It was after school hours. Almost an hour ago, either Krishna or Jimmy had rung the bell, a continual pealing that seemed to release a spring in the backs of the boys and girls, who jumped out of their chairs and proceeded to throw, without ceremony or compassion, their books into their satchels. It was then useless for a teacher to try to be heard, or to beat the table despairingly with the back of a duster, raising dramatic puffs of chalk-dust, for the boys hard-heartedly assumed deafness; one or two 'good girls' who raised their arms even now, a full twenty seconds after the bell, to ask a relevant question, irritated the teacher further, who, her hands powdered with sediments of green and white chalk, wanted to be upstairs in the teachers' common room, pouring tea from her cup into her saucer and very slowly sipping it. Preparing, like Atlas, to lift a tottering load of brown-paper covered exercise books full of long, ingenious bluffers' answers, she, in a moment of mischief and vindictiveness, said to a 'good girl': 'Lata, will you please carry these for me upstairs?' So impenitently angelic was the girl that she agreed without a murmur of resentment, with an air of perpetual readiness, even.

Mud-stained boys were now, at half-past four, coming in through the main gate after having played rugger, walking with both a tip-toer's tentativeness and a plodder's crushing stride in their studded boots. Only one girl, but the prettiest of them all, 7D's Charmayne, had stayed back, accidentally, to admire this spectacle. The rugger-tryouts had taken the trouble, on-field, during the scrum, to wrestle and hug the earth completely, and by the end of it, to return with an unfaultable cosmetic exterior of dirt, sweat, and plastered hair. Not an inch of clean skin, and on their bodies, uncreased cotton, was to be seen, and, on coming through the gate, they were confident of having presented their most redoubtably sluggish, most uncompromisingly slovenly, most acutely male selves to Charmayne's gaze, who, however, refused to look directly at them, perhaps out of shyness.

One of the boys, mounting the two steps to the corridor, regarded his left boot, whose lace had come untied. Elegant, casual, and drooping, the untied lace seemed to him a stylish touch, like an illegible but masterly signature, and he left it as it was and clattered off.

Gautam had stayed back with Khusroo because Khusroo had coaxed him into believing that dancing was something that could be learnt. 'There are no steps, believe me,' he said. 'You just have to move, and enjoy yourself.' And this matter, of moving, and being able to enjoy it, had taken on some importance because the first Senior School Social of the year had been announced, and the date set for Saturday. 'But you must come,' insisted Khusroo, who had never shown much interest in Gautam's spiritual or social evolution. 'You should come,' he had said with genuine, though inexplicable, eagerness. Gautam had been, at first, resistant. He could not see himself, much as he would have liked to, wantonly positioning himself a few inches away from a girl, and then, with aplomb, shivering and shaking ecstatically before her. Perhaps he would not mind if she did not look at him, but, contradictorily, perhaps he would mind. Such introspective furrows were left to be smoothed out by Khusroo, who tried to convince Gautam of the ordinariness and rationality of it - that dance was not a wayward display, but a necessary pleasure. Yet Gautam would not have changed his mind had not Anil, at five foot and half an inch, had the temerity to say, 'Of course I'm going,' as if it were a right it would be foolish not to exercise. If Anil, at his height, could suffer to relinquish the shield and protection of his white school uniform for the daring intimacy of his social clothes, so could Gautam.

So here they were, standing in the corridor near the gate, in front of one of the Standard 9 classrooms, by the back door to the Chemistry laborotary. The temperature had fallen, imperceptibly, gracefully, to 27 degrees, till the school itself seemed raised to a timeless stratosphere that was neither heaven nor earth, a place rained upon by coolness. The sun became tolerant, and suddenly sunlight was reflected in blinks and flashes, now here, now there, off hidden hospital windows across the street which earlier in the day no one would have guessed even existed. In the trees just outside the school walls, whose branches climbed prolifically over roofs and partitions, and ranged freely everywhere like a band of irrepressible trespassers, sparrows had begun to chirp all at once, loudly, excitedly, and perhaps informatively. Now that the school was empty, it seemed that the life around it had begun to imitate the intent, sometimes shy, play of the schoolchildren, with light bouncing and glancing off one hospital window to the next, chasing certain routes and eluding others, and the invisible birds shouting at each other at the top of their voices.

