CHILDREN’S GAMES by Ranbir Sidhu

I grew up in an orphanage in northern India. It had originally served as an imperial hill station employed as a sanatorium for injured soldiers who survived the 1857 revolt. Some years before the end of the century it was converted into a private school for children of officials of the Raj. Finally a Presbyterian minister from Texas bought the failing school, transforming it in the early decades of the twentieth century into an orphanage and dayschool primarily for Anglo-Indian children. The buildings dated from its earliest incarnation. They were a mouldering brown or dull orange stone that in the late afternoon and twilight took on the colors of the rougher, darker ground, as though the architecture, in the morning and daylight, was an illusion that fractured, giving itself up with the dying sun as it returned to the singular entropy of the dirt’s brown crushed surface.
The architecture was an imported architecture: a decayed Gothic hovering in the roofs and windows giving little inkling of utility or purpose. The buildings were arrayed along a ridgeline and not far from the school the roads afforded views of the verdant and green valleys surrounding the old hill station. The caretakers were continually seconded into an increasingly futile battle to retain the imported, distantly English flavor the original builders had introduced. Flowerbeds edged the gardens with their fuchsias, geraniums, lilies, heliotropes and bluebonnets while the vegetable patch persisted in offering up its cabbage, lettuce and turnips. But the native flora had long ago begun a suffocating infiltration of the grounds. Where mimosa trees had been imported from Australia now stood deodars and shishams; cassias, borage, marwan and pohli all found corners for themselves. Vines crusted the walls of buildings and every year an annual clearing away of their tendrilled arms from the windows was carried out with ever greater resignation and hopeless lethargy. In the days of the hill station, an artificial lake had been dug on the far outskirts. It lived on as a swamp, filled in mostly, home to water snakes and insects of every variety, an ugly, unstable ground few dared approach, smelling of refuse and excrement, slushing underfoot if trudged across.
We sometimes came upon reminders of the hill station’s previous incarnations. Scuttled away in the backs of cupboards were old boots with their leather already corrupted by the heat, rusted kit knives refusing to open, black dinner jackets fenestrated by time and moths whose sleeves still recalled the memory of a sharp crease, the frayed remnant of a photograph showing a curt major general or an ayah beleaguered by the closed-up anger of a small child, their edges chewed by mice or babies and the paper twisted into delicate half-cones whose pirouetted exposition of climate and age told as clear a history as the image itself.
The streets of the surrounding town, nothing more than a few monastic alleys with rundown shops catering to the inhabitants of the nearby valley and the orphanage, were all unnamed. We would name them after ourselves, claiming this was Vijay Boulevard, or that Howard Street, and there was Sanjay Square bestowing on the tiny village a history and grandeur in our imaginations, one it lacked entirely in reality.
In the center of the courtyard a massive pillar lay on its side. It was made of stone and neither base nor top survived, and much of the decoration that had once been inscribed onto it had been lost or chipped away by soldiers or children. Writing was still visible in areas and arrayed over its crumbling surface were several symbols whose curious menace invited attempts at interpretation: two dots became a face, a line became a knife, a circle was for us a decapitated head. There was a beauty to the decayed surface of the pillar, especially at certain hours, when the etched relief, made splendid in the slanting rays of the sun, took on the proportions of a grand history: now the dots were stars shooting through the sky, the line became a door leading to the hall of a great and glittering palace.
The teachers claimed it was erected by the great Emperor Asoka, one of his famous pillars cut in the third century BC, inscribed with his laws and spread all across the land all those untold eons ago. Vines struggled up its sides and enclosed the soft grey stone under a mossy sleep while the climate nibbled at it through a slow mastication by the elements. I once found a history of architecture in the school library showing a print of the same pillar. In the drawing the pillar appeared much larger and no houses yet surrounded it. A man dressed in a simple dhoti stood idly by for scale and behind him trees arched to fill the landscape. The author claimed that though some had counted this among Asoka’s pillars, he was certain it was not. The inscriptions dated from several centuries later. It was perhaps an imitation, though a good one, yet clearly not the real thing.
