By the age of ten, Argha had reached a physical and intellectual stature that made him an anomaly. He stood taller than his peers, his chiseled features sharpening into a striking likeness of a young Hrithik Roshan—broad shoulders, a regal nose, and those haunting green eyes that seemed to calculate the velocity of every falling leaf.
But it was his registration for the Madhyamik (Class 10 Board Exams) that sent shockwaves through the state.
The Special Dispensation
Biswajit had to travel to the Board of Secondary Education in Kolkata five times to convince them to let a ten-year-old sit for the exams. They thought it was a father's delusion until they sat Argha down in a room with three senior examiners.
They gave him a paper on Higher Mathematics. Argha didn't just solve the problems; he provided three different proofs for a theorem in coordinate geometry, one of which used a method from Complex Analysis that the examiners hadn't seen since their university days.
"Who taught you the Residue Theorem?" one professor asked, his glasses slipping down his nose.
"I found it in a book Baba brought from College Street," Argha replied simply. "It's the only logical way to handle the singularities."
The Examination Hall
When the exams finally arrived, Argha was assigned a center in a nearby town. The sight was surreal: hundreds of nervous sixteen-year-olds huddled together, and in the middle of them sat a ten-year-old boy who looked like a miniature deity.
While others sweated over the physics paper, Argha finished in forty minutes. He spent the remaining two hours staring out the window, watching the fluid dynamics of a distant rain cloud. On his answer sheet, he had not only answered the questions but added footnotes pointing out where the textbook's definition of Entropy was overly simplistic.
The Result that Shook the State
The day the results were announced, a sea of journalists descended upon the quiet village of Midnapore. Argha hadn't just passed; he had scored a perfect 100 in Mathematics, Physics, and Chemistry, breaking a sixty-year-old record.
The headline in The Telegraph read: "The Green-Eyed Einstein of Midnapore."
The Price of Fame
Suddenly, the humble school-teacher's house was no longer a sanctuary. Politicians arrived in white cars with sirens, offering "scholarships" that were really just photo opportunities. Film scouts from Kolkata even approached Biswajit, mesmerized by Argha's looks.
"The boy is a hero," a producer said, eyeing Argha's jawline. "He could be the next superstar. Why waste him on books?"
Biswajit looked at the producer with a cold, quiet fury. "My son is not here to entertain. He is here to explain the universe."
Argha, however, remained untouched by the noise. He spent those weeks in the village library, but he was no longer looking at the shelves. He was writing. He was drafting his first independent research paper on Number Theory, specifically focusing on the distribution of prime numbers—a precursor to his eventual encounter with the Riemann Hypothesis.
He knew that Midnapore was now a closed chapter. His mind was hungry for the high-energy labs and supercomputers of the city.
The Departure
The chapter ends on a humid morning at the Midnapore railway station. Biswajit handed Argha a small bag of books and a packet of home-made sandesh.
"In Bangalore, you will be among the best," Biswajit said, his voice thick with emotion. "But remember, Argha, even the stars have a home they orbit around."
Argha hugged his father. As the train pulled away, the boy looked back at the green fields of West Bengal. He was leaving as a child prodigy; he would return as the man who tamed the sun.