Between the Assassinations (9 page)

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:

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.”