The boyfriend, still smiling awkwardly, moved away from Mr. Venkatesan’s sister. His buddies, Tigers in berets, were clustered around a vendor of spicy fritters.
“Wait!” the sister pleaded, her face puffy with held-back tears.
“What do you see in that callow, good-for-nothing bloke?” Mr. Venkatesan asked.
“Please, please leave me alone,” his sister screamed. “Please let me do what I want.”
What if he were to do what he wanted! Twenty years ago when he’d had the chance, he should have applied for a Commonwealth Scholarship. He should have immured himself in a leafy dormitory in Oxford. Now it was too late. He’d have studied law. Maybe he’d have married an English girl and loitered abroad. But both parents had died, his sisters were mere toddlers, and he was obliged to take the lowest, meanest teaching job in the city.
“I want to die,” his sister sobbed beside him.
“Shut up, you foolish girl.”
The ferocity of her passion for the worthless boy, who was, just then, biting into a greasy potato fritter, shocked him. He had patronized her when she had been a plain, pliant girl squinting at embroidered birds and flowers. But now something harsh and womanly seemed to be happening inside her.
“Forget those chaps. They’re nothing but troublemakers.” To impress her, he tapped a foot to the beat of a slogan bellowing out of loudspeakers.
Though soldiers were starting to hustle demonstrators into double-parked paddy wagons, the intersection had taken on the gaudiness of a village fair. A white-haired vendor darted from police jeep to jeep hawking peanuts in paper cones. Boys who had drunk too much tea or soda relieved themselves freely into poster-clogged gutters. A dozen feet up the road a housewife with a baby on her hip lobbed stones into storefronts. A band of beggars staggered out of an electronics store with a radio and a television. No reason not to get in the mood.
“Blood for blood,” he shouted, timidly at first. “Blood begets blood.”
“Begets?” the man beside him asked. “What’s that supposed to mean?” In his plastic sandals and cheap drawstring pajamas, the man looked like a coolie or laborer.
He turned to his sister for commiseration. What could she expect him to have in common with a mob of uneducated men like that? But she’d left him behind. He saw her, crouched for flight like a giant ornament on the hood of an old-fashioned car, the March wind stiffly splaying her sari and long hair behind her.
“Get down from that car!” he cried. But the crowd, swirling, separated him from her. He felt powerless; he could no longer watch over her, keep her out of the reach of night sticks. From on top of the hood she taunted policemen, and not just policemen but everybody — shopgirls and beggars and ochre-robed monks — as though she wasn’t just a girl with a crush on a Tiger but a monster out of one’s most splenetic nightmares.
Months later, in a boardinghouse in Hamburg, Mr. Venkatesan couldn’t help thinking about the flock of young monks pressed together behind a police barricade that eventful afternoon. He owed his freedom to the monks because, in spite of their tonsure scars and their vows of stoicism, that afternoon they’d behaved like any other hot-headed Sri Lankan adolescents. If the monks hadn’t chased his sister and knocked her off the pale blue hood of the car, Mr. Venkatesan would have stayed on in Sri Lanka, in Trinco, in St. Joe’s teaching the same poems year after year, a permanent prisoner.
What the monks did was unforgivable. Robes plucked knee-high and celibate lips plumped up in vengeful chant, they pulled a girl by the hair, and they slapped and spat and kicked with vigor worthy of newly initiated Tigers.
It could have been another girl, somebody else’s younger sister. Without thinking, Mr. Venkatesan rotated a shoulder, swung an arm, readied his mind to inflict serious harm.
It should never have happened. The axe looped clumsily over the heads of demonstrators and policemen and fell, like a captured kite, into the hands of a Home Guards officer. There was blood, thick and purplish, spreading in jagged stains on the man’s white uniform. The crowd wheeled violently. The drivers of paddy wagons laid panicky fingers on their horns. Veils of tear gas blinded enemies and friends. Mr. Venkatesan, crying and choking, ducked into a store and listened to the thwack of batons. When his vision eased, he staggered, still on automatic pilot, down side streets and broke through garden hedges all the way to St. Joseph’s unguarded backdoor.
In the men’s room off the Teachers’ Common Room he held his face, hot with guilt, under a rusty, hissing faucet until Father van der Haagen, the Latin and Scriptures teacher, came out of a stall.
“You don’t look too well. Sleepless night, eh?” the Jesuit joked. “You need to get married, Venkatesan. Bad habits can’t always satisfy you.”
Mr. Venkatesan laughed dutifully. All of Father van der Haagen’s jokes had to do with masturbation. He didn’t say anything about having deserted his sister. He didn’t say anything about having maimed, maybe murdered, a Home Guards officer. “Who can afford a wife on what the school pays?” he joked back. Then he hurried off to his classroom.
Though he was over a half-hour late, his students were still seated meekly at their desks.
“Good afternoon, sir.” Boys in monogrammed shirts and rice-starched shorts shuffled to standing positions.
“Sit!” the schoolmaster commanded. Without taking his eyes off the students, he opened his desk and let his hand locate A Treasury of the Most Dulcet Verses Written in the English Language, which he had helped the headmaster to edit though only the headmaster’s name appeared on the book.
Matthew Arnold was Venkatesan’s favorite poet. Mr. Venkatesan had talked the Head into including four Arnold poems. The verses picked by the Head hadn’t been “dulcet” at all, and one hundred and three pages of the total of one hundred and seventy-four had been given over to upstart Trinco versifiers’ martial ballads.
Mr. Venkatesan would have nursed a greater bitterness against the Head if the man hadn’t vanished, mysteriously, soon after their acrimonious coediting job.
One winter Friday the headmaster had set out for his nightly after-dinner walk, and he hadn’t come back. The Common Room gossip was that he had been kidnapped by a paramilitary group. But Miss Philomena, the female teacher who was by tradition permitted the use of the Head’s private bathroom, claimed the man had drowned in the Atlantic Ocean trying to sneak into Canada in a boat that ferried, for a wicked fee, illegal aliens. Stashed in the bathroom’s air vent (through which sparrows sometimes flew in and bothered her), she’d spotted, she said, an oilcloth pouch stuffed with foreign cash and fake passports.
In the Teachers’ Common Room, where Miss Philomena was not popular, her story was discounted. But at the Pillais’ home, the men teachers had gotten together and toasted the Head with hoarded bottles of whiskey and sung many rounds of “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow,” sometimes substituting “smart” for “good.” By the time Mr. Venkatesan had been dropped home by Father van der Haagen, who owned a motorcycle, night had bleached itself into rainy dawn. It had been the only all-nighter of Mr. Venkatesan’s life and the only time he might have been accused of drunkenness.
The memory of how good the rain had felt came back to him now as he glanced through the first stanza of the assigned Arnold poem. What was the function of poetry if not to improve the petty, cautious minds of evasive children? What was the duty of the teacher if not to inspire?
He cleared his throat, and began to read aloud in a voice trained in elocution.