Yet plan or no plan, things will take their own course. Mrs Bindra’s corpse will rot. There will be a smell. The ironing lady will raise an alarm. The police will knock on my door one of these days. I will tell them whatever I know about Chottu. I will give them directions to Sadiq’s house in Kotla. Maybe I’ll tell them what I did to Arpita.

Pornography

Sunil Singh rode into school on his Luna with very little on his mind. The battered and noisy moped had inspired the boys into nicknaming Singh ‘Helicopter’. Some of the boys said ‘Good morning, sir’ but Singh did not respond. He was a firm believer in ‘keeping distance’.

Singh hadn’t taught a lesson in days. He spent most of his time reading the papers and chatting in the staffroom. He entered the classroom, but seldom to teach. He’d sit for a few minutes, have some Parle toffees and leave after taking attendance.

He parked his Luna under the big neem tree opposite the middle-school building. It was an unpretentious structure—flat, rectangular and painted yellow. Boys, dressed in their grey-and-white uniforms, had begun to gather in front of the building for morning assembly. Soon the prefects would arrive and the milling crowd would hurriedly organize itself into orderly lines, the short boys in the front, the tall ones at the back.

Singh walked towards the men’s staffroom on the first floor. On the staircase he bumped into his old friend, Awasthi. Awasthi taught maths. Unlike Singh, he taught everyday. He had a hands-off approach to teaching: walk in, open the textbook, start solving sums on the board. He never paused to explain anything. He didn’t mind the boys talking amongst themselves while he worked things out on the blackboard. He didn’t entertain questions. In the evening they all turned up at his house for extra tuitions. That was when the serious teaching and learning happened.

Singh, a thakur by caste, resented teaching Hindi and Sanskrit in a missionary school. He expressed his discomfort by not reciting the Lord’s Prayer during assembly. His son, who studied in the same school, was under strict instructions not to say the prayer. When he protested that this would only serve to get him into trouble, his father told him to lip sync.

During assembly, the women teachers stood on one side, the male members of staff on the other. The two rows formed a right angle with the boys in the middle and the headmaster up front. They said the pledge: ‘India is my country and I am proud of its rich and varied heritage’, followed by the national anthem and the Lord’s Prayer.