How did she feel, her students had asked her hesitantly one Saturday. Had she not wanted to see her husband's murderers hanged? She had thought about it and for the first time realized that not for a moment after Siddharth was killed had she wished good or ill upon his killers because they simply hadn’t seemed real enough. ‘See,’ she had tried to explain, ‘these people weren’t people. Who they were, how they looked, were they called Dilip, Keshav, Sanjay? None of that mattered. They were a mob and a mob is just that—a mob. The inciters of mobs cite history, religion, community—anything to convince them that killing innocents is justified. But before the world, the inciters defend their acts as an outburst of spontaneous emotion. Justice finds it difficult to punish mobs.’

The youngsters were livid. Kartik said, ‘How can that be allowed? Justice is justice. It can’t change with circumstances. As a victim you should have demanded justice.’

The wry smile on her face was because of the circumstances under which this group of young students had first come to her. They had been the liveliest of her final-year batch. They had rushed to her house when they heard the news of her sacking. Vaishali and Radha were weeping. Mangesh and Rahul stood looking glumly at the floor. Every muscle in Kartik's body was tense. He demanded, ‘Why?’

‘I read out something to you in your last lesson . . .’

Vaishali said, ‘Gatha Saptashati, wasn’t it?’

Mangesh smiled. ‘The language was vaguely Marathi, but it sounded so strange.’

‘I’m afraid a student's mother found the poems offensive. She complained that I was reading out obscene things to tender young children.’

‘Meaning us? Tender young children?’ The girls’ eyes dried up in laughter.

‘But that's no reason to sack a senior teacher,’ Kartik exploded. ‘Anyway what was obscene in those poems?’

‘You need to ask the mother. Or the school trustees,’ Anima said. ‘They put pressure on Principal Kolte. The mother and the trustees wanted to know why this teacher should read out things that weren’t part of the history syllabus.’

‘But we got so much more history out of those extra things you did with us. Why should we suffer because of one woman's idiocy? What kind of democracy is this?’

Anima held up a finger. ‘No school claims it is run on democratic principles.’

‘You’re not going to take this lying down, are you, ma’am? You’re going to fight, aren’t you?’

‘Yes, I am. Let's see how things turn out.’

‘We’ll win. No two ways.’