“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…”
In a moment of panic, the teacher obeyed.
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:
Film Two:
Bonus Reel:
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
Mr. Pundit, senior Kannada language teacher, scoffed at the naivete 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.
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
