Between the Assassinations

DAY TWO (AFTERNOON): ST. ALFONSO’S BOYS’ HIGH SCHOOL AND JUNIOR COLLEGE

A short walk from the park rises a massive gray Gothic tower on which is painted a coat of arms and the slogan LUCET ET ARDET. This is the St. Alfonso’s Boys’ High School and Junior College, established 1858, one of the oldest educational establishments in the state of Karnataka. The Jesuit-run school is Kittur’s most famous, and many of its alumni have gone on to the Indian Institute of Technology, the Karnataka Regional Engineering College, and other prestigious universities in India and abroad.

SEVERAL SECONDS, PERHAPS even a full minute, had passed since the explosion, but Lasrado, the chemistry professor, had not moved. He sat at his desk, his arms spread apart, his mouth open. Smoke was billowing from the bench at the back of the room, a yellow dust like pollen had filled the room, and the stench of fireworks was in the air. The students had all left the classroom by now; they watched from the safety of the door.

Gomati Das, the calculus teacher, arrived from next door with most of his class; then came Professor Noronha, the English and ancient history man, bringing his own flock of curious eyes. Father Almeida, the principal, pushed his way through the crowd and entered the acrid classroom, his palm over his nose and mouth. He lowered his hand and cried, “What is the meaning of this nonsense?”

Only Lasrado was left in the classroom; he stood at his desk like the heroic boy who would not leave the burning deck. He replied in a monotone.

“A bomb in class, Pather. The bench all the way in the back. It went opp during the lecture. About one minute apter I began talking.”

Father Almeida squinted at the thick smoke, and then turned to the boys. “The youth of this country have gone to hell and will ruin the names of their fathers and grandfathers-!”

Covering his face with his arm, he walked gingerly to the bench, which had toppled over from the blast.

“The bomb is still smoking,” he shouted. “Shut the doors and call the police.”

He touched Lasrado on the shoulder. “Did you hear me? We must shut the doors and-”

Red faced with shame, quivering with wrath, Lasrado turned suddenly and-addressing principal, teachers, students-yelled:

“You puckers! Puckers!”

In moments the entire junior college emptied; the boys gathered in the garden, or in the corridor of the Science and Natural History Wing, where the skeleton of a shark that had washed up on the beach some decades ago had been suspended from the ceiling as a scientific curiosity. Five of the boys kept apart from all the others, under the shade of a large banyan tree. They were distinguishable from the others by the pleated trousers that they wore, brand-name labels visible on the back pockets or at the side, and by their general air of cockiness. They were Shabbir Ali, whose father owned the only video rental store in town; the Bakht twins, Irfan and Rizvan, children of the black marketeer; Shankara P. Kinni, whose father was a plastic surgeon in the Gulf; and Pinto, the scion of a coffee-estate family.

One of them had planted the bomb. Each of this group had been subjected to multiple periods of suspension from classes for bad behavior, had been kept back a year because of poor marks, and had been threatened with expulsion for insubordination. If anyone would plant a bomb, it had to be one of this lot.

They seemed to think so themselves.

“Did you do it?” Shabbir Ali asked Pinto, who shook his head.

Ali looked at the others, silently repeating the question. “I didn’t do it either,” he stated at the end.

“Maybe God did it,” Pinto said, and all of them giggled. Yet they were aware that everyone in the school suspected them. The Bakht twins said they would go down to the Bunder to eat mutton biryani and watch the waves; Shabbir Ali would go to his father’s video store, or watch a pornographic movie at home; Pinto would probably tag along with him.

Only one of them remained at the school.

He could not leave yet; he loved it too much, the smoke and confusion. He kept his fist clenched.

He mingled among the crowd, listening to the hubbub, drinking it in like honey. Some of the boys had gone back into the building; they stood out on the balconies of the three floors of the college and shouted down to those on the ground; and this added to the hum, as if the college were a beehive struck with a pole. He knew that it was his hubbub-the students were talking about him, the professors were cursing him. He was the god of the morning.

For so many years the institution had spoken to him-spoken rudely: teachers had caned him, headmasters had suspended and threatened to expel him. (And, he was sure, behind his back, it had mocked him for being a Hoyka, a lower caste.) Now he had spoken back to it. He kept his fist clenched.

“Do you think it’s the terrorists?” he heard some boy say. “The Kashmiris, or the Punjabis?”

No, you morons! he wanted to shout. It’s me! Shankara! The lower caste!

There-he watched Professor Lasrado, his hair still disheveled, surrounded by his favorite students, the “good boys,” seeking support and succor from them.

Oddly enough, he felt an urge to go up to Lasrado and touch him on the shoulder, as if to say, Man, I feel your grief, I understand your humiliation, I sympathize with your rage, and thus end the long strife between him and the chemistry professor. He felt the desire to be one of the students whom Lasrado trusted at such moments, one of his “good boys.” But this was a lesser desire.

The main thing was to exult. He watched Lasrado’s suffering and smiled.

He turned to his left; someone in the crowd had said, “The police are coming.”

