Between the Assassinations

DAY TWO (EVENING): LIGHTHOUSE HILL (THE FOOT OF THE HILL)

You are on a road surrounded by ancient banyan trees; the smell of neem is in the air, an eagle glides overhead. Old Court Road-a long, desolate road with a reputation as a hangout for prostitutes and pimps-leads down from the top of the hill to St. Alfonso’s Boys’ High School and Junior College.

Next to the school you will find a whitewashed mosque dating back to the time of Tippu Sultan; according to local legend, Christians from Valencia suspected of being British sympathizers were tortured here. The mosque is the focus of a legal tussle between the school authorities and a local Islamic organization, both of which claim possession of the land on which it stands. Muslim students from the school are allowed, every Friday, to leave classes for an hour to offer namaz at this mosque, provided they bring a signed note from their fathers, or in case of boys whose fathers are working in the Gulf, from a male guardian. From a bus stand in front of the mosque, express buses go to Salt Market Village.

At least four stalls stand outside the mosque, selling sugarcane juice and Bombay-style bhelpuri and charmuri to passengers at the bus stand.

A FLURRY OF alarm bells rang at ten to nine, warning that this was no ordinary morning. It was a Morning of Martyrs, the thirty-seventh anniversary of the day Mahatma Gandhi had sacrificed his life so that India might live.

Thousands of miles away, in the heart of the nation, in chilly New Delhi, the President was about to bow his head before a sacred torch. Echoing through the massive Gothic edifice of St. Alfonso’s Boys’ High School-through thirty-six classrooms with vaulted ceilings, two outdoor lavatories, a chemistry-cum-biology laboratory, and a refectory where some of the priests were still finishing breakfast-the alarm bells announced that it was time for the school to do the same.

In the Staff Room, Mr. D’Mello, assistant headmaster, folded his copy of the newspaper, noisily, like a pelican folding its wings. Tossing the paper on a sandalwood table, Mr. D’Mello struggled against his paunch to get to his feet. He was the last to leave the Staff Room.

Six hundred and twenty-three boys, pouring out of classrooms and eventually merging into one long line, proceeded into the Assembly Square. In ten minutes they had formed a geometrical pattern, a tight grid around the flagpole at the center of the square.

By the flagpole stood an old wooden platform. And next to the platform stood Mr. D’Mello, drawing the morning air into his lungs and shouting:

“A-ten-shannn!”

The students shuffled in concert. Thump! Their feet knocked the chatter out of the square. Now the morning was ready for the somber ceremony.

The guest of honor had fallen asleep. From the top of the flagpole, the national tricolor hung, limp and crumpled, entirely uninterested in the events organized for its benefit. Alvarez, the old school peon, tugged on a blue cord to goad the recalcitrant piece of cloth into a respectable tautness.

Mr. D’Mello sighed and gave up on the flag. His lungs swelled again:

“Sa-loot!”

The wooden platform began to creak noisily: Father Mendonza, Junior School headmaster, was ascending the steps. At a sign from Mr. D’Mello, he cleared his throat into the booming mike, and launched into a speech on the glories of dying young for your country.

A series of black boxes amplified his nervous voice across the square. The boys listened to their headmaster spellbound. The Jesuit told them the blood of Bhagat Singh and Indira Gandhi fertilized the earth on which they stood, and they brimmed with pride.

Mr. D’Mello, squinting fiercely, kept an eye on the little patriots. He knew that the whole humbug would end any moment. After thirty-three years in an all-boys’ school, no secret of human nature was hidden from him.

The headmaster lumbered toward the crucial part of the morning’s speech.

“It is of course customary on Martyrs’ Day for the government to issue every school in the state with Free Film Day tickets for that following Sunday,” he said. It was as if an electric current had jolted the square. The boys became breathless with anticipation.

“But this year…” The headmaster’s voice quavered. “I regret to announce that there will be no Free Film Day.”

For a moment, not a sound. Then the entire square let out one big, aching, disbelieving groan.

“The government has made a terrible mistake,” the head master said, trying to explain. “A terrible, terrible mistake…They have asked you to go to a house of sin…”

Mr. D’Mello wondered what the headmaster was prattling on about. It was time to bring the speech to an end and send the brats back to class.

“I cannot even find the words to tell you…it has been a terrible mix-up. I am sorry. I…am…”

Mr. D’Mello was looking around for Girish when a movement at the back of the square caught his eye. Trouble had begun. The assistant headmaster, hindered by his massive paunch, struggled to descend from the podium, but then, with a surprising litheness, he slipped through the rows of boys and homed in on the danger zone. Students turned on their toes to watch him as he made his way to the back. His right hand trembled.

