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By Root 12025 0

you savages? Thees man eez civilization! You show heem respect: he’s got a sword!” And he’d swish his cane through the stone-walled air. We called him Pagal-Zagal, crazy Zagallo, because for all his talk of llamas and conquistadores and the Pacific Ocean we knew, with the absolute certainty of rumor, that he’d been in a Mazagaon tenement and his Goanese mother had been abandoned by a decamped shipping agent; so he was not only an “Anglo” but probably a bastard as well. Knowing this, we understood why Zagallo affected his Latin accent, and also why he was always in a fury, why he beat his fists against the stone walls of the classroom; but the knowledge didn’t stop us being afraid. And this Wednesday morning, we knew we were in for trouble, because Optional Cathedral had been cancelled.

The Wednesday morning double period was Zagallo’s geography class; but only idiots and boys with bigoted parents attended it, because it was also the time when we could choose to troop off to St. Thomas’s Cathedral in crocodile formation, a long line of boys of every conceivable religious denomination, escaping from school into the bosom of the Christians’ considerately optional God. It drove Zagallo wild, but he was helpless; today, however, there was a dark glint in his eye, because the Croaker (that is to say, Mr. Crusoe the headmaster) had announced at morning Assembly that Cathedral was cancelled. In a bare, scraped voice emerging from his face of an anesthetized frog, he sentenced us to double geography and Pagal-Zagal, taking us all by surprise, because we hadn’t realized that God was permitted to exercise an option, too. Glumly we trooped into Zagallo’s lair; one of the poor idiots whose parents never allowed them to go to Cathedral whispered viciously into my ear, “You jus’ wait: he’ll really get you guys today.”

Padma: he really did.

Seated gloomily in class: Glandy Keith Colaco, Fat Perce Fishwala, Jimmy Kapadia the scholarship boy whose father was a taxi-driver, Hairoil Sabarmati, Sonny Ibrahim, Cyrus-the-great and I. Others, too, but there’s no time now, because with eyes narrowing in delight, crazy Zagallo is calling us to order.

“Human geography,” Zagallo announces. “Thees ees what? Kapadia?”

“Please sir don’t know sir.” Hands fly into the air—five belong to church-banned idiots, the sixth inevitably to Cyrus-the-great. But Zagallo is out for blood today: the godly are going to suffer. “Feelth from the jongle,” he buffets Jimmy Kapadia, then begins to twist an ear casually, “Stay in class sometimes and find out!”

“Ow ow ow yes sir sorry sir …” Six hands are waving but Jimmy’s ear is in danger of coming off. Heroism gets the better of me … “Sir please stop sir he has a heart condition sir!” Which is true; but the truth is dangerous, because now Zagallo is rounding on me: “So, a lee-tle arguer, ees eet?” And I am being led by my hair to the front of the class. Under the relieved eyes of my fellow-pupils—thank God it’s him not us—I writhe in agony beneath imprisoned tufts.

“So answer the question. You know what ees human geography?”

Pain fills my head, obliterating all notions of telepathic cheatery: “Aiee sir no sir ouch!”

… And now it is possible to observe a joke descending on Zagallo, a joke pulling his face into the simulacrum of a smile; it is possible to watch his hand darting forward, thumb-and-forefinger extended; to note how thumb-and-forefinger close around the tip of my nose and pull downwards … where the nose leads, the head must follow, and finally the nose is hanging down and my eyes are obliged to stare damply at Zagallo’s sandalled feet with their dirty toenails while Zagallo unleashes his wit.

“See, boys—you see what we have here? Regard, please, the heedeous face of thees primitive creature. It reminds you of?”

And the eager responses: “Sir the devil sir.” “Please sir one cousin of mine!” “No sir a vegetable sir I don’t know which.” Until Zagallo, shouting above the tumult, “Silence! Sons of baboons! Thees object here”—a tug on my nose—“thees is human geography!”

“How sir where sir what sir?”

Zagallo