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By Root 281 0

the door. Then he called our names, beginning with the students he trusted. One by one we offered to go for help, then drifted off onto the school grounds, where we had to relieve ourselves behind bushes, and then went for a swim or dutifully entered the seven a.m. homework study class that Father Barnabus had in fact instituted earlier in the term. The cement had to be shattered off with a cricket stump by one of the groundsmen, but that was not until late afternoon. By then we hoped our housemaster would be overcome by fumes, perhaps be faint and uncommunicative. But his vengeance proceeded rapidly. Whipped, then expelled for a week, Cassius became even more of an icon for the junior school, especially after a stirring speech by the Warden at morning chapel that damned him for a full two minutes as if he were one of the fallen angels. Of course, no lesson was learned from this episode—by anyone. Years later when an old boy donated funds to St. Thomas’ for a new cricket pavilion, my friend Senaka said, “First they should construct some decent bogs.”

Like me, in order to be accepted into an English school, Cassius had taken an exam overseen by the Warden. We had to answer several mathematical questions based on pounds and shillings, whereas all we knew were rupees and cents. There were also general-knowledge questions, such as how many men were on the Oxford rowing team and who had lived at a place called Dove Cottage. We were even asked to name three members of the House of Lords. Cassius and I were the only students in the Warden’s living room that Saturday afternoon, and he threw me an incorrect answer to the question “What do you call a female dog?” He had said, “Cat,” and I had written that down. It was the first time he had actually spoken to me, and it was with a lie. I had known him until then only by reputation. All of us in the junior school saw him as the incorrigible of St. Thomas’ College. No doubt it galled the school staff that he would now be representing its name abroad.

There was a mix of stubbornness and kindness in Cassius. I never knew where these qualities came from. He never referred to his parents, and if he had he would probably have invented a scenario to make himself distinct from them. In fact, during the journey the three of us had no real interest in one another’s background. Ramadhin would speak now and then of the careful advice his parents had given him about his health. And as for me, all the other two knew was that I had an “aunt” in First Class. It had been Cassius who recommended we keep our backgrounds to ourselves. He liked the idea, I think, of being self-sufficient. That is how he saw our little gang existing on the ship. He put up with Ramadhin’s domestic anecdotes because of his physical weakness. There was a gentle democracy in Cassius. In retrospect, he was only against the power of Caesar.

I suppose he changed me during those twenty-one days, persuading me to interpret anything that took place around us with his quizzical or upside-down perspective. Twenty-one days is a very brief period in a life, but I would never unlearn the whisper of Cassius. As the years went by I would hear of him or read about his career, but I would never meet him again. It was Ramadhin I would keep in touch with, visiting him in Mill Hill, where his family lived, going to matinee movies with him and his sister, or to the Boat Show in Earls Court, where we would try to imagine the deeds that Cassius would commit if he were in our company.

EXAMINATION BOOKLET: OVERHEARD CONVERSATIONS,

Day 1 to Day 11

“Don’t look at him, you hear me? Celia? Don’t ever look at the swine again!”

“My sister has a strange name. Massoumeh. It means ‘immaculate,’ ‘protected from sins.’ But it can also mean ‘defenceless.’ ”

“I have a specific dislike, I am sorry to say, of the Sealyham terrier.”

“I thought she was a blue-stocking, at first.”

“We use fruit as a fish poison sometimes.”

“Pickpockets always come out during a storm.”

“This man said he could cross a desert eating just a date