A brown dog had climbed up from the playground below the Assembly Square and was loping about behind the boys. Some troublemakers were trying to persuade it to draw nearer with soft whistles and clicks of their tongue.

“Stop that at once!” D’Mello-he was gasping for breath already-stamped his foot toward the dog. The indulged animal mistook the fat man’s advance for another blandishment. The teacher lunged at the dog, and it pulled back, but as he stopped to breathe, it raced back toward him.

The boys were laughing openly now. Waves of confusion spread throughout the square. Over the speaker system the headmaster’s voice wobbled, with a hint of desperation.

“…You boys have no right to misbehave…The Free Film Day is a privilege, not a right…”

“Stone it! Stone it!” someone shouted at D’Mello.

In a moment of panic, the teacher obeyed. Whack! The stone caught the dog on the belly. The animal yelped in pain-he saw a gleam of betrayal in its eyes-before it bounded out of the square and ran down the steps of the playground.

A sensation of sickness tightened in Mr. D’Mello’s gut. The poor animal had been hurt. Turning around, he saw a sea of grinning boys. One of them had goaded him to stone the animal; he swung around, picked a boy at random-only hesitating for a split second to make sure that it wasn’t Girish-and slapped him hard, twice.

When Mr. D’Mello walked into the Staff Room, he found all the other teachers gathered around the sandalwood table. The men were dressed alike, in light-colored half-sleeve shirts, closely checked, with brown or blue trousers that widened into bell-bottoms, while the few women wore peach or yellow polyester-and-cotton-blended saris.

Mr. Rogers, the biology-cum-geology teacher, was reading aloud a schedule of the Free Film Day from the Kannada-language newspaper.

Film One: Save the Tiger

Film Two: The Importance of Physical Exercise

Bonus Reel: The Advantages of Native Sports (with special attention to Kabbadi and Kho-Kho)

After that harmless listing came the bombshell.

Where to send your son or daughter on Free Film Day (1985):

1. St. Milagres Boys’ High School: surnames A to N, White Stallion Talkies; O to Z, Belmore Theater.

2. St. Alfonso’s Boys’ High School: surnames A to N, Belmore Theater; O to Z, Angel Talkies.

“Half our school!” Mr. Rogers’s voice whistled in excitement. “Half our school to Angel Talkies!”

Young Mr. Gopalkrishna Bhatt, only a year out of the teachers’ college in Belgaum, tended to supply the chorus on such occasions. He raised his arms fatalistically:

“What a mix-up! Sending our children to that place!”

Mr. Pundit, senior Kannada language teacher, scoffed at the naïveté of his colleagues. He was a short silver-haired man of startling opinions.

“This is no mix-up, it’s deliberate! The Angel Talkies has bribed all those bloody politicians in Bangalore so they’d send our boys to a house of sin!”

Now the teachers were divided between those who thought it was a mix-up, and those who thought it was a deliberate ploy to corrupt the youth.

“What do you think, Mr. D’Mello?” young Mr. Bhatt called out.

Instead of replying, Mr. D’Mello dragged a cane chair from the sandalwood table toward an open window at the far end of the Staff Room. It was a sunny morning: he had a blue sky, rolling hills, a private vista of the Arabian Sea.

The sky was a dazzling light blue, a thing meant for meditation. A few perfectly formed clouds, like wishes that had been granted, floated through the azure. The arc of Heaven deepened in color as it stretched toward the horizon and touched a crest of the Arabian Sea. Mr. D’Mello invited the morning’s beauty into his agitated mind.

“What a mix-up, eh, Mr. D’Mello?”

Gopalkrishna Bhatt hopped onto the window ledge, block ing the view of the sea. Dangling his legs gleefully, the young man flashed a gap-toothed smile at his senior colleague.

“The only mix-up, Mr. Bhatt,” said the assistant headmaster, “was made on fifteen August 1947, when we thought this country could be run by a people’s democracy instead of a military dictatorship.”

The young teacher nodded his head. “Yes, yes, how true. What about the Emergency, sir-wasn’t that a good thing?”

“We threw that chance away,” Mr. D’Mello said. “And now they’ve shot dead the only politician we ever had who knew how to give this country the medicine it needed.” He closed his eyes again, and concentrated on an image of an empty beach in an attempt to dispel Mr. Bhatt’s presence.

Mr. Bhatt said, “Your favorite’s name is in the paper this morning, Mr. D’Mello. Page four, near the top. You must be a proud man.”

Before Mr. D’Mello could stop him, Mr. Bhatt had begun reading:

The Midtown Rotary Club announces the Winners of its Fourth Annual Inter-School English Elocution Contest.

Theme: Science-A Boon or Curse for the Human Race?

