NATHAN X MUST DIE.

He had squeezed through the crack in the wall to get to the three lampposts, and scraped the words with his umbrella, to decipher their mystery. What did the three signs mean? An old man pulled along a cart of vegetables. Mr. D’Mello tried asking him who Nathan X was, but the vegetable man just shrugged. Ernest D’Mello stood there, with the mist in the trees, and wondered.

The next morning the signs were gone. Intentionally wiped out. When he got to school, he scanned the obituary column of the newspaper, and couldn’t believe his eyes-a man called “Nathan Xavier” had been murdered the previous night at the Bunder! He was convinced at first that he had come upon some secret society planning a murder. A darker anxiety beset him soon. Maybe Chinese spies had written those words? Years had passed, but the mystery remained, and he thought about it each time he passed that crack.

“Do you think Pakistani spies did it, sir?” Girish said. “Did they kill Nathan X?”

Mr. D’Mello grunted. He felt he shouldn’t have revealed the memory to Girish; he felt, somehow, he had compromised himself. Teacher and student walked on.

Mr. D’Mello watched as the rays of sunset fell through the banyan leaves in large patches on the ground, like the puddles left behind by a child after a bath. He looked to the sky, and involuntarily spoke a line of Hindi poetry: “The golden hand of the sun as it grazes the clouds…”

“I know that poem, sir,” a little voice said. Girish Rai repeated the rest of the couplet: “…is like a lover’s hand as it grazes its beloved.”

They walked on.

“So you have an interest in poetry?” D’Mello asked. Before the boy could reply, D’Mello confessed another secret to him. In his youth he had wanted to be a poet-a nationalist writer, no less, a new Bharathi or Tagore.

“Then why didn’t you become a poet, sir?”

He laughed. “In this little hole of Kittur, my learned friend, how could a man make a living from poetry?”

The lamps came on, one by one. It was almost night now. In the distance Mr. D’Mello saw a lighted door, his quarters. As they got closer to the house, he stopped talking. He could hear the brats from here. What have they smashed today? he wondered.

Girish Rai watched.

Mr. D’Mello took off his shirt, and left it on a hook on the wall. The boy saw the assistant headmaster in his singlet, slowly setting himself down on a rocking chair in his living room. Two girls in identical red frocks were running in circles around the room, bellowing their lungs out. The old teacher ignored them completely. He gazed at the boy for a while, again wondering why, for the first time in his career as a teacher, he had invited a student home.

“Why did we let the Pakistanis get away, sir?” Girish blurted out.

“What do you mean, boy?” Mr. D’Mello screwed his nose and brows together and squinted.

“Why did we let the Pakistanis get away in 1965? When we had them in our clutches? You said it in class one day, but you didn’t explain.”

“Oh, that!” Mr. D’Mello slapped his hand against his thigh with relish. Another of his favorite topics. The great screwup of the war of 1965. The Indian tanks had rolled into the outskirts of Lahore, when our own government cut the ground beneath their feet. Some bureaucrat had been bribed; the tanks came back.

“Ever since Sardar Patel died, this country has gone down the drain,” he said, and the little boy nodded. “We live in the midst of chaos and corruption. We can only do our jobs and go home,” he said, and the little boy nodded.

The teacher exhaled contentedly. He was deeply flattered; in all these years at the school, no student had ever felt the same outrage he had, at that colossal blunder of ’65. Lifting himself off the rocking chair, he pulled out a volume of Hindi poetry from a bookshelf. “I want this back, huh? And in perfect shape. Not one scratch or blotch on it.”

The boy nodded. He looked around the house furtively. The poverty of his teacher’s house surprised him. The walls of the living room were bare, save for a lighted picture of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. The paint was peeling, and stouthearted geckos ran all over the walls.

As Girish flicked through the book, the two girls in red dresses took turns at shrieking into his ears, before screaming away into another room.

A woman in a flowing green dress, patterned with white flowers, approached the boy with a glass of red cordial. The boy was confused by her face and could not answer her questions. She looked very young. Mr. D’Mello must have married very late in life, the boy thought. Perhaps he had been too shy to go near women in his young days.

D’Mello frowned, and drew nearer to Girish.

“Why are you grinning? Is something funny?”

Girish shook his head.

The teacher continued. He spoke of other things that made his blood boil. Once India had been ruled by three foreigners: England, France, and Portugal. Now their place was taken by three native-born thugs: Betrayal, Bungling, and Backstabbing. “The problem is here-” He tapped his ribs. “There is a beast inside us.”

He began to tell Girish things he had told no one-not even his wife. His innocence of the true nature of schoolboys had lasted just three months into his life as a teacher. In those early days, he confessed to Girish, he stayed back after class to read up on the collection of Tagore’s poetry in the library. He read the pages carefully, stopping sometimes to close his eyes and fantasize that he was alive during the freedom struggle-in any one of those holy years when a man could attend a rally and see Gandhi spinning his wheel and Nehru addressing a crowd.

When he got out of the library his head would be buzzing with images from Tagore. At that hour, electrolyzed by the setting sun, the brick wall around the school became a long plane of beaten gold. Banyan trees grew along the length of the wall; within their deep, dark canopies, tiny leaves glittered in long strings of silver, like rosaries held by the meditating tree. Mr. D’Mello passed. The whole earth seemed to be singing Tagore’s verses. He passed by the playground, which was set into a pit below the school. Debauched shouts jarred his reveries.

“What is that shouting in the evenings?” he asked a colleague naïvely. The older teacher helped himself to a pinch of snuff. Inhaling the vile stuff from the edge of a stained handkerchief, he had grinned.

“’Tripping. That is what is going on.”

“’Tripping?”

The more experienced teacher winked.

“Don’t tell me it didn’t happen when you were at school…”

From D’Mello’s expression he gathered that this was, indeed, not the case.

“It’s the oldest game played by boys,” the old teacher said. “Go down and see for yourself. I don’t have the language to describe it.”

He went down the next evening. The sounds became louder and louder as he descended the steps into the playground.

The next morning, he summoned all the boys involved-all of them, even the victims-to his desk. He kept his voice calm with an effort. “What do you think this is, a moral school run by Catholics, or a whorehouse?” He hit them with such violence that morning.

When he was done, he noticed that his right elbow was still shaking.

The next evening, there was no noise from the playground. He recited Tagore out loud to protect himself from evil:

Where the head is held high and the mind is without fear…

A few days later, passing the playground, he saw his right elbow trembling again in recognition. The old, familiar black noise was rising from the playground.

“That was when the scales fell off my eyes,” Mr. D’Mello said. “I had no more illusions about human nature.”

He looked at Girish with concern. The little boy was stirring a large grin into the red cordial.