commanded respect naturally; but we, in reality,

commanded them all, because we could

escape them, but not they us. Repeating themselves,

possibly until the end of their working days,

they’d stand in the morning as the Lord’s Prayer was said,

or write out sums, later, on the blackboard,

till the peon rang the bell; a new set of boys go home

in big cars, while teachers arrive next morning

on buses and scooters. Pigeons, their silly murmurs,

I remember from the senior school classrooms.

I recall little from all I learnt: H2O,

NO2, zygotes, amoebae, the life cycle

of the parasite, a ball expanding with heat

and failing to pass through a ring, the way a tinder

burst brightly into flames, thrust in a jar of oxygen,

before the flame went out, exhaling carbon dioxide.

All that comes back: the way we were looking

not at the flames, but at the freckles on the prettiest

girls’ legs, at the back of their heads, and how

quickly we’d forgotten the prayers said earlier

that morning, and shrugged off fear of sin. We were

afraid of no higher entity, at least

not afraid enough. No wonder, then, after

all those hours in the classroom, we learnt so little.

There was no guardian to review our daydreams;

with the wanton abandon that belongs

to a state of natural anarchy, our imagination,

possessed by something like the whooping courage of the pillaging

soldier touring razed villages, chose the girl

two rows from us, as the lesson progressed, or even

the teacher with chalk on her fingers,

the outline of her breasts visible in the dull,

electric glow of our vision, stopping short only

at some revered and long cherished figure, like a tea taster

coming to a halt in his quick tasting, and wrinkling

his nose at something inadmissible or fundamentally wrong.

There was no VHP to monitor these pictures

in our head; there were only our parents; they couldn’t know

much of what were loosely called our “thoughts.” If they’d ever

had, once, similar ones themselves, they’d forgotten,

with the amnesia that growing up induces, erasing forever

what it means not to have been adult. The classes

were interspersed with the granddaughters

and grandsons of the Birlas and the Tatas, of the families

that owned Roger’s soda—a scion, Pheroze,

was a close accomplice in the third standard—

and Duke’s Mangola. Biscuits, soft drinks, aerated

water circulated between class and the home.

So much money in a single classroom,

albeit incarnated in the figures of children

between four and five feet tall (the taller boys pushing

the shorter ones, whenever they could, like bulls)—

if a teacher had thought to hold a classroom

to ransom, he might have recovered

enough money to recompense him for his labours

several pensions over. When promoted to the eighth

standard, I was moved from section A to section

B, where unruly students were consigned,