First Prize: Harish Pai, St. Milagres Boys’ High School (Science as a Boon)

Second Prize: Girish Rai, St. Alfonso’s Boys’ High School (Science as a Curse)

The assistant headmaster pulled the newspaper from the hands of his junior colleague. “Mr. Bhatt,” he snarled, “I have often said this publicly: I have no favorites among the boys.”

He closed his eyes, but now his peace of mind was gone.

“Second prize”-the words stung him once again. He had worked with Girish all last evening on the speech-its content, its delivery, the boy’s posture at the mike, everything! And only second prize? His eyes filled with tears. The boy had gotten into a habit of losing these days.

There was commotion in the Staff Room now, and through his closed eyes Mr. D’Mello knew that the headmaster had arrived, and all the teachers were running around him sycophantically. He remained in his seat, though he knew his peace would not last long.

“Mr. D’Mello-” came the nervous voice. “It is a terrible mix-up…one-half of the boys won’t get to see the free film this year.”

The headmaster was gazing at him from near the sandalwood table. Mr. D’Mello ground his teeth. He folded his copy of the newspaper violently; he took his time getting to his feet, and he took his time turning around. The headmaster was mopping his forehead. Father Mendonza was a very tall, very bald man, with strands of heavily oiled hair combed over his naked pate. His large eyes stared out through thick glasses and an enormous forehead glittered with beads of sweat, like a leaf spotted with dew after a shower.

“May I make a suggestion, Father?”

The headmaster’s hand paused with his handkerchief at his brow.

“If we don’t take the boys to Angel Talkies, they’ll see it as a sign of weakness. We’ll only have more trouble with them.”

The headmaster bit his lips. “But…the dangers…one hears of terrible posters…of evils that cannot be put into words…”

“I will take care of the arrangements,” Mr. D’Mello said gravely. “I will take care of the discipline. I give you my word.”

The Jesuit nodded hopefully. As he left the Staff Room, he turned to Gopalkrishna Bhatt, and the depth of gratitude in his voice was unmistakable:

“You too should go along with the assistant headmaster when he takes the boys to Angel Talkies…”

Father Mendonza’s words echoing in his mind, he walked to his eleven a.m. class, his first of the morning. Assistant headmaster. He knew that he had not been the Jesuit’s first choice. The insult still smarted after all this time. The post was his by right of seniority. For thirty years he had taught Hindi and arithmetic to the boys of St. Alfonso’s, and maintained order in the school. But Father Mendonza, who had recently come down from Bangalore with his oily comb-over and six trunks full of modern ideas, stated his preference for someone smart in appearance. Mr. D’Mello had a pair of eyes and a mirror at home. He knew what that remark meant.

He was an overweight man entering the final phase of middle age, he breathed through his mouth, and a thicket of hair poked out his nose. The centerpiece of his body was a massive potbelly, a hard knot of flesh pregnant with a dozen cardiac arrests. To walk, he had to arch his lower back, tilt his head, and screw his brow and nose together in a foul-looking squint. “Ogre,” the boys chanted as he passed. “Ogre, Ogre, Ogre!”

At noon, he ate a dish of red fish curry out of a stainless-steel tiffin-carrier, at his favorite window in the Staff Room. The smell of the curry did not please his colleagues, so he ate alone. Done, he slowly took his tiffin-carrier to the public tap outside. The boys stopped their games. Since it was out of the question for him to bend forward (the paunch, of course), he had to fill his tiffin-carrier with water and raise it to his mouth. Gargling loudly, he belched out a saffron torrent several times. The boys shrieked with pleasure each time. When he was back in the Staff Room, they crowded by the tap: little skeletons of fish had piled up at its base, like deposits of a nascent coral reef. Awe and disgust commingled in the voices of the boys, and they chanted, in a unison that grew louder and louder: “Ogreogreogre!”

“The main problem with selecting Mr. D’Mello as my assistant is that he has an excessive penchant for old-fashioned violence,” the young headmaster wrote to the Jesuit Board. Mr. D’Mello caned too often, and too much. Sometimes, even as he wrote on the blackboard, his left hand would reach for the duster. He would turn around and send it flying at the last row, and there would be a scream and the bench would topple over under the weight of diving boys.

He had done worse. Father Mendonza reported in detail a shocking story he had heard. Once, many years ago, a small boy had been talking in the front row, right in front of D’Mello. The teacher said nothing. He just sat still and let his anger stew. Suddenly, it was said, there was a moment of blackness in his brain. He snatched the boy from his seat and hoisted him into the air and took him to the back of the class: there he shut him in a cupboard. The boy beat on the insides of the cupboard with his fists for the rest of the class. “I can’t breathe in here!” he shouted. The beating inside the cupboard grew louder and louder; then fainter and fainter. When the cupboard was finally opened, a full ten minutes later, there was a stench of fresh urine, and the boy fell out in an unconscious heap.