He hurried to the backyard of the college, opened a gate, and walked down the long flight of stone steps that led to the Junior School. After the new passageway had been opened through the playground, hardly anyone used this route anymore.

The road was called Old Court Road. The court had long ago relocated and the lawyers had moved, and the road had been closed down for years-after the suicide of a visiting businessman here. Shankara had been coming down this road ever since he was a boy; it was his favorite part of town. Even though Shankara could summon his chauffeur up to the college, the man was instructed to wait for him down at the bottom of the steps.

The road was lined with banyan trees; but even strolling in the shade, Shankara had worked up a terrific sweat. (He was always like that, quick to sweat, as if some irrepressible heat were building up inside him.) Most boys had handkerchiefs placed in their pockets by their mothers, but Shankara had never carried one, and to dry himself he had adopted a savage method: he tore large leaves off a nearby tree and scraped his arms and legs over and over, until the skin was red and raw.

Now he felt dry.

About halfway down the hill, he left the road, parting a growth of trees, and walked into a clearing that was completely hidden except to those who knew it. Inside this bower was a statue of Jesus made of dark bronze. Shankara had known of this statue for years, ever since stumbling upon it as a boy while playing hide-and-seek. There was something wrong with the statue; with its dark skin, the lopsided expression on its lips, its bright eyes, it seemed more like an icon of the devil than of the Savior. Even the words at the base-I AM THE RESURRECTION AND THE LIFE-seemed like a taunt to God.

He saw that there was still some fertilizer around the foot of the statue-the remains of the same powder that he had used to detonate his bomb. Quickly he covered the powder with dry leaves. Then he leaned against the base of the Jesus statue. “Puckers,” he said-and giggled.

But as he did so, he felt as if his great triumph had been reduced to that one giggle.

He sat at the foot of the dark Jesus, and the tension and thrill slowly left him. He always relaxed around images of Jesus. There was a time when he had thought about converting to Christianity; among Christians there were no castes. Every man was judged by what he had done with his own life. But after the way the Jesuit priests had treated him-caning him once on a Monday morning in the assembly grounds, in full view of the entire school-he had sworn never to become a Christian. There was no better institution to stop Hindus from converting to Christianity than the Catholic boys’ school.

Waving good-bye to the Jesus, and having checked that there was no fertilizer visible around the base of the statue, he continued downhill.

His chauffeur, a small dark man in a bedraggled khaki uniform, was waiting for him halfway down the road.

“What are you doing here?” he shouted. “I told you: wait at the bottom of the hill for me. Never come up this road!”

The driver bent low with his palms folded. “Sir…don’t be angry…I heard…a bomb…your mother asked me to make sure you were…”

How quickly news had spread. It was bigger than him; it was taking on a life of its own.

“The bomb-oh, it was nothing important,” he told the driver as they walked down. Was that a mistake, he wondered-should he have exaggerated instead?

It was not an appealing irony. His mother had sent the driver to look for him, as if he were a little baby-he, who had exploded the bomb! He gritted his teeth. The driver opened the door of the white Ambassador car for him, but instead of getting into the car, he began shouting.

“You bastard! Son of a bald woman!”

He paused for breath, and then said, “You pucker! You pucker!”

Laughing hysterically, he got into the car, while the driver stared at him.

On the way home, he thought how any other master could expect loyalty from his chauffeur. Yet Shankara expected nothing; he suspected his chauffeur of being a Brahmin.

As they paused at a red light, he heard two ladies in an adjacent Ambassador talking about the bomb blast: “…The police have sealed off the entire school and college now, they say. No one can leave until they find the terrorist.”

It occurred to him he had had a lucky escape; had he stayed any longer, he would have fallen into the trap of the police.

When he got to his mansion, he ran in through the back door and bounded up the steps to his room. He had thought, at one point, of sending a manifesto to the Dawn Herald: “The man Lasrado is a fool, and the bomb was burst in his class to prove this to the whole world.” He could not believe he had left it lying on his desk; he tore it up at once. Then, uncertain whether the pieces could be reassembled and the message re-created, he thought about swallowing them all, but decided instead to swallow only some of the key syllables-“rado,” “bo,” “m,” “class.” The rest he set fire to with his pocket lighter.

Besides, he thought, slightly sick from the sensation of paper settling into his stomach, that was not the right message to send to the press, because ultimately his anger was not solely directed at Lasrado, it went much deeper. If the police asked him for a statement, what he would say was this:

I have burst a bomb to end the five-thousand-year-old caste system that still operates in our country. I have burst a bomb to show that no man should be judged, as I have been, merely by the accident of his birth.

And the lofty sentences made him feel better. He was sure he would be treated differently in prison, as a martyr of some kind. The Hoyka self-advancement committees would organize marches for him, and the police would not dare touch him. Perhaps, when he was released, large crowds would greet him-he would be launched on a political career.

Now he felt he had to send an anonymous letter to the newspaper at all costs. He took a fresh piece of paper and began writing, even as his stomach was churning from the paper he had swallowed.

