Mr. Bhatt said, “Your favorite’s name is in the paper this morning, Mr. D’Mello. Page four, near the top. You must be a proud man.”

Before Mr. D’Mello could stop him, Mr. Bhatt had begun reading:

The Midtown Rotary Club announces the Winners of its Fourth Annual Inter-School English Elocution Contest.

Theme: Science-A Boon or Curse for the Human Race?

First Prize: Harish Pai, St. Milagres Boys’ High School (Science as a Boon)

Second Prize: Girish Rai, St. Alfonso’s Boys’ High School (Science as a Curse)

The assistant headmaster pulled the newspaper from the hands of his junior colleague. “Mr. Bhatt,” he snarled, “I have often said this publicly: I have no favorites among the boys.”

He closed his eyes, but now his peace of mind was gone.

“Second prize”-the words stung him once again. He had worked with Girish all last evening on the speech-its content, its delivery, the boy’s posture at the mike, everything! And only second prize? His eyes filled with tears. The boy had gotten into a habit of losing these days.

There was commotion in the Staff Room now, and through his closed eyes Mr. D’Mello knew that the headmaster had arrived, and all the teachers were running around him sycophantically. He remained in his seat, though he knew his peace would not last long.

“Mr. D’Mello-” came the nervous voice. “It is a terrible mix-up…one-half of the boys won’t get to see the free film this year.”

The headmaster was gazing at him from near the sandalwood table. Mr. D’Mello ground his teeth. He folded his copy of the newspaper violently; he took his time getting to his feet, and he took his time turning around. The headmaster was mopping his forehead. Father Mendonza was a very tall, very bald man, with strands of heavily oiled hair combed over his naked pate. His large eyes stared out through thick glasses and an enormous forehead glittered with beads of sweat, like a leaf spotted with dew after a shower.

“May I make a suggestion, Father?”

The headmaster’s hand paused with his handkerchief at his brow.

“If we don’t take the boys to Angel Talkies, they’ll see it as a sign of weakness. We’ll only have more trouble with them.”

The headmaster bit his lips. “But…the dangers…one hears of terrible posters…of evils that cannot be put into words…”

“I will take care of the arrangements,” Mr. D’Mello said gravely. “I will take care of the discipline. I give you my word.”

The Jesuit nodded hopefully. As he left the Staff Room, he turned to Gopalkrishna Bhatt, and the depth of gratitude in his voice was unmistakable:

“You too should go along with the assistant headmaster when he takes the boys to Angel Talkies…”

Father Mendonza’s words echoing in his mind, he walked to his eleven a.m. class, his first of the morning. Assistant headmaster. He knew that he had not been the Jesuit’s first choice. The insult still smarted after all this time. The post was his by right of seniority. For thirty years he had taught Hindi and arithmetic to the boys of St. Alfonso’s, and maintained order in the school. But Father Mendonza, who had recently come down from Bangalore with his oily comb-over and six trunks full of modern ideas, stated his preference for someone smart in appearance. Mr. D’Mello had a pair of eyes and a mirror at home. He knew what that remark meant.

He was an overweight man entering the final phase of middle age, he breathed through his mouth, and a thicket of hair poked out his nose. The centerpiece of his body was a massive potbelly, a hard knot of flesh pregnant with a dozen cardiac arrests. To walk, he had to arch his lower back, tilt his head, and screw his brow and nose together in a foul-looking squint. “Ogre,” the boys chanted as he passed. “Ogre, Ogre, Ogre!”

At noon, he ate a dish of red fish curry out of a stainless-steel tiffin-carrier, at his favorite window in the Staff Room. The smell of the curry did not please his colleagues, so he ate alone. Done, he slowly took his tiffin-carrier to the public tap outside. The boys stopped their games. Since it was out of the question for him to bend forward (the paunch, of course), he had to fill his tiffin-carrier with water and raise it to his mouth. Gargling loudly, he belched out a saffron torrent several times. The boys shrieked with pleasure each time. When he was back in the Staff Room, they crowded by the tap: little skeletons of fish had piled up at its base, like deposits of a nascent coral reef. Awe and disgust commingled in the voices of the boys, and they chanted, in a unison that grew louder and louder: “Ogreogreogre!”

“The main problem with selecting Mr. D’Mello as my assistant is that he has an excessive penchant for old-fashioned violence,” the young headmaster wrote to the Jesuit Board. Mr. D’Mello caned too often, and too much. Sometimes, even as he wrote on the blackboard, his left hand would reach for the duster. He would turn around and send it flying at the last row, and there would be a scream and the bench would topple over under the weight of diving boys.

He had done worse. Father Mendonza reported in detail a shocking story he had heard. Once, many years ago, a small boy had been talking in the front row, right in front of D’Mello. The teacher said nothing. He just sat still and let his anger stew. Suddenly, it was said, there was a moment of blackness in his brain. He snatched the boy from his seat and hoisted him into the air and took him to the back of the class: there he shut him in a cupboard. The boy beat on the insides of the cupboard with his fists for the rest of the class. “I can’t breathe in here!” he shouted. The beating inside the cupboard grew louder and louder; then fainter and fainter. When the cupboard was finally opened, a full ten minutes later, there was a stench of fresh urine, and the boy fell out in an unconscious heap.

Then there was the little matter of his past. Mr. D’Mello had been in training at the Valencia Seminary to be a priest for six years, before leaving suddenly, and on bad terms with his superiors. The rumor was that he had challenged the holy dogma, and declared that the policies of the Vatican on the matter of family planning were illogical in a country like India-and so walked out, abandoning six years of his life. Other rumors suggested that he was a freethinker, who did not attend church regularly.

The weeks went on. The Jesuit Board inquired by mail if Father Mendonza had made a decision yet. The young headmaster confessed he had had no time for that. Every morning the padre found that his first duty was to discipline a long line of recalcitrants. The same faces appeared morning after morning. Talking in class. Disfiguring school property. Pinching studious boys.

One day, a foreigner, a Christian woman from Britain who was a generous donor to worthy causes in India, paid a visit to the school. Father Mendonza oiled his surviving strands of hair with special care that morning. He solicited Mr. Pundit’s assistance in guiding the British lady around the school. With great courtesy, the Kannada teacher explained to the foreigner the proud history of St. Alfonso’s, its celebrated alumni, its role in civilizing the savage nature of this part of India, once a bare wilderness overrun by elephants. Father Mendonza began to feel that Mr. Pundit was as smart a fellow as he was likely to find in this part of the world. Then, all at once, the foreigner began shrieking. The fingers of her hand spread out with horror. Julian d’Essa, the coffee-plantation scion, was standing on the last bench of a giggling classroom, exposing his privates to the world. Mr. Pundit rushed at the crazy boy, but the damage had been done. The Jesuit saw the foreign donor step back from him with terror-struck eyes: as if he were the exhibitionist.

An old member of the board called Father Mendonza from Bangalore that evening to console him. Did the “reformer” not finally see the truth? Modern ideas of education were fine in Bangalore. But in a backwater like Kittur, miles and miles and miles away from civilization?