Then there was the little matter of his past. Mr. D’Mello had been in training at the Valencia Seminary to be a priest for six years, before leaving suddenly, and on bad terms with his superiors. The rumor was that he had challenged the holy dogma, and declared that the policies of the Vatican on the matter of family planning were illogical in a country like India-and so walked out, abandoning six years of his life. Other rumors suggested that he was a freethinker, who did not attend church regularly.

The weeks went on. The Jesuit Board inquired by mail if Father Mendonza had made a decision yet. The young headmaster confessed he had had no time for that. Every morning the padre found that his first duty was to discipline a long line of recalcitrants. The same faces appeared morning after morning. Talking in class. Disfiguring school property. Pinching studious boys.

One day, a foreigner, a Christian woman from Britain who was a generous donor to worthy causes in India, paid a visit to the school. Father Mendonza oiled his surviving strands of hair with special care that morning. He solicited Mr. Pundit’s assistance in guiding the British lady around the school. With great courtesy, the Kannada teacher explained to the foreigner the proud history of St. Alfonso’s, its celebrated alumni, its role in civilizing the savage nature of this part of India, once a bare wilderness overrun by elephants. Father Mendonza began to feel that Mr. Pundit was as smart a fellow as he was likely to find in this part of the world. Then, all at once, the foreigner began shrieking. The fingers of her hand spread out with horror. Julian d’Essa, the coffee-plantation scion, was standing on the last bench of a giggling classroom, exposing his privates to the world. Mr. Pundit rushed at the crazy boy, but the damage had been done. The Jesuit saw the foreign donor step back from him with terror-struck eyes: as if he were the exhibitionist.

An old member of the board called Father Mendonza from Bangalore that evening to console him. Did the “reformer” not finally see the truth? Modern ideas of education were fine in Bangalore. But in a backwater like Kittur, miles and miles and miles away from civilization?

“To manage a school filled with six hundred little animals,” the old member of the board told the sobbing young headmaster, “you need an ogre now and then.”

Two months after his arrival at St. Alfonso’s, Father Mendonza summoned Mr. D’Mello over to his office one morning. He told Mr. D’Mello that he had no option but to ask him to serve as the assistant headmaster. To handle a school like this, the Jesuit declared, he needed a man like Mr. D’Mello.

Stop for a moment, D’Mello told himself. Catch your breath. He was about to go into the classroom-about to declare war. The plan had worked well so far; he had come the way of the rear entrance. A surprise attack. He had figured that the news of Mendonza’s change of mind on Angel Talkies was by now common knowledge. The boys had of course construed it as cowardice on the part of the school authorities. The danger was highest now, but also the opportunity to teach them a lasting lesson.

The class was quiet-too quiet.

D’Mello went in on tiptoe. The last row, where the tall, overdeveloped boys sat, were clumped together, a soundless knot around a magazine. D’Mello hovered over the boys. The magazine was the usual kind of magazine. “Julian,” he said gently.

The boys turned around, and the magazine dropped to the floor. Julian stood up with a grin. He was the tallest of the tall, the most overdeveloped of the overdeveloped. An inverted triangle of chest hair jutted out of his open shirt already, and when he rolled up a sleeve and made a muscle, D’Mello could see his biceps swelling into pale, thick tubers. As the son of a coffee-planting dynasty, Julian d’Essa could never be expelled from the school. But he could be punished. The little demon looked up at D’Mello, with a lecherous grin pasted on his face. In his mind Mr. D’Mello heard d’Essa’s voice; it goaded him on to do his worst: Ogre! Ogre! Ogre!

He heaved the boy out of the seat by his collar. Rip-the collar came off the shirt. D’Mello’s shaking elbow straightened out-it connected with the side of the boy’s face.

“Get out of the class, you animal…and kneel down…”

After shoving Julian out of the class, he put his hands on his knees and caught his breath. He picked up the magazine and flipped its pages about for public view.

“So this is the sort of thing you boys want to read, huh? Now you want to go to Angel Talkies? You think you’ll see the posters on the wall: those Murals of Sin?”

He walked around the class with his shaking elbow and thundered: Even the lechers were ashamed to go into Angel Talkies. They covered themselves in blankets and pushed rupee notes shamefully to the desk attendants. Inside, the walls of the theater were papered with posters of X-rated films, purveyors of every known depravity. To see a movie in such a theater was a corruption of body and soul alike.

He hurled the magazine against a wall. Did they think he was frightened to beat them? No! He was not one of these “new-fashioned” teachers trained in Bangalore or Bombay! Violence was his staple, and his dessert. Spare the rod, and spoil the child.