There! He was done. He read it over:

“The Manifesto of a Wronged Hoyka. Why the Bomb was Burst Today!”

But then he reconsidered. It was well known that he was a Hoyka. Everyone knew it. They gossiped about it, and their gossip was like that faceless buzz out of the black doors of the classrooms today. Everyone in his school, in this entire town, knew that as rich as Shankara Prasad Kinni was, he was only a Hoyka woman’s son. If he sent that letter, they would know it was he who had planted the bomb.

He jumped. It was only the cry of the vegetable seller, who had brought his cart right up outside the back wall of the house: “Tomatoes, tomatoes, ripe red tomatoes, come get your ripe red tomatoes.”

He wanted to go down to the Bunder, check into a cheap hotel, and say he was someone else. No one would ever find him there.

He paced around his room, and then slammed the door; he dived into his bed and pulled the sheet over him. Inside the darkness of the bedsheet he could still hear the vendor shouting, “Tomatoes, ripe red tomatoes, hurry before they all rot!”

In the morning, his mother was watching an old black-and-white Hindi film that she had rented from Shabbir Ali’s father’s video store. This was how she spent every morning these days, addicted to old melodramas.

“Shankara, I heard there was some brouhaha in school,” she said, turning as she heard him come down. He ignored her and sat at the table. He could not remember the last time he had spoken a full sentence to his mother.

“Shankara,” his mother said, putting toast on the table before him. “Your Urmila Auntie is coming. Please stay around the house today.”

He bit into the toast, saying nothing to his mother. He found her possessive, and pesky, and hectoring. But he knew that she was in awe of her half-Brahmin son; she felt beneath him, because she was a full-blooded Hoyka.

“Shankara! Please tell me: Will you stay around? Will you be nice to me just today?”

Dropping his toast onto his plate, he got to his feet and headed for the stairs.

“Shan-ka-ra! Come back!”

Even as he cursed her, he understood her fears. She did not want to face the Brahmin woman alone. Her sole claim to acceptance, to respectability, was the production of a male child, an heir-and if he wasn’t in the house, then she had nothing to show. She was just a Hoyka trespassing onto a Brahmin’s household.

He thought, It is her own fault if she feels wretched in their presence. Again and again he had told her, “Mother, ignore our Brahmin relatives. Don’t continually humiliate yourself in front of them. If they don’t want us, let us not want them.”

But she could not do that; she still wanted to be accepted. And her ticket of acceptance was Shankara. Not that he himself was fully acceptable to the Brahmins. They viewed him as the product of a buccaneering adventure on the part of his father; they associated him (he was sure) with an entire range of corruptions. Mix one part premarital sex and one part caste violation in a black pot and what do you get? This cute little Satan: Shankara.

Some Brahmin relatives, like Urmila Auntie, had visited him for years, although they never seemed to enjoy fondling his cheeks, or sending flying kisses his way, or doing the other repellent things aunties did to nephews. He got the feeling, around her, that he was being tolerated.

Fuck, he did not like being tolerated.

He had the driver take him to Umbrella Street, and he gazed blankly out of the window as the car passed the furniture shops and sugarcane juice stands. He got off at White Stallion Talkies. “Don’t wait for me; I’ll call you when I’m done with the movie.”

As he was climbing the steps, he saw the owner of a store nearby waving at him vigorously. A relative, on his mother’s side. The man flashed him enormous smiles; then he began gesturing for him to come sit in his shop. Shankara was always treated as someone special among his Hoyka relatives: because he was half Brahmin, and hence so much higher than them in caste terms; or because he was so rich, and hence so much higher than them in class terms. Swearing to himself, he kept going up the stairs. Didn’t these stupid Hoykas understand? There was nothing he hated more than their groveling to him because of his half-Brahminness. If they had been contemptuous to him, if they had forced him to crawl into their shops to expiate the sin of being half Brahmin, then wouldn’t he have come to see them every day!

There was another reason for him not to visit this particular relative. He had heard a rumor that the plastic surgeon Kinni had kept a mistress in this part of town-another Hoyka girl. He suspected that the relative would know of this woman, that he would be thinking constantly, This fellow Shankara-poor, poor Shankara-little does he know of his father’s treachery. Shankara knew all about his father’s treachery-this father whom he had not seen for six years, who no longer even wrote or called over the phone, although he still sent home packages of candies and foreign-made chocolates. Yet somehow he felt that his father knew what life was about. A Hoyka mistress near the theater, and another beautiful Hoyka woman for a wife. Now he was leading a life of ease and luxury in the Gulf, fixing the noses and lips of rich Arab women. Another mistress there, for sure. Fellows like his father belonged to no caste or religion or race; they lived for themselves. They were the only real men in this world.

The box office was shuttered up. NEXT SHOW 8:30 P.M. He came down the stairs quickly, avoiding eye contact with his relative. Turning down a couple of streets in a hurry, he went into the Ideal Traders Ice Cream Parlor and ordered a chikoo milk shake.

He sucked it down quickly, and with the sugar in his brain he leaned back and chuckled and said to himself:

“Pucker!”

