LONDON
1954

RAJ, WHO HAD JUST TURNED TWELVE, ENTERED THE school gates in the rain. In his right hand he held a heavy rubber ball, which he was squeezing rhythmically, echoing the anxious pulse of his heart. During playtime, as he had for many years, he would throw this against the outside wall of the gym, moving farther and farther away to catch it. Children would sometimes stop in their play to watch him, impressed by how hard and far he could throw.

Today everyone was inside because of the weather. It would be fifteen minutes before Greenberg, who taught history, turned up to take attendance and send them off to their classes: the bright Alphas, of which Raj was one, to study English literature with Big Boobs Bellamy; the slightly tarnished Betas to study physics with Freeman the Fondler; and the drooling, lurching Gammas to study mathematics with Peterson the Punisher.

Raj affected an absorbed frown as he entered the classroom. Angling forward, he made a prow of his lanky body and tried to steer as rapidly and unobtrusively as possible through the cruel shoals of boys to his desk. An apple core glanced off the side of his cheek and slammed against the blackboard just behind him.

“Shit wallah!” shouted Robbie Vincent, a fat boy who seemed to have been born with the poached eyes of an old alcoholic. He was flanked by his cronies: the lazily attractive Andy Halton, whose tongue played constantly through the gap where one of his front teeth had been, and Lee Monroe, a vicious-tempered undersized boy who looked like a wet rat. “’Ere, Gunga. Come ’ere. Come ’ere,” Robbie called.

Raj slipped the ball into his pocket and threw his satchel on his desk. As he pulled up in front of these boys, he abruptly transformed into Mr. Greenberg. Stooping, he widened his eyes crazily, pushed out his lower lip, and made a strange corkscrew motion with the extended forefinger of his right hand, as if trying to drill it through a wall. Imitating Greenberg’s stammer and nasal whine, he launched into one of their teacher’s most recent diatribes. “Mr. V-V-Vincent, am I to understand—to understand that you’ve not done your prep?” Another wild twist of the wrist. “Willful ignorance, Mr. V-V-Vincent, is willful murder. It means, people can stuff your empty noggin with whatever they see fit. It means, Mr. V-V-Vincent, that they can put a gun in your hand and tell you to put that gun to an innocent head. Those, Mr. V-V-Vincent, who have the capacity to kill millions—kill millions—are among us, in this very classroom. And they—they are the ones who—who make such choices as not doing their prep. They—”

Snatching up the lapel of Raj’s blazer, Robbie pulled him closer to show him a swastika he had just sketched in his note pad.

“Go and draw that on the board, Mowgli, nice and big. Go on.”

Raj stared at the swastika. Again he started to imitate Greenberg, but Andy Halton pulled his tongue out of the gap in his teeth long enough to say, “’Ere, my mum says you’re living with some posh white family down Whitehall? Where’s your own mum and dad, then?”