“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.