So he had done it; he had humiliated Lasrado for having humiliated him.

“One more chikoo milk shake!” he shouted. “With double ice cream!”

Shankara had always been one of the rotten apples at school. Since the age of eight or nine, he had been in trouble. But the most trouble he had ever had was with this chemistry teacher with the speech impediment. One morning, Lasrado had caught him smoking a cigarette in the sugarcane juice stand outside the college.

“Smoking bepore the age of twenty will arrest your development as a normal human being,” Mr. Lasrado had shouted. “Ip your pather were here, and not in the Gulp, he would do exactly what I am doing now…”

For the rest of that day, Shankara was made to kneel outside the chemistry class. He knelt with his eyes to the ground, and thought, over and over again, He is doing this to me because I am a Hoyka. If I were a Christian or a Bunt he would never have humiliated me like this.

That night, as he lay in bed, the thought had come to him, Since he has hurt me, I will hurt him back. And it came to him so clearly and succinctly, like a ray of sunlight, like a credo for his entire life. The initial euphoria turned into a restlessness, and he turned from side to side in the bed, saying, “Mustafa, Mustafa.” He had to meet Mustafa now.

The bomb-maker.

He had heard the name several weeks ago, at Shabbir Ali’s place.

They had just-all five of the “bad boys” gang-watched another porno at Shabbir Ali’s place that night. The woman had been entered from behind; the big black man had stuck his cock into her again and again. Shankara had no idea it could be done that way too; nor did Pinto, who kept squealing with pleasure. Shabbir Ali watched his friends’ amusement with detachment; he had seen this video many times, and it no longer excited his lust. He lived with such famil iarity with evil that nothing excited him anymore-neither scenes of fornication nor rape nor even bestiality; a constant exposure to vice had nearly returned him to a state of innocence.

After the video, the boys lay on Shabbir Ali’s bed, threatening to jerk off right there, while their host warned them not even to think about it.

Shabbir Ali produced a condom to keep them happy, and they took turns sticking fingers into it.

“Who’s this for, Shabbir?”

“My girlfriend.”

“Shut up, you homo.”

“You’re the homo!”

The others talked about sex, and Shankara, staring at the ceiling, pretending to be absorbed in himself, listened. He felt he was always being kept out of such discussions, because the others knew he was a virgin. There was a girl in the college who “talked” to men. Shabbir Ali had “talked” to her; he implied that he had done much more. Shankara had tried to pretend that he too had “talked” to women; maybe even screwed a whore on Old Court Road. He knew that the others saw through him.

Ali began passing things around; the condom was followed by a dumbbell that he kept under his bed; copies of Hustler, Playboy, and the official NBA magazine.

“Guess what this is,” he said. It was something small and black, with a timer attached to it.

“It’s a detonator,” he said, when no one could guess.

“What does it do?” Shankara asked, standing up on the bed and holding the thing to the light.

“It detonates, you idiot.” There was laughter. “You use it in a bomb.

“It’s the easiest thing on earth, to make a bomb,” Shabbir said. “Take a bag of fertilizer, and then put this detonator in it, and that’s it.”

“Where would you get it?” someone, not Shankara, asked.

“Mustafa gave it to me,” Shabbir Ali said, almost in an aside.

Mustafa, Mustafa. Shankara clung tightly to the name.

“Where does he live?” asked one of the twins.

“Down by the Bunder. In the pepper market. Why?” Shabbir Ali poked his questioner. “You planning on making a bomb?”

“Why not?”

More giggling. And Shankara had said nothing more that evening, saying, Mustafa, Mustafa, to himself, terrified he would forget the name unless he said nothing else all evening.

As he was stirring his third chikoo shake, two men came and sat down next to him: two policemen. One ordered an orange juice, and the other wanted to know how many types of tea were served at the shop. Shankara got up; then sat down. He knew they would start talking about him. His heart beat faster.

“Only the detonator went off, and it blew the fertilizer all around the room. That idiot who made it thought making a bomb is as simple as sticking a detonator into a bag of fertilizer. It’s a good thing, otherwise some of those boys would have been killed.”

“What is the youth of this country coming to?”

“These days, it’s all sex, sex, and violence. The whole country is going the Punjab way.”

One of the cops caught him staring, and stared back. He turned away. Maybe I should have stuck around with Urmila Auntie. Maybe I should have kept indoors today.

But what guarantee that she-even though she was his auntie-wouldn’t betray him? You never knew with Brahmins. As a boy, he had been taken to a wedding of one of his Brahmin relatives. His mother never came to such events, but his father put him in the car, and then told him to play with his cousins. The Brahmin boys invited him to join in a competition. An inch of salt sat on a slab of vanilla ice cream; the challenge was for someone to eat it. “You idiot,” one of the others shouted, when Shankara put his spoon down, a scoop of salty ice cream in his mouth. “It was just a joke!”

