The Last Theorem - Arthur Charles Clarke [8]
His father smiled. “French is a language of culture,” he pointed out. “And also of your hero, Monsieur Fermat.”
“Huh,” Ranjit said, recognizing the debating point but still unconvinced. “All right, but what about history? Who cares? Why do I need to know what the king of Kandy said to the Portuguese? Or whether the Dutch threw the English out of Trinco, or the other way around?”
His father patted him again. “There is an easy answer to your question. The reason is because the university requires those credits of you before they will grant you your degree. After that, in graduate school, you can specialize as much as you like. Isn’t the university teaching you anything you enjoy other than math?”
Ranjit brightened slightly. “Not now, no, but by next year I’ll be through with this really boring biology. Then I can take a different science course, and I’m going to do astronomy.” Reminded, he glanced up at the bright red star, now dominating the eastern horizon.
His father did not disappoint him. “Yes, that’s Mars,” he said, following Ranjit’s line of sight. “It’s unusually bright; there’s good seeing tonight.” He turned his gaze back to his son. “Speaking of the planet Mars, do you remember who Percy Molesworth was? The one whose grave we used to visit?”
Ranjit reached back into his recollections of childhood and was pleased to find a clue. “Oh, right. The astronomer.” They were speaking of Percy Molesworth, the British army captain who had been stationed at Trincomalee around the end of the nineteenth century. “Mars was his specialty, right?” he went on, happy to be talking about something that would please his father. “He was the one who proved that, uh…”
“The canals,” his father assisted.
“Right, the canals! He proved that they weren’t actual canals built by an advanced Martian civilization but just an example of the kind of tricks our eyes can play on us.”
Ganesh gave him an encouraging nod. “He was the astronomer—the very great astronomer—who did most of his work right here in Trinco, and he—”
Then Ganesh stopped midsentence. He turned to peer into Ranjit’s face. Then he sighed. “Do you see what I am doing, Ranjit? I am delaying the inevitable. It was not to talk about astronomers that I asked you to come here tonight. What we must discuss is something a great deal more serious. That is your relationship with Gamini Bandara.”
It had come.
Ranjit took a deep breath before bursting out: “Father, believe me! It is not what you think! We just play at that sort of thing, Gamini and I. It means nothing.”
Unexpectedly, his father looked surprised. “Means nothing? Of course what you were doing means nothing. Did you think I did not know all the ways in which young boys like to experiment with kinds of behavior?” He shook his head reproachfully, and then said in a burst, “You must believe me in this, Ranjit. It isn’t the experimenting with sexual behavior that matters. It is the person you were sharing it with.” His voice was stressed again, as though it were hard for these words to come out. “Remember, my son, you are a Tamil. Bandara is Sinhalese.”
Ranjit’s first reaction was that he could not believe what he was hearing from his father’s lips. How could his father, who had always taught him that all men were brothers, say such things now? Ganesh Subramanian had been faithful to his beliefs in spite of the fact that the ethnic riots that began in the 1980s had left scars that would take generations to heal. Ganesh had lost close relatives to rampaging mobs. He himself had narrowly escaped death more than once.
But that was ancient history. Ranjit hadn’t been born yet in those days—even his deceased mother had hardly been born yet—and for years now there had been a well-kept truce. Ranjit raised a hand. “Father,” he begged, “please! This is not like you. Gamini hasn’t murdered anyone.”
Inexorably Ganesh Subramanian repeated the terrible words. “Gamini is Sinhalese.”
“But Father! What about all the things you taught me? About that poem you made me learn by heart, the one from the Purananuru. ‘To us all towns are