In the Staff Room, Mr. D’Mello, assistant headmaster, folded his copy of the newspaper, noisily, like a pelican folding its wings. Tossing the paper on a sandalwood table, Mr. D’Mello struggled against his paunch to get to his feet. He was the last to leave the Staff Room.

Six hundred and twenty-three boys, pouring out of classrooms and eventually merging into one long line, proceeded into the Assembly Square. In ten minutes they had formed a geometrical pattern, a tight grid around the flagpole at the center of the square.

By the flagpole stood an old wooden platform. And next to the platform stood Mr. D’Mello, drawing the morning air into his lungs and shouting:

“A-ten-shannn!”

The students shuffled in concert. Thump! Their feet knocked the chatter out of the square. Now the morning was ready for the somber ceremony.

The guest of honor had fallen asleep. From the top of the flagpole, the national tricolor hung, limp and crumpled, entirely uninterested in the events organized for its benefit. Alvarez, the old school peon, tugged on a blue cord to goad the recalcitrant piece of cloth into a respectable tautness.

Mr. D’Mello sighed and gave up on the flag. His lungs swelled again:

“Sa-loot!”

The wooden platform began to creak noisily: Father Mendonza, Junior School headmaster, was ascending the steps. At a sign from Mr. D’Mello, he cleared his throat into the booming mike, and launched into a speech on the glories of dying young for your country.

A series of black boxes amplified his nervous voice across the square. The boys listened to their headmaster spellbound. The Jesuit told them the blood of Bhagat Singh and Indira Gandhi fertilized the earth on which they stood, and they brimmed with pride.

Mr. D’Mello, squinting fiercely, kept an eye on the little patriots. He knew that the whole humbug would end any moment. After thirty-three years in an all-boys’ school, no secret of human nature was hidden from him.

The headmaster lumbered toward the crucial part of the morning’s speech.

“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…”

“Stone it! Stone it!” someone shouted at D’Mello.

In a moment of panic, the teacher obeyed. Whack! The stone caught the dog on the belly. The animal yelped in pain-he saw a gleam of betrayal in its eyes-before it bounded out of the square and ran down the steps of the playground.

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: Save the Tiger

Film Two: The Importance of Physical Exercise

Bonus Reel: The Advantages of Native Sports (with special attention to Kabbadi and Kho-Kho)

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 that place!”

Mr. Pundit, senior Kannada language teacher, scoffed at the naïveté 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.