As the years passed, it was always the same. Once, a Brahmin boy in school had invited him home. He took a chance, he liked the fellow, he said yes. The boy and his mother invited Shankara into the drawing room. It was a “modern” family-they had lived abroad. He saw miniature Eiffel Towers and porcelain milkmaids in the drawing room, and he felt reassured that he would not be ill treated here.

He was given tea and biscuits, and made to feel perfectly at home. But as he left, he turned and saw his friend’s mother with a cleaning rag in her left hand. She had begun wiping the sofa where he had been sitting.

His caste seemed to be common knowledge to people who had no business knowing it. One day, when he had gone to play cricket at Nehru Maidan, an old man had stood watching him from the wall of the playground. In the end, he called Shankara over, and examined his face, neck, and wrists for several minutes. Shankara had stood helpless during the examination: he just looked at the wrinkles that radiated from the old man’s eyes.

“You’re the son of Vasudev Kinni and the Hoyka woman, aren’t you?”

He insisted that Shankara walk along with him.

“Your father always was a headstrong man. He would never agree to an arranged marriage. One day he found your mother, and he told all the Brahmins, ‘To hell with you. I am marrying this beautiful creature, whether you like it or not.’ I knew what would happen; you would be a bastard. Neither a Brahmin nor a Hoyka. I told your father this. He would not listen.”

The man patted him on the shoulder. The unselfconscious way in which he touched Shankara suggested that he was not a bigot, not caste-obsessed, but just someone speaking the sad truth of life.

“You too belong to a caste,” said the old fellow. “The Brahmo-Hoykas, in between the two. They are mentioned in the scriptures, and we know that they exist somewhere. They are a people separate entirely from other humans. You should talk to them, and marry one of them. That way everything will be normal again.”

“Yes, sir,” Shankara said, not knowing why he said it.

“Today, there is no such thing as caste,” the man said with regret. “Brahmins eat meat. Kshatriyas get educated and write books. And lower castes convert to Christianity and Islam. You heard what happened at Meenakshipuram, didn’t you? Colonel Gaddafi is trying to destroy Hinduism, and the Christian priests are hand in glove with him.”

They walked along for a while, until they came to the bus stand.

“You must find your own caste,” said the man. “You must find your people.” He lightly embraced Shankara and boarded the bus, where he began to jostle with young men for a seat. Shankara felt sorry for this old Brahmin. He had never in his life had to catch a bus; there was always the chauffeur.

Shankara thought, He is of a higher caste than me, but he is poor. What does this thing mean, then, caste?

Is it just a fable for old men like him? If you just said to yourself, “Caste is a fiction,” would it vanish like smoke; if you said, “I am free,” would you realize you had always been free?

He had finished his fourth chikoo milk shake. He felt sick.

As he left the ice-cream shop, all he wanted to do was to go visit Old Court Road. To sit by that statue of the dark Jesus.

He looked around to see if the police were following him. Of course, on a day like this he could not go anywhere near the Jesus statue. It was suicide. They would be watching all routes into the school.

He thought of Daryl D’Souza. That was the man to go see! In twelve years in the schooling system, Daryl D’Souza was the only one who had been decent to Shankara.

Shankara had first seen the professor at a political rally. This was the Hoyka Pride and Self-Expression Day Rally held at the Nehru Maidan-the greatest political event in the history of Kittur, the newspaper would say the following day. Ten thousand Hoykas had filled the maidan to demand their rights as a full-fledged community, and to ask retribution for the five millennia of injustice done to them.

The warm-up speaker talked about the language issue. The official language of the town should be declared Tulu, the language of the common man, and not Kannada, which was the Brahmin language.

A thunderclap of applause followed.

The professor, although not himself a Hoyka, had been invited as a sympathetic outsider; he was sitting next to the guest of honor, Kittur’s member of Parliament, who was a Hoyka, the pride of his community. A three-time MP, and also a junior member of the Cabinet of India-a sign to the entire community of how high they could aim.

Eventually, after many more preliminary speakers, the member of Parliament got up. He began to shout:

“We, brother and sister Hoykas, were not even allowed into the temple in the old days, did you know? The priest stood at the door, saying, ‘You low-caste!’”

He paused, to let the insult reverberate among his listeners.

“‘Low-caste! Go back!’ But ever since I was elected to Parliament-by you, my people-do the Brahmins dare do that to you? Do they dare call you ‘low-caste’? We are ninety percent of this town! We are Kittur! If they hit us, we will hit them back! If they shame us, we will…”

After the speech, someone recognized Shankara. He was led into a small tent where the member of Parliament was relaxing after the speech, and introduced as the plastic surgeon Kinni’s son. The great man, who was sitting on a wooden chair, a drink in his hand, set his glass down firmly, spilling his drink. He took Shankara’s hand in his hand and gestured for him to squat down on the ground beside him.

“In the light of your family situation, your high status in society, you are the future of the Hoyka community,” the MP said. He paused, and belched.

“Yes, sir.”

“You understand what I said?” asked the great man.

“Yes, sir.”

“The future is ours. We are ninety percent of this town. All that Brahmin shit is finished,” he said-flicking his wrist.

“Yes, sir.”

