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?