The orphanage I grew up in was different from the institution of its founding days. Though still a Christian organization, the religious practice had become a quotidian activity not unlike classes or break so that morning prayers were no longer taken seriously, certainly not by the students, perhaps not even by the minister who led us in the Lord’s Prayer and the morning’s hymns. It was Christianity by default and we called ourselves Christian because we did not know what else to call ourselves. I doubt if even one of the children believed, and often several of the teachers could be seen escaping in the morning before the service was concluded and we would find them later waiting for us in the classroom, smoking idly, calling us inside with an offhand gesture of the wrist. We were left alone, especially those who lived in the grounds of the school, because we had no parents to return to and none of the teachers or the minister took any interest in us. Our society was one we created ourselves, including whomever we wished, excluding at our whim and fancy.
Once, when I showed Mr. Babcock, the English and Latin teacher, the print I had found of the Asokan pillar and the author’s claim that it was little more than a forgery, he laughed. He shook his head from side to side, showing all his teeth, and then took the book from me, looking at it first upside down then rightway up, telling me it didn’t matter if it was a fake or not. Everything, he told me, was a fake in this country. Even I was forged.
I didn’t know what he meant and when I left him I was troubled and frightened. Mr. Babcock was a short, balding man and in the evenings, when I found him in his room or sitting on a verandah, he would be clutching a glass of beer or gin or scotch. He never showed his drunkenness. That was, I guess, the single rule of the orphanage, its last redoubt against complete deterioration: that as long as moral collapse remained hidden there lived a possibility of redemption. It was this hiding that both saved and doomed us. Few of the teachers were good at dissembling their carelessness. Classes were odd affairs where a teacher would stand at the front and talk, often dictating, seldom checking work for accuracy, simply ensuring we had filled up pages and not made too much noise with the quickly scribbled check of a fountain pen across an hour’s work.
Such a strange freedom was a burdensome, agoraphobic freedom. We could do almost anything, but in a world bounded by the atrophied wills of our keepers, we found ourselves unmoored and without purpose. We were afraid to leave the grounds and we created tales of all the horrors awaiting us in the old lake, along the ridge, in the houses in the valley, the dark recesses of the town’s shops. Djinns mocked us from every gate and window. We looked to each other for structure and for boundaries to our actions and worlds and what felt like a natural hierarchy developed, or perhaps showed itself, now freed of the imposed hierarchies of parents and teachers.
Those at the top were the orphans. We owned the grounds and the dayschoolers could never better our knowledge and sense of freedom among the buildings and the fields. Among us orphans there were those who had been left by parents and those who had lived here since they could remember, who knew nothing or little of their parents. These latter formed the apex of our hierarchy, its college of bishops, its senate, and here skin color, age and strength gave rise to our leaders. Those with the lightest skin, a skin almost European in tint, always occupied the highest rungs. My own skin was clearly brown, a light shade and so though near the top (because I had no memories of anyplace other than the orphanage) I never found myself at the highest point of our invented mountain of souls.
Howard was at the top most years. His skin betrayed virtually no brown and in the sun it took on a ruddy, reddish glow. His hair was a dark brown and his eyes slate grey and we all envied the color of his skin – it seemed to glow with a natural authority. He was a lanky, tall kid out of place in the shorts we all wore. He looked like he should already be wearing pants. He wasn’t the strongest among us and in fights he was sometimes beaten, but he never showed fear. He would fight a kid who had beaten him several times with the same energy and enthusiasm as when he would fight one he felt sure to beat. Yet in his attacks, in his battling, there came out of him a fierceness and an anger that he seldom showed when not fighting. His altercations could become quite vicious and it was partly this unpredictability that gave him his position among us. He was seldom vindictive, or any more vindictive than the rest of us, and we found in his uneasy rule the boundaries that gave us a primal stability, the kind that can only flourish in such ephemeral societies of children lost to parents.
My closest friend among the children was named Arjun. He was shorter than myself, skinny, dark-skinned, and rested in the lower reaches of the hierarchy. Though he lived at the orphanage there were several dayschool kids he was required to defer to. We played chess together and roamed the library for dusty books of adventure and tales of pirate gold. We both discovered India the same way: through those books the library still held in the upper reaches of its shelves. No new books had been added since before I arrived and the last date we ever found was 1934. This was the year the librarian died and no librarian was hired again. I don’t know if the philosophy of the school changed or if books were simply forgotten. Perhaps it was thought that knowledge of a certain era was surely sufficient for subsequent eras. So much had been discovered that no one could hope to learn it all.