“If they hit you, you hit them back. If they…if they…” The great man made circles with his hand, to complete the slurred statement.

Shankara wanted to shout out in joy. “Brahmin shit!” Yes, that was exactly how he would put it himself; and here was a member of Parliament, a cabinet minister in the government of Rajiv Gandhi, talking just as he would!

Then an aide led Shankara from the tent. “Mr. Kinni”-the aide squeezed Shankara’s arm-“if you could make a small donation towards this evening’s function. Just a small amount…”

Shankara emptied his pockets. Fifty rupees. He gave it all to the aide, who bowed deeply and told him once more that he was the future of the Hoyka community.

Shankara watched. Already hundreds of men were getting into lines, where beer and quarter-liter bottles of rum were being distributed to them, as a bribe for having attended the rally and cheered the speakers. He shook his head with disapproval. He didn’t like the idea that he was part of ninety percent of his town. Now it seemed to him that the Brahmins were defenseless-a former elite of Kittur who now lived in constant fear of being robbed of their homes and their wealth by the Hoykas, the Bunts, the Konkanas, and everyone else in town. The sheer averageness of the Hoykas-whatever they did became the average at once, by definition-repulsed him.

The following morning, he read the newspaper, and thought he had been too harsh on the Hoykas. He remembered the professor who had been up onstage, and found out from his chauffeur where he lived. He paced backward and forward outside the front gate of the professor’s house for a while. Finally he opened the gate, approached the house, and pressed the front doorbell.

The professor opened the door. Shankara said, “Sir, I am a Hoyka. You are the only man in this town whom I trust. I wish to talk with you.”

“I know who you are,” Professor D’Souza said. “Come in.”

Professor D’Souza and Shankara sat in the living room and had a long talk.

“Who is that member of Parliament? What is his caste?” the professor asked.

The question confused Shankara.

“He is one of us, sir. A Hoyka.”

“Not quite,” the professor said. “He is a Kollaba. Have you heard the term? There is no such thing as a Hoyka, my dear fellow. The caste is subdivided into seven subcastes. You understand the term? Subcaste? Good. The member of Parliament is a Kollaba, the top of the seven subcastes. The Kollabas have always been millionaires. The British anthropologists of Kittur noted this fact with interest even in the nineteenth century. The Kollabas have exploited the other six Hoyka castes for years. And now once again, this man is playing the Hoyka card to get himself reelected, so he can sit in an office in New Delhi and accept large envelopes filled with cash from businessmen who want to set up garment factories in the Bunder.”

Seven subcastes? The Kollabas? Shankara had never heard any of this. He gaped.

“This is the big problem with you Hindus,” the professor said. “You are mysteries to yourselves!”

Shankara felt ashamed to be a Hindu; what a repulsive thing, this caste system that his ancestors had devised. But at the same time he was annoyed with Daryl D’Souza. Who was this man, to lecture him on caste? How dare the Christians do this? Hadn’t they been Hindus too, at some point? Shouldn’t they have remained Hindus and defeated the Brah mins from within, instead of taking the easy way out by converting?

He crushed his annoyance into a smile.

“What do we do about the caste system, sir? How do we get rid of it?”

“One solution is what the Naxalites have done, just to blow up the upper castes entirely,” said the professor. He had a quaint, womanlike habit of dipping his large round biscuit in milk, and then hurrying to eat it before it got too soggy. “They blow up the entire system; that way you can start from scratch.”

“From scratch”-the American idiom excited Shankar. “I too think we should start from scratch, sir. I think we should destroy the caste system and start from scratch.”

“My dear boy: you are a nihilist,” the professor said, with an approving smile. He bit into his soggy biscuit.

They had not met after that; the professor had been traveling, and Shankara had been too shy to barge in on him a second time. But he had never forgotten the conversation. Now, wandering around town in a daze, the sugar from the milk shakes upsetting his stomach, he thought, He’s the only man who’d understand what I’ve done. I’ll confess everything to him.

The professor’s house was packed with students. A reporter from the Dawn Herald was there, asking the big man questions about terrorism. A black tape recorder sat on the desk. Shankara, who had come to the professor’s house by autorickshaw, waited with the students and watched.

“It is an absolute act of nihilism on the part of some student,” the professor was saying, his eyes on the tape recorder. “He should be caught and thrown into jail.”

“Sir, what does this episode say about today’s India, sir?”

“This is an example of the nihilism of our youth,” said Professor D’Souza. “They are lost and directionless. They have…”-a pause-“lost the moral standards of our nation. Our traditions are being forgotten.”

Shankara felt himself choke with rage.

He stormed out.

He caught an autorickshaw to Shabbir Ali’s house and rang the bell. A bearded man in a North Indian-style kurta, with his chest hair sticking out, opened the door. It took Shankara some time to recognize him as Shabbir Ali’s father, whom he had never before seen.

“He is not allowed to talk to any of his friends,” he said. “You fellows have corrupted my son.” And he slammed the door in Shankara’s face.

So, the great Shabbir Ali, the man who “talked” to women and played with condoms, was locked up in his house. By his father. Shankara wanted to laugh.

