Between the Assassinations by Aravind Adiga Page B

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