Whatever the reason, it placed a circumference on our discoveries. The world we learned of was a world existing in the early decades of the last century, in fact a world built mostly in the imaginations of the nineteenth century, and all we were ever offered to counteract this picture were radio broadcasts or a newspaper left for us by a forgetful teacher. We read mostly tales of Europeans, often the British, and our world became one of sahibs and their hunting expeditions, generals and their armies, Indian princes and their diminished courts. It was a fabulous invention and we imagined how we would have lived in that same world, what positions of power we would have occupied.
From the library I could see the great pillar sitting in the lonely greyness of the courtyard, a stone that had slipped the anchor of history. We all played on it or sat with our backs to it in the heat of the day. It was the locus of all our motions, the central pivot of our clock. It was our pillar and some among us had inscribed our initials alongside those ancient letters none could read. I would look up and see it as I read an account of a tiger hunt in Bihar and see myself in its dimmed magnificence. I too was lost to the anchor of history – without parents or siblings I found in the great old stone a curious commonality, a friendly certainty: it had been here for so many years and would stay with us far beyond my own death.

All I knew of my parents were their initials on a ring and the barest scrap of a photograph. It wasn’t even a whole photograph, only the torn corner, and the inscription on the ring, an unadorned gold engagement band, read only AT to CG Always and Never. AT was my father, CG my mother.
Reverend Healdstone served as principal and pastor of the school. He was a tall man with thick arms and in the afternoons I would hear the clack of an axe as he chopped wood, the sharp, dying rustle of branches as he scythed through encroaching brush.
It was Reverend Healdstone who gave me the scrap of photograph and the ring. He did not look at me when he handed over the faded, brown envelope in which they had been stored. On its face was written “Thakur, V. – effects” as though they were the remnants of my own dead body. He had called me into his office with a rough, belligerent voice and I was afraid I had done some terrible deed. The room was dark and unbearably hot, the curtains perennially drawn. I began to sweat as soon as I walked inside. The reverend emitted an odor of alcohol and cigarettes. His hand was shaking when he passed the envelope to me. “Yours, I believe,” he said, adding nothing else. I took this as a sign that he was finished with me, though he would not say as much. I walked out the door. Behind me I heard his ravaged cough. The ring was my mother’s. They had been with me when I arrived. This I later learned from Babcock, but he said he knew nothing else. The Reverend never told me anything more and in all the years I lived at the school I seldom spoke more words to him in a single instance than at the meeting in that strangling office.
Those initials inscribed into the gold band were sometimes the most tangible elements of my life, holding in them the authenticity of an unknown and clouded heritage. The letters – ATCG, CGAT – threaded around each other, following the path of my childhood and molding my person with the strength of their many possibilities. They were intimations of an ancestry that took on the power of a religion, a whole world caught and imagined. I was eleven, perhaps twelve, when Healdstone handed them to me. The shock was a rewriting of my history. I had always known I had had a mother and a father, but I had never believed in them, in their physicality. They were more vaporous than ghosts. But here was tangible proof. They had touched these objects, worn the ring; one of them must have torn the photograph into fragments. With these scant clues I began to piece together a new life and a new history, multiple lives, multiple histories, all equally possible.
The photograph showed only a man’s shoe. It was a black and white photograph, and I guessed the shoe was almost certainly brown and polished to a high sheen and it reflected the bright star of a studio light bathing my father in its hot glow. On the back was written my name in an elegant but hurried hand, “Vijay Thakur.” Spots of ink surrounded the name where the hand obviously rushed. Perhaps when surrendering the baby with the ring he had searched quickly for a scrap of paper in case my name would be forgotten or changed, and finding nothing, he chose this photograph and tore one corner, thus preserving much of the whole, and wrote my name. Or perhaps it was CG, my mother, who handed me over, who tore the corner of her love’s photograph, not wanting to lose more than this. Or perhaps in a show of anger she had torn up the photograph and then in remorse kept the pieces with her until the day she carried me to this village and this orphanage where AT said he would support me; and from a certain sentimentality, she chose a fragment of that portrait of my father to write my name upon.
