A gang of three senior boys had been bullying Tapan. Their leader was the hockey captain, the seniormost prefect in the house other than the house captain. He was sexually obsessed with Tapan, and made him spend hours every night somersaulting up and down the long verandah as an alternative, he said, to somersaulting naked in his study four times. Tapan knew what he was after and had refused. Sometimes he was made to somersault in assembly because there was an imaginary spot of dust on his shoes, sometimes he had to run around the lake (after which the school was named) for an hour or more till he was near collapse – for no reason other than the prefect’s whim. Protest was useless, since insubordination would carry its own penalties. To speak to the house captain was pointless; the solidarity of the barons would have ensured his further torture. To speak to the housemaster, a genial and ineffectual fool with his dogs and his beautiful wife and his pleasant don’t-disturb-me life would have branded Tapan as a sneak – to be shunned and hounded even by those who now sympathized with him. And often enough his peers too could not resist teasing him about his powerful admirer’s obsession, and implying that Tapan secretly enjoyed it.
Tapan was physically tough, and was always ready to use his fists or his sharp Chatterji tongue in his own defence; but the combination of major and minor cruelties had worn him down. He felt crushed by their cumulative weight and his own isolation. He had nothing and no one to tell him that he was right except a single Tagore song at Assembly, and this made his loneliness even deeper.
Dipankar looked grim as he listened; he knew the system from experience, and realized what pitiful resources a boy of thirteen could summon up against three seventeen-year-olds, invested with the absolute power of a brutal state. But he had no idea of what was to come; and Tapan became almost incoherent as he recounted the worst of it.
One of the nocturnal sports of the prefect’s gang was to hunt the civet cats that roamed around under the roof of their house. They would smash their heads in and skin them, then break bounds with the connivance of the night-watchman and sell them for their skin and scent-glands. Because they discovered that Tapan was terrified of the things, they got a particular kick out of forcing him to open trunks in which they were lying dead. He would go berserk, run screaming at the senior boys and hit them with his fists. This they thought was hilarious, especially since they were also able to feel him up at the same time.
In one case they garotted a live civet cat, forced Tapan to watch, heated up an iron bar, and cut its throat from side to side with it. Then they played with its voice-box.
Dipankar stared at his brother, almost paralysed. Tapan was shuddering and gagging in dry heaves.
‘Just get me out of there, Dada – I can’t spend another term there – I’ll jump off the train, I’m telling you – every time the morning bell rings I wish I was dead.’
Dipankar nodded and put his arm around his shoulder. This time it was not shrugged off.
‘One day I’ll kill him,’ said Tapan with such hatred that Dipankar was chilled. ‘I’ll never forget his name, I’ll never forget his face. I’ll never forget what he did. Never.’
Dipankar’s mind turned back to his own schooldays. There had been plenty of unpleasant incidents, but this psychopathic and persistent sadism left him speechless.
‘Why didn’t you tell me – why? – that school was like this?’ said Tapan, still gasping. His eyes were full of misery and accusation.
Dipankar said: ‘But – but school wasn’t like that for me – my schooldays weren’t unhappy for me on the whole. The food was bad; the omelettes were like lizards’ corpses, but –’ He stopped, then continued, ‘I’m sorry, Tapan… I was in a different house, and, well, times do change… But that housemaster of yours should be sacked immediately. And as for those boys – they should be –’
He controlled himself with an effort, then went on: ‘Gangs did terrorize the juniors, even in my time, but this –’ He shook hishead. ‘Do other boys have it just as bad?’
‘No –’ said Tapan, then corrected himself. ‘He picked on another boy earlier, but the boy gave in after a week’s treatment, and went to his study.’
Dipankar nodded. ‘How long has this been going on?’
‘More than a year, but it’s been worse since he was made a prefect. These last two terms –’
‘Why didn’t you tell me before?’
Tapan was silent. Then he burst out passionately: ‘Dada, promise me, please promise me you won’t tell anyone else.’