He was tired of moving in autorickshaws; so he called home from a pay phone and asked for the car to be sent to Shabbir Ali’s house to pick him up.

Back home, he bolted the door to his room. He lay in bed. He picked up the phone and put it down and counted to five and then picked it up again. Eventually it worked. In Kittur, that was all you had to do to enter into someone else’s world.

He was listening to a “cross-connection.”

The phone line crackled and came to life. A man and woman, possibly husband and wife, were talking. They were speaking in a language he couldn’t understand; he thought it might be Malayalam-the speakers must be Muslim, he thought. He wondered what they were talking about-was the man complaining about his health, was she asking about more money for the household? Why were they on the phone? he wondered. Was the man living away from Kittur? Whatever their situation, whatever they were saying in that foreign language, he felt the intimacy of their conversation. It would be nice to have a wife or a girlfriend, he thought. Not to be so alone all the time. Even a single real friend. Even that would have kept him from planting the bomb and getting into all this trouble.

The man’s tone changed suddenly. He began to whisper.

“I think someone’s breathing on the line,” the man said-or so Shankara imagined.

“Yes, you’re right. Some pervert is listening to us,” the woman replied-or so Shankara imagined.

Then the man hung up.

I have the worst of both castes in my blood, Shankara thought, lying in bed, the receiver of the phone still at his ear. I have the anxiety and fear of the Brahmin, and I have the tendency to act without thinking of the Hoyka. In me the worst of both has fused and produced this monstrosity which is my personality.

He was going mad. Yes, he was convinced of that. He wanted to get out of the house again. He worried that the chauffeur was noticing his restlessness.

He went out the back door and slipped out of the house without the driver observing him.

But he probably doesn’t suspect me, he thought. He probably thinks I’m a useless rich brat, like Shabbir Ali.

All these rich fellows like Shabbir Ali, he told himself bitterly, lived out a kind of code. They talked things, but did not do them. They had condoms at home, but did not use them; they kept detonators, but did not explode them. Talk, and talk, and talk. That was their life. It was like the salt on the ice cream. The salt was smeared on the slab of vanilla and left there in the open; but no one was meant to lick it! That was only a joke! It was meant to be talk only, all this bomb-exploding stuff. If you knew the code, you understood it was just talk. Only he had taken them seriously; he had thought that they fucked women and blew up bombs. He did not know about the code, because he did not really belong-either to the Brahmins, or to the Hoykas, or even to the gang of spoiled brats.

He was in a secret caste-a caste of Brahmo-Hoykas, of which he had found only one representative so far, himself, and which put him apart from all the other castes of humankind.

He took another autorickshaw to the junior college, and from there, making sure no one was watching him, walked up Old Court Road with his head to the ground and his hands in his pockets.

He parted the trees, came up to the statue of Jesus, and sat down. The smell of fertilizer was still strong in the air. Closing his eyes, he tried to calm himself. Instead, he began to think about the suicide that had taken place on this road many years ago. He had heard about it from Shabbir Ali. A man had been found hanging from a tree by this road-perhaps even in this spot. A suitcase lay at his feet, broken open. Inside, the police found three gold coins and a note: “In a world without love, suicide is the only transformation possible.” Then there was a letter, addressed to a woman in Bombay.

Shankara opened his eyes. It was as if he could see the man from Bombay, hanging in front of him, his feet dangling in front of the dark Jesus.

He wondered, was that going to be his fate? Would he end up condemned and hanged?

He remembered again the fateful events. After the conversation at Shabbir Ali’s house, he had gone down to the Bunder. He had asked for Mustafa, describing him as a man who sold fertilizers; he had been directed to a market. He found a row of vegetable sellers, he asked for Mustafa, and was told, “Go upstairs.” He climbed the stairs. He found himself in a pitch-black space where a thousand men seemed to be coughing at once. He too began to cough. As his eyes got used to the dark, he realized he was in a pepper market. Giant gunnysacks were stacked up against the grimy walls, and coolies, coughing incessantly, were hauling them around. Then the darkness ended, and he arrived in an open courtyard. Once again he asked:

“Where is Mustafa?”

He was directed by a man lying on a cart of old vegetables toward an open door.

He went in and found three men at a round table playing cards.

“Mustafa’s not in,” said a man with narrow eyes. “What do you want?”

“A bag of fertilizer.”

“Why?”

“I am growing lentils,” Shankara said.

The man laughed. “What kind?”

“Beans. Green gram. Horse gram.”

The man laughed again. He put his cards down, went into a room, and hauled out an enormous gunnysack, putting it down by Shankara’s feet.

“What else do you need to grow your beans?”

“A detonator,” Shankara said.

The men at the table all put down their cards together.

In the inner room of the house, he was sold a detonator; he was told how to turn the dial and set the timer. It would cost more than Shankara had on him at that moment, so he came back the next week with the money, and took the bag and the detonator back with him by autorickshaw, and got off at the bottom of Old Court Road. He had hidden it all near the statue of Jesus.