I imagined his name was Adi Thakur and when the name first came to me it seemed he could have no other name except Adi, a demon bird in myth that could both swim and fly. How else, I thought as a child, would he come to save me from whatever distant realms he lived within?
CG’s name offered more possibilities. Her first name was always Caroline. I loved the sound of that name, it was a sound skimming across the surface of my tongue and out into the world like a whisper, a breath of necessity and hope. But her last name always changed with the year, the mood, the past I wanted to have had and the future I was always trying to grab onto. There were Grays and Greens and Grunvalds and Grosvenors and Gays and Gilliams and Gneisses and Gorses. Each Caroline was different and for each I created a new Adi to be her lover, husband, admirer.
Caroline Gray was the daughter of an old Scots lord, half blind and deaf, and when her father looked at her he would pull his face all the way up to hers so that all that filled his vision were her eyes, likewise filling her vision with his own crimped eyes. She carried a rifle as a young girl and shot pheasants and hunted foxes while refusing to ride sidesaddle. She was all elbows and pushed herself into the world with a wild, unmanageable tongue, all the more because her father hardly heard a word she said. It was this dissonance that attracted Adi. For he would stand with her in her father’s study, a guest, perhaps a professor, a businessman, that sort of thing, and listen to the foul mouth of the daughter, her laughing all the while, and the father’s patient nods of approval.
Another was Caroline Gates whose mother imagined her from the beginning, before the womb, before the husband, that her daughter – for she would have a daughter and set about getting one, first a husband, then a pregnancy, the way things go so neatly in order, like alphabets in any language – would be a concert pianist. And so Caroline Gates practiced for years at what she called simply “that abysmal tinkling” until the night before her first solo recital when by some accident a hammer found its way into one hand and crashed onto her other hand, a neat relationship of forces here, crushing three fingers and leaving the stain of her carpals on the black finish of her – as she called it, abysmally black – piano. (And there was also Caroline Gates-Parker who owned a deeper conflict because both her parents [the Parker and the Gates] painted themselves into her future, and thus the split, a hyphenated name with a hyphenated personality, who half the year was the doctor her father wanted and the other half the engineer her mother demanded.)
But my favorite was always Caroline Green, who traced her family back to Charlemagne on one side and Alfred the Great on the other, straddling the channel with her blood like some ancient warrior goddess, red-haired, bedevillingly beautiful, she moved with sharp, determined motions and said only what was on her mind, never a lie, never a word burnished with pleasing sentiments to escape offense; and with her Adi took on his full name, a god and bird, in water and in air, they were everywhere together, the two most famous criminals on the continent, anarchists both, whose crimes were always crimes of failure, or crimes bound to fail, for their goal was never to steal but to give back, to show to those who lost their goods and possessions the luxury attainable only when one sees oneself reflected in the sparseness of a room emptied by such looting. They saw their crimes as acts of beauty and of purification; rooms became monuments to their inhabitants, to the lives lived inside them, not to the objects filling them; they wanted to free people to see themselves as themselves, not as extensions of all they owned. They wanted to give the clarity of emptiness.
