for the first one is option D,” she had said in a quiet voice.

Mukundo had grinned. Reading was already an easy task for her. She must have seen his answer in the notebook he was writing in.

“For the second one also D.”

And then she had gone on to give answers to all the ten questions on that page. An increasingly astonished Mukundo had written down her answers after the fifth question, because he hadn’t yet solved those himself. Then he solved those and found that she was right about all of them.

“How on earth—Piyali. Have you seen the answers at the back of the book?”

“No, I haven’t,” she had replied matter-of-factly, already used to occasional accusations like those in school.

“Okay. Let’s see,” Mukundo had taken another book out of his bag. He had bought it that morning only and there was no way Piyali could have read it earlier. He opened a page at random and asked her to solve the first question on that page.

“It’s B. The answer is B.”

Mukundo didn’t have the patience to solve it himself to verify. He looked at the answer key to find that she was right once again. He made her solve twenty more questions at random. Towards the end of the exercise he would no longer be surprised when her answer turned out to be right once again.

Mukundo himself was an intelligent student, he was doing well in his studies and was even a bit vain about it. He wouldn’t miss any opportunity of mocking his cousins who struggled at school. But that teenage-vanity didn’t come in the way of him recognizing that this little friend of his was a genius. Her father Debendra Banerjee was an accomplished gardener who worked in Mukundo’s house. Her mother Debangi had worked as his nanny when he was younger, and now helped around the house, supervising other staff on Mukundo’s mother’s behalf. She was good at her job too. Neither of them, however, could be credited with passing down that extraordinary brain to Piyali.

Mukundo spoke to his mother, Mohima Thakur, “She is a prodigy, Ma. Trust me, this girl is super bright. She could crack this paper right now. Most of my classmates struggle with those questions. I saw her reading Priyendra’s older books today.” Priyendra was Piyali’s elder brother, three-years her senior. “What would she do in those nursery classes. Talk to her teachers. Let them allow her to skip classes.”

She did jump classes, though not fast enough for Mukundo’s estimation of her skills. Still the problem of minimum age for writing class tenth exam sprang up. One could try to get an exemption. But a workaround was deemed suitable by everyone. She was born a year before birth certificates became compulsory. So, her date of birth could easily be manipulated while registering for the exam so long as the school looked the other way. The school did, because it was pretty common for kids to register a date of birth later than their real one. A practice driven by the mindset that put a premium on government jobs, which often had a maximum age limit. If the child was technically younger, he would have more time to land such a coveted job. In Piyali’s case it was used in the other direction. She was shown to be three years older than she really was. So, she finished class tenth at the age of twelve and class twelfth at the age of fourteen. Her undergraduate education, which Mukundo’s father – Aurobindo Thakur – had sponsored, was in one of the best Science institutes of the country. It had flexible policies. She amassed enough credits to get a degree within two years and they allowed her to have it. By her real age of twenty she had a Ph. D. from the same institute. Now she was armed with multiple job offers from a number academic and research institutes and would pick up one of them in next month or so. Mukundo fervently hoped that she would choose to stay in Kolkata, but he hadn’t told her that. Just like he had never told her how much he had missed her when she was away for her higher studies and how he looked forward to her vacations that she spent in Kolkata. He had not told her a lot of things.

—

To be continued