He collapsed onto his chair. He was horribly out of breath. A dull pain spread its roots across his chest. He saw with satisfaction that his speech had had some effect. The boys were sitting without a squeak. The sight of Julian with his torn collar kneeling outside the class had a quieting effect. But Mr. D’Mello knew it was just a matter of time, just a matter of time. At the age of fifty-seven he had no more illusions about human nature. Lust would inflame the boys’ hearts with rebellion again.

He ordered them to open the Hindi textbooks. Page 168.

“Who will read the poem?”

The class was silent around one raised arm.

“Girish Rai, read.”

A boy wearing comically large spectacles got to his feet from the first bench. His hair was thick and parted down the middle; his small face was overpowered by pimples. He did not need the textbook, for he knew the poem by heart:

Nay, Said the Flower

Cast me, said the flower,

Not on the virgin’s bed

Nor in the bridal carriage

Nor in the merry village square.

Nay, said the flower,

Cast me but on that lonely path

Where the heroes walk

For their nation to die.

The boy sat down. The entire class was silent, humbled for a moment by the purity of his enunciation in Hindi, that alien language. “If only all of you could be like this boy,” Mr. D’Mello said quietly.

But he had not forgotten that his favorite had let him down in the Rotary competition. Ordering the class to copy out the poem six times in their notebooks, he ignored Girish for two or three minutes. Then he summoned him with his fingers.

“Girish…” His voice faltered. “Girish…why didn’t you get first prize in the Rotary competition? How will we ever get to Delhi unless you win more first prizes?”

“Sorry, sir…” the boy said. He hung his head in shame.

“Girish…lately you haven’t been winning so many first prizes…Is something the matter?”

There was a worried look on the boy’s face. Mr. D’Mello panicked.

“Is someone troubling you? One of the boys? Has d’Essa threatened you?”

“No, sir.”

He looked at the tall boys in the back row. He turned to his right and glanced at the kneeling d’Essa, who was grinning hard. The assistant headmaster came to a quick decision.

“Girish…tomorrow…I don’t want you to go to Angel Talkies. I want you to go to the Belmore Theater.”

“Why, sir?”

Mr. D’Mello recoiled.

“What do you mean, why? Because I say so, that’s why!” he yelled. The class looked at them; had Mr. D’Mello raised his voice to his favorite?

Girish Rai reddened. He seemed on the verge of tears, and Mr. D’Mello’s heart melted. He smiled and patted the small boy on the back.

“Now, now, Girish, don’t cry…I don’t care about the other boys. They’ve been to the talkies many times-they’ve read magazines. There isn’t anything left to be corrupted. But not you. I won’t let you go there. Go to Belmore.”

Girish nodded, and went back to his seat in the front bench. He was still on the verge of tears. Mr. D’Mello felt his heart melting out of pity; he had been too harsh on the poor boy.

When the class ended, he went up to the front bench and tapped on the desk: “Girish-do you have any plans for this evening?”

What a terrible day, what a terrible day. Mr. D’Mello was walking along the mud road that led from the school to his home in the teacher’s colony. That awful whack of the stone echoed over and over again in his head…the look in the poor animal’s eyes…

He walked back with his poetry books beneath his armpit. His shirt was now speckled with red curry, and the tips of his collars were curled in, like sunburned leaves. Every few minutes, he stopped to straighten his aching back and catch his breath.

“Are you ill, sir?”

Mr. D’Mello turned around: Girish Rai, with a huge khaki schoolbag strapped to his back, was following him.

Teacher and pupil walked a few yards side by side, and then Mr. D’Mello stopped. “Do you see that, boy?” He pointed.

Halfway between the school and the teacher’s house ran a brick wall with a wide crack yawning down the middle. Both the wall and the crack had been there for years, in that road where no detail had significantly changed since Mr. D’Mello had moved to the neighborhood thirty years ago to take up the quarters assigned to him as a young teacher. Three lampposts along the adjacent road were visible through the crack in the wall, and for nearly twenty years now, Mr. D’Mello had stopped every evening and squinted hard at the three lampposts. For twenty years, he had been searching the lampposts for the explanation of a mystery. One morning, about two decades ago, while passing the crack he had seen a sentence in white chalk marked on all three lampposts:

NATHAN X MUST DIE.

He had squeezed through the crack in the wall to get to the three lampposts, and scraped the words with his umbrella, to decipher their mystery. What did the three signs mean? An old man pulled along a cart of vegetables. Mr. D’Mello tried asking him who Nathan X was, but the vegetable man just shrugged. Ernest D’Mello stood there, with the mist in the trees, and wondered.

