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 knew only 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 there were no stains on their conscience, and that an awareness of duties, theirs and others’, was never far from their minds; 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 Malayali accent, where one consonant, without quite ending, liquidly siphoned off into another—“m,” for instance, became “yem.”

At least once a week, nationalistic ideals were indulged by reading out “Where the Mind Is Without Fear.” The entire hall, then, in a grave, communal, drowsy chorus, said the words together; from afar, it would have sounded like nothing human, like a host of spirits praying, a murmur that swelled and died and swelled again:

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;

Where knowledge is free;

Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;

Where words come out from the depth of truth;

Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;

Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;

Where the mind is led forward by Thee into ever widening thought and action—

Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.