Between the Assassinations (5 page)

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.

S
EVERAL 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.