The next morning the signs were gone. Intentionally wiped out. When he got to school, he scanned the obituary column of the newspaper, and couldn’t believe his eyes-a man called “Nathan Xavier” had been murdered the previous night at the Bunder! He was convinced at first that he had come upon some secret society planning a murder. A darker anxiety beset him soon. Maybe Chinese spies had written those words? Years had passed, but the mystery remained, and he thought about it each time he passed that crack.

“Do you think Pakistani spies did it, sir?” Girish said. “Did they kill Nathan X?”

Mr. D’Mello grunted. He felt he shouldn’t have revealed the memory to Girish; he felt, somehow, he had compromised himself. Teacher and student walked on.

Mr. D’Mello watched as the rays of sunset fell through the banyan leaves in large patches on the ground, like the puddles left behind by a child after a bath. He looked to the sky, and involuntarily spoke a line of Hindi poetry: “The golden hand of the sun as it grazes the clouds…”

“I know that poem, sir,” a little voice said. Girish Rai repeated the rest of the couplet: “…is like a lover’s hand as it grazes its beloved.”

They walked on.

“So you have an interest in poetry?” D’Mello asked. Before the boy could reply, D’Mello confessed another secret to him. In his youth he had wanted to be a poet-a nationalist writer, no less, a new Bharathi or Tagore.

“Then why didn’t you become a poet, sir?”

He laughed. “In this little hole of Kittur, my learned friend, how could a man make a living from poetry?”

The lamps came on, one by one. It was almost night now. In the distance Mr. D’Mello saw a lighted door, his quarters. As they got closer to the house, he stopped talking. He could hear the brats from here. What have they smashed today? he wondered.

Girish Rai watched.

Mr. D’Mello took off his shirt, and left it on a hook on the wall. The boy saw the assistant headmaster in his singlet, slowly setting himself down on a rocking chair in his living room. Two girls in identical red frocks were running in circles around the room, bellowing their lungs out. The old teacher ignored them completely. He gazed at the boy for a while, again wondering why, for the first time in his career as a teacher, he had invited a student home.

“Why did we let the Pakistanis get away, sir?” Girish blurted out.

“What do you mean, boy?” Mr. D’Mello screwed his nose and brows together and squinted.

“Why did we let the Pakistanis get away in 1965? When we had them in our clutches? You said it in class one day, but you didn’t explain.”

“Oh, that!” Mr. D’Mello slapped his hand against his thigh with relish. Another of his favorite topics. The great screwup of the war of 1965. The Indian tanks had rolled into the outskirts of Lahore, when our own government cut the ground beneath their feet. Some bureaucrat had been bribed; the tanks came back.

“Ever since Sardar Patel died, this country has gone down the drain,” he said, and the little boy nodded. “We live in the midst of chaos and corruption. We can only do our jobs and go home,” he said, and the little boy nodded.

The teacher exhaled contentedly. He was deeply flattered; in all these years at the school, no student had ever felt the same outrage he had, at that colossal blunder of ’65. Lifting himself off the rocking chair, he pulled out a volume of Hindi poetry from a bookshelf. “I want this back, huh? And in perfect shape. Not one scratch or blotch on it.”

The boy nodded. He looked around the house furtively. The poverty of his teacher’s house surprised him. The walls of the living room were bare, save for a lighted picture of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. The paint was peeling, and stouthearted geckos ran all over the walls.

As Girish flicked through the book, the two girls in red dresses took turns at shrieking into his ears, before screaming away into another room.

A woman in a flowing green dress, patterned with white flowers, approached the boy with a glass of red cordial. The boy was confused by her face and could not answer her questions. She looked very young. Mr. D’Mello must have married very late in life, the boy thought. Perhaps he had been too shy to go near women in his young days.

D’Mello frowned, and drew nearer to Girish.

“Why are you grinning? Is something funny?”

Girish shook his head.

The teacher continued. He spoke of other things that made his blood boil. Once India had been ruled by three foreigners: England, France, and Portugal. Now their place was taken by three native-born thugs: Betrayal, Bungling, and Backstabbing. “The problem is here-” He tapped his ribs. “There is a beast inside us.”

He began to tell Girish things he had told no one-not even his wife. His innocence of the true nature of schoolboys had lasted just three months into his life as a teacher. In those early days, he confessed to Girish, he stayed back after class to read up on the collection of Tagore’s poetry in the library. He read the pages carefully, stopping sometimes to close his eyes and fantasize that he was alive during the freedom struggle-in any one of those holy years when a man could attend a rally and see Gandhi spinning his wheel and Nehru addressing a crowd.

When he got out of the library his head would be buzzing with images from Tagore. At that hour, electrolyzed by the setting sun, the brick wall around the school became a long plane of beaten gold. Banyan trees grew along the length of the wall; within their deep, dark canopies, tiny leaves glittered in long strings of silver, like rosaries held by the meditating tree. Mr. D’Mello passed. The whole earth seemed to be singing Tagore’s verses. He passed by the playground, which was set into a pit below the school. Debauched shouts jarred his reveries.

