The box office was shuttered up. NEXT SHOW 8:30 P.M. He came down the stairs quickly, avoiding eye contact with his relative. Turning down a couple of streets in a hurry, he went into the Ideal Traders Ice Cream Parlor and ordered a chikoo milk shake.

He sucked it down quickly, and with the sugar in his brain he leaned back and chuckled and said to himself:

“Pucker!”

So he had done it; he had humiliated Lasrado for having humiliated him.

“One more chikoo milk shake!” he shouted. “With double ice cream!”

Shankara had always been one of the rotten apples at school. Since the age of eight or nine, he had been in trouble. But the most trouble he had ever had was with this chemistry teacher with the speech impediment. One morning, Lasrado had caught him smoking a cigarette in the sugarcane juice stand outside the college.

“Smoking bepore the age of twenty will arrest your development as a normal human being,” Mr. Lasrado had shouted. “Ip your pather were here, and not in the Gulp, he would do exactly what I am doing now…”

For the rest of that day, Shankara was made to kneel outside the chemistry class. He knelt with his eyes to the ground, and thought, over and over again, He is doing this to me because I am a Hoyka. If I were a Christian or a Bunt he would never have humiliated me like this.

That night, as he lay in bed, the thought had come to him, Since he has hurt me, I will hurt him back. And it came to him so clearly and succinctly, like a ray of sunlight, like a credo for his entire life. The initial euphoria turned into a restlessness, and he turned from side to side in the bed, saying, “Mustafa, Mustafa.” He had to meet Mustafa now.

The bomb-maker.

He had heard the name several weeks ago, at Shabbir Ali’s place.

They had just-all five of the “bad boys” gang-watched another porno at Shabbir Ali’s place that night. The woman had been entered from behind; the big black man had stuck his cock into her again and again. Shankara had no idea it could be done that way too; nor did Pinto, who kept squealing with pleasure. Shabbir Ali watched his friends’ amusement with detachment; he had seen this video many times, and it no longer excited his lust. He lived with such famil iarity with evil that nothing excited him anymore-neither scenes of fornication nor rape nor even bestiality; a constant exposure to vice had nearly returned him to a state of innocence.

After the video, the boys lay on Shabbir Ali’s bed, threatening to jerk off right there, while their host warned them not even to think about it.

Shabbir Ali produced a condom to keep them happy, and they took turns sticking fingers into it.

“Who’s this for, Shabbir?”

“My girlfriend.”

“Shut up, you homo.”

“You’re the homo!”

The others talked about sex, and Shankara, staring at the ceiling, pretending to be absorbed in himself, listened. He felt he was always being kept out of such discussions, because the others knew he was a virgin. There was a girl in the college who “talked” to men. Shabbir Ali had “talked” to her; he implied that he had done much more. Shankara had tried to pretend that he too had “talked” to women; maybe even screwed a whore on Old Court Road. He knew that the others saw through him.

Ali began passing things around; the condom was followed by a dumbbell that he kept under his bed; copies of Hustler, Playboy, and the official NBA magazine.

“Guess what this is,” he said. It was something small and black, with a timer attached to it.

“It’s a detonator,” he said, when no one could guess.

“What does it do?” Shankara asked, standing up on the bed and holding the thing to the light.

“It detonates, you idiot.” There was laughter. “You use it in a bomb.

“It’s the easiest thing on earth, to make a bomb,” Shabbir said. “Take a bag of fertilizer, and then put this detonator in it, and that’s it.”

“Where would you get it?” someone, not Shankara, asked.

“Mustafa gave it to me,” Shabbir Ali said, almost in an aside.

Mustafa, Mustafa. Shankara clung tightly to the name.

“Where does he live?” asked one of the twins.

“Down by the Bunder. In the pepper market. Why?” Shabbir Ali poked his questioner. “You planning on making a bomb?”

“Why not?”

More giggling. And Shankara had said nothing more that evening, saying, Mustafa, Mustafa, to himself, terrified he would forget the name unless he said nothing else all evening.

As he was stirring his third chikoo shake, two men came and sat down next to him: two policemen. One ordered an orange juice, and the other wanted to know how many types of tea were served at the shop. Shankara got up; then sat down. He knew they would start talking about him. His heart beat faster.

“Only the detonator went off, and it blew the fertilizer all around the room. That idiot who made it thought making a bomb is as simple as sticking a detonator into a bag of fertilizer. It’s a good thing, otherwise some of those boys would have been killed.”

“What is the youth of this country coming to?”

“These days, it’s all sex, sex, and violence. The whole country is going the Punjab way.”

One of the cops caught him staring, and stared back. He turned away. Maybe I should have stuck around with Urmila Auntie. Maybe I should have kept indoors today.

But what guarantee that she-even though she was his auntie-wouldn’t betray him? You never knew with Brahmins. As a boy, he had been taken to a wedding of one of his Brahmin relatives. His mother never came to such events, but his father put him in the car, and then told him to play with his cousins. The Brahmin boys invited him to join in a competition. An inch of salt sat on a slab of vanilla ice cream; the challenge was for someone to eat it. “You idiot,” one of the others shouted, when Shankara put his spoon down, a scoop of salty ice cream in his mouth. “It was just a joke!”

As the years passed, it was always the same. Once, a Brahmin boy in school had invited him home. He took a chance, he liked the fellow, he said yes. The boy and his mother invited Shankara into the drawing room. It was a “modern” family-they had lived abroad. He saw miniature Eiffel Towers and porcelain milkmaids in the drawing room, and he felt reassured that he would not be ill treated here.

He was given tea and biscuits, and made to feel perfectly at home. But as he left, he turned and saw his friend’s mother with a cleaning rag in her left hand. She had begun wiping the sofa where he had been sitting.

His caste seemed to be common knowledge to people who had no business knowing it. One day, when he had gone to play cricket at Nehru Maidan, an old man had stood watching him from the wall of the playground. In the end, he called Shankara over, and examined his face, neck, and wrists for several minutes. Shankara had stood helpless during the examination: he just looked at the wrinkles that radiated from the old man’s eyes.

“You’re the son of Vasudev Kinni and the Hoyka woman, aren’t you?”

He insisted that Shankara walk along with him.

“Your father always was a headstrong man. He would never agree to an arranged marriage. One day he found your mother, and he told all the Brahmins, ‘To hell with you. I am marrying this beautiful creature, whether you like it or not.’ I knew what would happen; you would be a bastard. Neither a Brahmin nor a Hoyka. I told your father this. He would not listen.”

The man patted him on the shoulder. The unselfconscious way in which he touched Shankara suggested that he was not a bigot, not caste-obsessed, but just someone speaking the sad truth of life.

“You too belong to a caste,” said the old fellow. “The Brahmo-Hoykas, in between the two. They are mentioned in the scriptures, and we know that they exist somewhere. They are a people separate entirely from other humans. You should talk to them, and marry one of them. That way everything will be normal again.”