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speak),
topos
for the toilets (from the Greek word for “place”), and, rudely,
oiks
for non–Rugby School inhabitants of the town, a place best known for the manufacture of cement. Though the Three Mistakes were never forgiven, he did his best to fit in. In the sixth form he won the Queen’s Medal for a history essay about Napoléon’s foreign minister, the clubfooted, cynical, amoral libertine Talleyrand, whom he vigorously defended. He became secretary of the school’s debating society and spoke eloquently in favor of fagging, which was abolished not long after his school days ended. He came from a conservative Indian family and was in no sense a radical. But racism was something he quickly understood. When he returned to his little study, he more than once found an essay he had written torn to pieces, which were scattered on the seat of his red armchair. Once somebody wrote the words WOGS GO HOME on his wall. He gritted his teeth, swallowed the insults, and did his work. He did not tell his parents what school had been like until after he left it (and when he did tell them they were horrified that he had kept so much pain to himself). His mother was suffering because of his absence, his father was paying a fortune for him to be there, and it would not be right, he told himself, to complain. So in his letters home he created his first fictions, about idyllic school days of sunshine and cricket. In fact he was no good at cricket and Rugby in winter was bitterly cold, doubly so for a boy from the tropics who had never slept under heavy blankets and found it hard to go to sleep when so weighed down. But if he cast them off, then he shivered. He had to get used to this weight also, and he did. At night in the dormitories,after lights-out, the metal-frame beds began to shake as the boys relieved their adolescent urges, and the banging of the beds against the heating pipes running around the walls filled the large dark rooms with the night music of inexpressible desire. In this matter, as in all else, he strove to be like the others, and join in. Again: He was not, by nature, rebellious. In those early days, he preferred the Rolling Stones to the Beatles, and, after one of his friendlier housemates, a serious, cherubic boy named Richard Shearer, made him sit down and listen to
The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan
, he became an enthusiastic Dylan worshipper; but he was, at heart, a conformist.
    Still: Almost as soon as he came to Rugby he did rebel. The school insisted that all boys should enroll in the CCF, or Combined Cadet Force, and then climb into full military khaki on Wednesday afternoons to play war games in the mud. He was not the sort of boy who thought that might be fun—indeed, it struck him as a kind of torture—and in the first week of his school career he went to see his housemaster, Dr. George Dazeley, a mild-natured mad-scientist type with a glittering, mirthless smile, to explain to him that he did not wish to join. Dr. Dazeley stiffened, glittered, and pointed out, just a little icily, that boys did not have the right to opt out. The boy from Bombay, suddenly possessed by an unaccustomed stubbornness, drew himself up straight. “Sir,” he said, “my parents’ generation have only recently fought a war of liberation against the British Empire, and therefore I cannot possibly agree to join its armed forces.” This unexpected burst of postcolonial passion stymied Dr. Dazeley, who limply gave in and said, “Oh, very well, then you’d better stay in your study and read instead.” As the young conscientious objector left his office Dazeley pointed to a picture on the wall. “That is Major William Hodson,” he said. “Hodson of Hodson’s Horse. He was a Bradley boy.” William Hodson was the British cavalry officer who, after the suppression of the Indian Uprising of 1857 (at Rugby it was called
the Indian Mutiny
), captured the last Mughal emperor, the poet Bahadur Shah Zafar, and murdered his three sons,