As if he were being rocked from side to side, and backward and forward, in a train compartment, Khusroo's hip and torso shook, as, more frugally, did his legs. 'On the shuffeling ma-adness, ' he sang, 'Of loco-motive bryeath - da da da all time loser's hurtlin' to his dyeath...' Melody was replaced by a menacing curl of the lips. All the time, Khusroo seemed to lean forward quickly and spectatorially, and then immediately retreat backward with a mildly alarmed air; meanwhile, his arms, quite irrelevantly and encouragingly keeping time, appeared to treat these two ostensibly unconnected movements as part of a single motion, accompanying them with magical and peremptory snaps of the fingers. 'You try too,' said Khusroo. Gautam, sitting on the floor and looking up, pretended cunningly not to hear. Khusroo stopped and stamped his foot. 'Gautam Bose, what am I doing here if you're not going to get up and do something?' he said sternly. 'Khusroo, I've just realised...' mumbled the other. 'Realised?' said Khusroo, enraged, as if it had been a particularly poorly chosen word. 'You haven't realised anything! Come on, get up.' Gautam obeyed, out of embarrassment; he lifted himself out of his brooding inactivity with a giant, ostentatious effort. Then he stood with both his arms by his side, like a boxer who does not know what to do. Khusroo uttered unexpected soothing words: 'It's easy, Gautam, just loosen up.' But each part of his body felt like a mechanism that had been jammed and rusted and made useless by shyness and sensitivity, and some miraculous lubricant, like forgetfulness, was now required. He remembered his parents, who, for about two months in the middle of their lives, used to put a 45 R.P.M. on the gramaphone, and then, in broad daylight, amidst the drawing-room furniture, watched by Gautam looking past the twin peaks of his knees, sitting huddled on the sofa, try out their recently memorised dance-steps. His mother, continually adjusting the aanchal on her sari, and saying 'Cha - cha - cha' under her breath, as she had no doubt been told to by her instructor, would dance with an expression of utter determination on her face. There were times when, on Gautam's request, she did this when his father was not there, alone, in the drawing-room, and the look of determination reappeared. Every Saturday evening, they would go to the first floor of an old mansion behind the Taj Mahal Hotel, where Mr Sequiera conducted his dancing classes. Mr Sequiera even advertised on the slides in cinema halls, illuminating this message: Be A Social Success: Learn Ballroom Dancing! For a while, thus, cha cha cha was mentioned in the house, and also that word that could have come straight from a fable: foxtrot. Then, after two months, almost overnight, his parents gave up dance and stopped playing those records and quite calmly took up other habits. Though it is said that children pass through 'phases', Gautam found that his parents probably passed through as many phases, if not more, than he did. They were always changing, developing, growing. For instance, when Gautam had been eight, his mother would return from the hairdresser with her hair leavened into a full-grown bun, which had then been set and lacquered into a marble repose. Now, however, those accessories - hair-net, false hair, lacquer spray - were lying in some drawer untouched, and his mother's hair, on evenings out, had taken on another, less extreme, incarnation. His father, too, he remembered, once had two personable sideburns, which, one day, without explanation, had been reduced to a more modest size. There was nothing fixed, constant, or permanent about his parents.

Even as Gautam was summoning within himself the preparedness to set his body moving, without safety, without company, in mid-air as it were, there came a bang from not too far away, and then the sound of a muffled, amplified voice: 'Check... one - two - three... check.' 'Come on,' said Khusroo, losing interest in Gautam's lonely, fledgling efforts to translate into motion. 'Let's see what those chaps are doing. If you don't mind,' he added, 'we'll continue later.' 'No, no,' said Gautam. 'No, let's see what those chaps are doing.' They went down the corridor and turned right, and walked a little way to the first door to the hall. At the other end of the now empty hall, where only this morning they had stood distractedly with their hymn-books, the stage was occupied by the Phantom Congregation, who were practising, in resounding fits and starts punctuated by gaps of silence and slouching, the songs that would set this hall and the bones and vertebrae of various eager neophytes vibrating next Saturday. Rahul Jagtiani, the lead singer, a tall, unextraordinary boy with spectacles and a moustache, was holding the mike with one hand casually, as if it were a perfectly mundane, everyday object, and talking to Keki Antia the bassist, who, as he struck the strings on his guitar with his plectrum, produced fat, ponderous globules of sound. The other two were bent upon their instruments in introspective postures of study and absorption: the thin, spirit-like, demoniacally stubble-cheeked Freddy Billimoria, who leaned with a mixture of swooning pleasure and fatigue over his drums, now thudded, with a pedal at his foot, the great bass drum standing upright, and now, superfluously, hit the floating cymbal with a polished attenuated stick that seemed a fitting extension of his own skinniness, creating a marvellous sound that rippled outward, a reverberating whisper. And Rajat Kapoor, also splenetic and unpredictable, hit his guitar strings at times to release that loud electric bang that Khusroo and Gautam had heard from a distance, which they now understood to be a particular chord. Then he would rapidly turn one of the four knobs on the guitar's incandescent flame-red box, and prick his ears for a prophetic hum on the speaker. To Khusroo's and Gautam's awe, Rahul Jagtiani suddenly turned and exclaimed, 'Hey - one - two - three,' and all those individual technological noises had been gathered into a single united wave, and they had begun to sing 'Smoke on the water, fire in the sky'. The combined voices of Antia, Jagtiani, and Billimoria could hardly be heard over Rajat Kapoor's guitar, which had been, midway through the song, launched into the wayward kinks and corkscrew effect of the wa-wa mode. Khusroo and Gautam felt jolted by the scruff of their necks and shoulders, a cavity forming in their solar plexus, and they looked on speechless with wonder.

The stage was not always such a profane site. In fact, in the morning, at nine o'clock, the Principal stood upon it and took the lead in folding his hands together and, uncharacteristically, closing his eyes to say, rather haltingly, the Lord's prayer. Gautam only knew some of the words - 'Vouchsafe', 'almighty God', 'daily bread' (when he involuntarily and quite logically pictured a white Britannia slice), and the incomprehensible last lines, 'Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven, Forever and ever, Amen.' The other words in the prayer, which far outnumbered these intervals of continuity, he substituted with approximate reverent vowel and consonant sounds. On some mornings, the head boy, or even a house captain or prefect, read out the prayer with a zeal and a correctness of elocution which the Protestant Principal from Kerala himself lacked. These prefects possessed an enviable purposefulness of bearing that told one that there were no stains on their conscience, and that an awareness of duties, theirs and others', was never far from their mind; and they carried out, whenever they could, the Principal's and even the Lord's will in school. To the ordinary boys and girls in class, however, God was a figure whose qualities were daily advertised and who was deferred to each morning, but who, in their lives, they had discovered through an inuring process of trial and error, was an absent friend, a perpetually missing advisor, and an unreliable and niggardly petitionee. On Thursday mornings, Father Kurien, in a long white habit, looked down apocalyptically upon the heads of the boys and girls and, doubling the size of his own eyes, fulminated about a God who had eyes everywhere, or lowered his voice to make gentle, ironical jabs at Darwin's theory of evolution. He had a flowing Malyali accent, where one consonant, without quite ending, liquidly siphoned off into another - 'm', for instance, became 'yem'.

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