“What is that shouting in the evenings?” he asked a colleague naïvely. The older teacher helped himself to a pinch of snuff. Inhaling the vile stuff from the edge of a stained handkerchief, he had grinned.

“’Tripping. That is what is going on.”

“’Tripping?”

The more experienced teacher winked.

“Don’t tell me it didn’t happen when you were at school…”

From D’Mello’s expression he gathered that this was, indeed, not the case.

“It’s the oldest game played by boys,” the old teacher said. “Go down and see for yourself. I don’t have the language to describe it.”

He went down the next evening. The sounds became louder and louder as he descended the steps into the playground.

The next morning, he summoned all the boys involved-all of them, even the victims-to his desk. He kept his voice calm with an effort. “What do you think this is, a moral school run by Catholics, or a whorehouse?” He hit them with such violence that morning.

When he was done, he noticed that his right elbow was still shaking.

The next evening, there was no noise from the playground. He recited Tagore out loud to protect himself from evil:

Where the head is held high and the mind is without fear…

A few days later, passing the playground, he saw his right elbow trembling again in recognition. The old, familiar black noise was rising from the playground.

“That was when the scales fell off my eyes,” Mr. D’Mello said. “I had no more illusions about human nature.”

He looked at Girish with concern. The little boy was stirring a large grin into the red cordial.

“They haven’t done it to you, have they, Girish-when you play cricket with them in the evening? ’Tripping?”

(Mr. D’Mello had already let d’Essa and his overdeveloped gang know: if they ever tried that on Girish, he would skin them alive. They would see what an ogre he really was.)

He watched Girish with anxiety. The boy said nothing.

Suddenly the boy put his cordial down, stood up, and advanced to his teacher with a folded piece of paper. The assistant headmaster opened it, prepared for the worst.

It was a gift: a poem, in chaste Hindi.

Monsoon.

This is the wet and fiery season,

When lightning follows after thunder.

Each night, the sky shakes, and I wonder,

What could be the reason

God gave us this wet and fiery season?

“Did you write this yourself? Is this what you were blushing about?”

The boy nodded happily.

Good Lord! he thought. In thirty years as a teacher no one had done anything like this for him.

“Why is the rhyming scheme uneven?” D’Mello frowned. “You should be careful about such things…”

The teacher pointed out the flaws of the poem one by one. The boy nodded his head attentively.

“Shall I bring you another one tomorrow?” he asked.

“Poetry is good, Girish, but…are you losing interest in quizzes?”

The boy nodded.

“I don’t want to go anymore, sir. I want to play cricket after class. I never get to play, because of the-”

“You have to go to the quizzes!” Mr. D’Mello got up from his rocking chair. He explained: Any opportunity for fame in this small town had to be seized at once. Didn’t the boy understand?

“First go to the quizzes, become famous, then you’ll get a big job, and then you can write poetry. What will your cricket get you, boy? How will it make you famous? You’ll never write poetry if you don’t get out of here, don’t you understand?”

Girish nodded. He finished his cordial.

“And, tomorrow, Girish…you’re going to Belmore. I don’t want any more discussion about that.”

Girish nodded.

After the boy left, Mr. D’Mello sat in his rocking chair and thought for a long time. It was no bad thing, he was thinking, Girish Rai’s newfound interest in poetry. Perhaps he could look out for a poetry contest for Girish to enter. The boy would win, of course-he would come back heaped in gold and silver. The Dawn Herald might put a picture of him on the back page. Mr. D’Mello would stand with his arms proudly on Girish’s shoulders. “The teacher who nourished the budding genius.” They would conquer Bangalore next, the teacher-and-pupil team that won the all-Karnataka state poetry contest. After that, what else- New Delhi! The President himself would award the two of them a medal. They would take an afternoon off, take a bus to Agra, and visit the Taj Mahal together. Anything was possible with a boy like Girish. Mr. D’Mello’s heart leapt up with joy, as it had not done for years, since his days as a young teacher. Just before he went to sleep in his chair he pressed his eyes shut and prayed fervently, Lord, only keep that boy pure.

Next morning, at ten past ten, by the express order of the state government of Karnataka, a throng of innocent schoolboys from St. Alfonso’s with surnames from O to Z rushed into the welcoming arms of a theater of pornography. An old stucco angel crouched over the doorway of the theater, showering its dubious benediction on the onrushing boys.

Once they got inside, they found they had been tricked.