One Sunday, he went around the school. It was like the movie Papillon, one of his favorites, the scene where the hero plans on how to escape from jail-it was as exciting as that. He was seeing his school as if for the first time, with all the keenness of a fugitive’s eye. After that, on that fateful Monday, he took the bag of fertilizer with him to school and attached the detonator to it, turned the timer to one hour, and left it under the back row, where he knew no one would sit.

Then he waited, counting off the hour minute by minute, like the hero in Papillon.

At midnight, the phone began ringing.

It was Shabbir Ali.

“Lasrado wants to see us all in his office, man! Tomorrow, first thing!”

All five of them had to be there in his office. The police would be present.

“He’s going to have a lie detector.”

Shabbir paused. Then he shouted, “I know you did it! Why don’t you confess? Why don’t you confess at once!”

Shankara’s blood went chill. “Fuck you!” he yelled back, and slammed down the phone. But then he thought, My God, so Shabbir knew all along. Of course! Everyone knew all along. Everyone in the bad boys’ gang must have known; and by now they must have told the whole town. He thought, Let me confess right now. It would be best. Perhaps the police would give him some credit for having turned himself in. He dialed 100, which he thought was the police number.

“I want to speak to the deputy inspector general, please.”

“Ha?”

The voice was followed by a shriek of incomprehension.

Thinking he’d get better results, he spoke in English: “I want to confess. I planted the bomb.”

“Ha?”

“The bomb. It was me.”

“Ha?”

Another pause. The phone was transferred.

He repeated his message to another person on the other line.

Another pause.

“Sorrysorrysorry?”

He put the phone down in exasperation. Damn Indian police-couldn’t even answer a phone call properly; how the hell were they going to catch him?

Then the phone rang again: Irfan, calling on behalf of the twins.

“Shabbir just called us; he says we did it, man. I didn’t do it! Rizvan didn’t do it either! Shabbir is lying!”

Then he understood: Shabbir had called everyone, and accused them all-hoping to extract a confession! Relief mingled with anger. He had almost been trapped! Now he felt anxious that the police might trace his 100 call back to his phone. He needed a plan, he thought, a plan. Yes, he got it: he would say, if they asked, that he was calling to report Shabbir Ali for the crime. Shabbir is a Muslim, he would say. He wanted to do this to punish India for Kashmir.

The following morning, Lasrado was in the principal’s office, sitting next to Father Almeida, who was at his desk. The two men stared at the five suspects.

“I have scientipic evidence,” Lasrado said. “Pingerprints survive on the black stub of the bomb.” He sensed incredulity among the accused, so he added, “Pingerprints have survived even on the loaves of bread lept behind in the Paraoh’s tomb. They are indestructible. We will pind the pucker who has done this, rest assured.”

He pointed a finger.

“And you, Pinto, a Christian boy-shame on you!”

“I didn’t do it, sir,” Pinto said.

Shankara wondered. Should he also throw in an interjection of his innocence, just to be safe?

Lasrado looked at them piercingly, waiting for the guilty party to turn himself in. Minutes passed. Shankara understood: He has no fingerprints. He has no lie detector. He is desperate. He has been humiliated, mocked, and rendered a joke in college, and he wants revenge.

“You puckers!” Lasrado shouted. And then, again, in a trembling voice, “Are you lapping at me? Are you lapping because I cannot say the letter ‘epp’?”

Now the boys could barely control themselves. Shankara saw that even the principal, having turned his face to the ground, was trying to suppress his laughter. Lasrado knew this; you could see it on his face. Shankara thought, This man has been mocked his whole life because of his speech impediment. That’s why he has been such a jerk in class. And now his entire life’s work has been destroyed by this bomb; he will never be able to look back on his life with the pride, however false, that other professors do; never be able to say, at his farewell party, “My students, although I was strict, loved me.” Always there would be someone whispering at the back, “Yes, they loved you so much they exploded a bomb in your class!”

At that moment, Shankara thought, I wish I had just left this man alone. I wish I had not humiliated him, as so many have humiliated me and my mother.

“I did it, sir.”

Everyone in the room turned to Shankara.

“I did it,” he said. “Now stop bothering these other boys and punish me.”

Lasrado banged his hand on the desk. “Motherpucker, is this a joke?”

“No, sir.”

“Op course it is a joke!” Lasrado shouted. “You are mocking me! You are mocking me in public!”

“No, sir-”

“Shut up!” Lasrado said. “Shut up!” He flexed a finger and pointed it wildly around the room.

“Puckers! Puckers! Get out!”

Shankara walked out with the four innocent ones. He could see that they did not believe his confession: they too thought he had been mocking the teacher to his face.

“You went too far there,” Shabbir Ali said. “You really have no respect for anything in this world, man.”

Shankara waited outside the college, smoking. He was waiting for Lasrado. When the door to the staff room opened and the chemistry professor walked out, Shankara threw the cigarette to the ground and stubbed it out with a scrape of his shoe. He watched his teacher for a while. He wished there were some way he could go up to him and say he was sorry.