I liked the long bus ride home. It gave me time to study.
There were two buses. The first was crowded and took about five minutes to reach Connaught Place. The second was a chartered bus with air conditioning. On that one I could sit down, open a notebook, and work. Physics, mathematics, whatever needed doing. There was always something.
I was in high school in Delhi. It was one of my first days at a new school.
Doing well in school was one thing. Getting into college was another. The colleges had their own entrance examinations. You could pass high school and still fail those. Plenty of students spent another year preparing. I wanted to go straight through. I did not want to lose that year.
My old school had not left me enough room to prepare for those examinations, so I had moved. Now I had two kinds of work: the entrance questions I wanted to solve and the months of classwork I had missed. I was still finding out where the new class had reached.
One day I borrowed notes from one new friend. The next day, from another. I was getting to know people through their notebooks. I wanted to catch up quickly and then get ahead. More questions. More problems. If there was time on a bus, there was time to do a few more.
I had the shirt and trousers for the new school, white and brown. The tie and belt were particular to that school, and I did not have them yet. I was not quite dressed for the place, but I was already carrying its homework.
The school stood in an old part of the city. Farther along the same road was the place where I had gone to preschool. I had known that street as a little boy. Now I took the buses there early in the morning and went home with physics and mathematics in my bag.
Other boys were thinking about other schools.
The rivalries were old. Sports, pride, one school against another. But the fighting did not stay on the playing field. Boys went looking for boys in the wrong uniform. They carried metal rods and wooden sticks. It had become a blood sport.
My siblings had attended schools in that circle, and I had heard the stories. Still, I thought about the questions I had left to solve. I wore the uniform and thought about mathematics.
One afternoon, the crowded bus brought me to Connaught Place as usual. I moved toward the door.
Usually, the crowd behind you pushed you off. This time, hands reached in and pulled.
A boy caught hold of me. Then another. They dragged me off the bus and into the street.
“We’ve got one! We’ve got one!”
One boy shouted, and more came. Two became five, then ten. Soon there may have been twenty. They pulled me to the side of the street. Everywhere I turned, there was another boy. All because of a white shirt and brown trousers.
They did not know me. They needed a boy from my school. Any boy would do.
I was there. They had the rods.
I was very thin then, with hollow cheeks and hardly an ounce of fat. Looking back, I think I resembled a French model living on a spoonful of rice a day. There was not much of me to push around.
Hands gripped my collar and jerked me one way, then another. My backpack was still on. My feet were on the street, but I could not stand still. It felt as though I were up in the air.
“Hold on,” I kept saying. “What’s going on?”
Then I recognized the uniforms. They belonged to the rival school. The boys looked sharp in them. They were better turned out than I was.
Some held wooden sticks. Others held metal rods. I could see the rust.
I knew what those things were for. I was the boy they had caught.
They named my school.
“You’re from there?”
“No,” I said, and named my old school.
“But you’re wearing their uniform.”
I began explaining my journey. I changed buses here every day. I was going to take the chartered bus home. It was over there. That was why I was here.
Most schoolboys did not take that nicer bus. I tried to make something of this. A boy taking that bus could not be the boy they wanted. I kept explaining, trying to give them something they would believe.
They did not believe me.
I gave them the name of my old principal. They could call the school and ask about me. I knew the place. I had gone there until very recently, and I could keep talking about it.
Then I pointed to what I was not wearing.
“Look. No tie. No belt.”
At my school, I told them, we did not have to wear those things.
Each answer brought another question. They still had my collar.
“I can show you my books.”
They loosened their grip.
“Show us! Show us!”
Several of them shouted at once. Their hands came off my collar. Now they wanted the bag open.
“Thank you,” I said.
I had been working so hard on what to say. That came out by itself.
“He can’t be from that school!” one boy yelled to the others. “Look how polite he is. Those boys don’t say thank you!”
The boys at my new school could be rough. I knew that. Now this boy was making my case for me, and the others were accepting it.
No one asked for the books again. The boys began to leave.
I had begun opening my bag. I closed it.
They disappeared almost as quickly as they had come.
The chartered bus was waiting where it always waited. I walked over, got in, and sat down. I remember doing it calmly. There was the air conditioning. There was my seat. I opened my bag for my math workbook, just as I did every day.
Out came a handful of notebooks.
On top was my friend’s. The one I had borrowed that day.
The name of my new school was printed across the cover.
There it was. On top. The first thing they would have seen.
I had offered to show them that.
They would not have needed another answer. The name was there, and they had the rods and sticks. They would have beaten me black and blue.
I had been only seconds away from putting the notebook in their hands. Instead, I was holding it on the bus.
The next morning, I was called into the principal’s room. I had told my class teacher what had happened, and the teacher had reported it. The school had also heard something about the trouble.
There I learned that another boy from our school had been rounded up the day before. He had been badly beaten.
The boys had let me go before they saw the name on the notebook. What they had heard mattered more.
I had thanked them.