The walls of Angel Talkies-those infamous murals of depravity-had been covered in black cloth. Not a single picture remained visible to the human eye. A deal had been struck between Mr. D’Mello and the theater management. The children would be shielded from the Murals of Sin.

“Do not stand close to the black cloth!” Mr. D’Mello shouted out. “Do not touch the black cloth!” He had everything planned. Mr. Alvarez, Mr. Rogers, and Mr. Bhatt went among the students to keep them away from the posters. Two attendants from the theater helped in the arrangements. The boys were split into two groups. One group was marched to the upstairs auditorium, one herded downstairs. Before they could react, the boys would be sealed off inside the auditoriums. And so it was done: the plan worked perfectly. The boys were inside Angel Talkies, and they were going to watch nothing but the government films; Mr. D’Mello had won.

The lights cut out inside the upstairs auditorium; a buzz of excitement from the boys. The screen glowed.

A scratched and fading reel flickered into life.

SAVE THE TIGER!

Mr. D’Mello stood behind the seated boys along with the other teachers. He wiped his face with relief. It looked like everything was going to be okay, after all. After leaving him alone in peace for a few minutes, young Mr. Bhatt then moved up to the assistant headmaster and tried to make small talk.

Ignoring young Mr. Bhatt, Mr. D’Mello kept his eyes to the screen. Photos of tiger cubs frolicking together flashed on the screen, and then a caption said, “If you don’t protect these cubs today, how can there be tigers tomorrow?”

He yawned. Stucco angels stared at him from the four corners of the auditorium, long peels of faded paint rising from their noses and ears, like heat blisters. He hardly went to films anymore. Too expensive; he had to get tickets for the wife and the two little screamers too. But as a boy, hadn’t films been his whole life? This very theater, Angel Talkies, had been one of his favorite haunts; he would cut class and come here and sit alone and watch movies and dream. Now look at it. Even in the darkness the deterioration was unmistakable. The walls were foul, with large moisture stains. The seats had holes in them. The simultaneous advance of decay and decadence: the story of this theater was the story of the entire country.

The screen went black. The audience tittered. “Silence!” Mr. D’Mello shouted.

The title shot of the “bonus reel” came on.

THE IMPORTANCE OF

PHYSICAL WELL-BEING IN

THE DEVELOPMENT OF CHILDREN

Images of boys showering, bathing, running, and eating, each appropriately captioned, began flashing one by one. Mr. Bhatt came up to the assistant headmaster once again. This time he whispered deliberately:

“It’s your turn to go now, if you want.”

Mr. D’Mello understood the words, but not the hint of secrecy in the young man’s voice. At his own suggestion, the teachers were taking turns to patrol the black-clothed corri dor to make sure none of the overdeveloped boys slipped out to take a peek at the pornographic images. It had just been Gopalkrishna Bhatt’s turn to patrol the Murals of Sin. For a moment he was lost-then it all made sense. From the way the young man was grinning, Mr. D’Mello realized that he had taken a quick peek himself. He looked around: each of the teachers was suppressing a grin.

Mr. D’Mello walked out of the auditorium full of contempt for his colleagues.

He walked past the black-cloth-covered walls without feeling the slightest urge. How could Mr. Bhatt and Mr. Rogers have been so base to have done it? He walked past the whole length of the walls without the least temptation to lift up the black cloth.

A light flickered on and off in a stairwell that led to an upper gallery. The walls of this gallery too were covered with black cloth. Mr. D’Mello dropped his mouth open and squinted at the upper gallery. No, he was not dreaming. Up there, he could make out a boy, his face averted, walking on tiptoe toward the black cloth. Julian d’Essa, he thought. Naturally. But then the boy’s face came into view, just as he lifted up a corner of the black cloth and peered.

“Girish! What are you doing?”

At the sound of Mr. D’Mello’s voice the boy turned. He froze. Teacher and student stared at each other.

“I’m sorry, sir…I’m sorry…they…they…”

There was giggling behind him; and suddenly he vanished, as if someone had dragged him away.

Mr. D’Mello rushed up the stairs at once, to the upper gallery. He could climb only two steps. His chest burned. Stomach heaving and hands clutching the balustrade, he rested there for a moment. The naked bulb in the stairwell sputtered on and off, on and off. The assistant headmaster felt dizzy. In his chest the heartbeat felt fainter and fainter, a dissolving tablet. He tried to call to Girish for help, but the words would not come out. Reaching a hand for help, he caught a corner of the black cloth on the wall. It ripped and split open: hordes of copulating creatures frozen in postures of rapes, unlawful pleasures, and bestialities swarmed out and danced around his eyes in a taunting cavalcade, and a world of angelic delights that he had scorned until now flashed at him. He saw everything, and he understood everything, at last.

Young Mr. Bhatt found him like that, lying on the stairs.