Between the Assassinations by Aravind Adiga Read Free Book Online Page B

Science and Natural History Wing, where the skeleton of a shark that had washed up on the beach some decades ago had been suspended from the ceiling as a scientific curiosity. Five of the boys kept apart from all the others, under the shade of a large banyan tree. They were distinguishable from the others by the pleated trousers that they wore, brand-name labels visible on the back pockets or at the side, and by their general air of cockiness. They were Shabbir Ali, whose father owned the only video rental store in town; the Bakht twins, Irfan and Rizvan, children of the black marketeer; Shankara P. Kinni, whose father was a plastic surgeon in the Gulf; and Pinto, the scion of a coffee-estate family.
    One of them had planted the bomb. Each of this group had been subjected to multiple periods of suspension from classes for bad behavior, had been kept back a year because of poor marks, and had been threatened with expulsion for insubordination. If anyone would plant a bomb, it had to be one of this lot.
    They seemed to think so themselves.
    “Did you do it?” Shabbir Ali asked Pinto, who shook his head.
    Ali looked at the others, silently repeating the question. “I didn’t do it either,” he stated at the end.
    “Maybe God did it,” Pinto said, and all of them giggled. Yet they were aware that everyone in the school suspected them. The Bakht twins said they would go down to the Bunder to eat mutton biryani and watch the waves; Shabbir Ali would go to his father’s video store, or watch a pornographic movie at home; Pinto would probably tag along with him.
    Only one of them remained at the school.
     
     
    He could not leave yet; he loved it too much, the smoke and confusion. He kept his fist clenched.
    He mingled among the crowd, listening to the hubbub, drinking it in like honey. Some of the boys had gone back into the building; they stood out on the balconies of the three floors of the college and shouted down to those on the ground; and this added to the hum, as if the college were a beehive struck with a pole. He knew that it was his hubbub—the students were talking about him, the professors were cursing him. He was the god of the morning.
    For so many years the institution had spoken to him—spoken rudely: teachers had caned him, headmasters had suspended and threatened to expel him. (And, he was sure, behind his back, it had mocked him for being a Hoyka, a lower caste.) Now he had spoken back to it. He kept his fist clenched.
    “Do you think it’s the terrorists?” he heard some boy say. “The Kashmiris, or the Punjabis?”
    No, you morons! he wanted to shout. It’s me! Shankara! The lower caste!
    There—he watched Professor Lasrado, his hair still disheveled, surrounded by his favorite students, the “good boys,” seeking support and succor from them.
    Oddly enough, he felt an urge to go up to Lasrado and touch him on the shoulder, as if to say, Man, I feel your grief, I understand your humiliation, I sympathize with your rage, and thus end the long strife between him and the chemistry professor. He felt the desire to be one of the students whom Lasrado trusted at such moments, one of his “good boys.” But this was a lesser desire.
    The main thing was to exult. He watched Lasrado’s suffering and smiled.
    He turned to his left; someone in the crowd had said, “The police are coming.”
    He hurried to the backyard of the college, opened a gate, and walked down the long flight of stone steps that led to the Junior School. After the new passageway had been opened through the playground, hardly anyone used this route anymore.
    The road was called Old Court Road. The court had long ago relocated and the lawyers had moved, and the road had been closed down for years—after the suicide of a visiting businessman here. Shankara had been coming down this road ever since he was a boy; it was his favorite part of town. Even though Shankara could summon his chauffeur up to the college, the man was instructed