Mud-stained boys were now, at half-past four, coming in through the main gate after having played rugger, walking with both a tiptoer’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 or, 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 learned. “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 feet 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.