Once she and Adi exploded a bomb in a bank in Geneva. It was one of those round, black bombs from old Buster Keaton movies: BANG! and then the chaos of the bank after the explosion; and the guard, who had been caught off guard, running to the phone and the alarm and shaking his gun in the air as though the explosion hid the culprits the way smoke hides a djinn escaping from a bottle. But this was not a large explosion, mostly smoke and sound, and in the smoke gold threads, hundreds, thousands, thrown up into the air now hanging there as though time had slowed or stopped, as though the force of the explosion was now held in or dissipated and some other force, or idea, had taken over; and the customers and clerks and even the guard, his gun pointing this way and that way like some shaky finger of a large puppet, realizing that no one was hurt, that no one was screaming any longer in fright, that no blood fouled the floor, no masked gang carrying revolvers or tommy guns had appeared or menace of djinns from some eastern shore, now all stopped and looked up into the air and watched and saw a world of gold threads spidering about their eyes and heads and bodies, playing in the dying smoke, rising, falling, settling on counters and shoulders and hats and hair and floor, glistening not with their own gold colors, but with every color around them, reflecting infinitely every shape and variation that struck these threads and passed onto the viewers’ eyes; and for some moments all who watched thought they were looking out of this world entirely, that they no longer stood inside a bank inside a capital within the heart of a continent, but were simply what they saw, this gleaming shimmering life that sometimes reflected their own eyes back at them like a diamond set in some great ring; and then the denudation of the effect, its dying, the fading of the light as the alarm sounded once again in their eyes and police sirens wailed in the street, and the rift between them and this other world closing shut with violent, mocking force, as though to say, You see what could have been; and then among all of them, looking around, looking at each other again for the first time, those eyes they had seen shining and then their own and then those colors that were everything but gold, a sense that they had been truly robbed.
Those initials threaded through my childhood, strands of mystery and terror, an inscription in gold on the slim, gleaming band of their engagement ring, their disengagement ring? Sometimes I would hold it up to the light and imagine it as one of those bursting threads that Caroline Green let loose in the bank that day. I would stare into its sharp depths, the glints of light, the play of shadow across the initials, imagining the far and distant worlds beyond the spidering twist of gold. I believed always they would come for me, that AT would appear one day at the gates of the school, his brown shoes still polished to a high sheen, that CG would arrive in search of the ring, in search of me, that they would whisk me up in their arms, that I too would join their gang, living on that far side of the ring lustre.

The day Howard found a monkey’s skull reshaped our vision of him and of ourselves, it shifted the crustal plates of our small world at the orphanage. It was a bright white skull, the color of a newly whitewashed wall with the paint still infecting the air around it with its burying odor. The teeth in the maxilla were all there, though the lower jaw was missing. The canines were a fabulous vision of our carnivorous selves and we mimicked them when he showed us this strange prize of a sortie out to the old lake. I thought of him stamping about in those noxious, forbidden tracts that held so much terror for us all. It was a brave act and gave his find the aura of an object carried back from a forbidden expedition.
None of us had seen a monkey’s skull before and when he claimed it to be the skull of one of our ancestors, a proto-human, Krishnanthropus he called it, we all believed him. “One of your ancestors,” he insisted in the singsong voice of childhood certainty, “not mine. I don’t come from anything so low.” Howard said that anthropology, for this is what he termed what he was doing – a new word to all of us – was a hit and miss thing: you might be lucky to find a tooth, let alone a skull with its jaw. We applauded him and danced around him, making wild monkey noises, until Mr. Babcock, driven from his afternoon lethargy by our exuberance, demanded to know what all the ruckus was after. He was drunk and we all knew it and we laughed at him, right in his face. It was an incredible show of defiance, one we had never allowed ourselves before, and it pulled us all, I am sure, to the edges of our own possible worlds. It was Howard who started laughing, though he had not taken part in our screams and cries some minutes earlier. He mimicked perfectly Mr. Babcock’s swaying gait, his demand to know what was happening, his confusion, his annoyance at being disturbed. We all quickly followed, ourselves drunk on the sudden liberty of Howard’s capering free, while Mr. Babcock stood within our threatening circle, his cheeks reddening, saying nothing, nothing at all. Finally he retreated. He walked drunkenly back to his rooms on the far side of the complex of buildings.
We were all terrified for a night and day afterwards waiting for the coming punishment, yet none admitted his fear. We all threatened Babcock and Healdstone with what we would do when they came for us, mocking Babcock’s grand defeat – bravado all the way round, for every one of us awaited the coming punishment with quiet terror. The night and day and the following night and day passed and there was no reaction from either Healdstone or Babcock. They didn’t punish us. At first we celebrated this fact as our victory. Arjun began dancing around like a monkey and Howard said that now we were in control. But as the withholding of the punishment continued, carrying over from one or two days to a week and then two weeks, we all began to feel the oppression of its absence, waiting there for us. In every gesture of Healdstone in the morning assembly we expected his violent reaction, and when every gesture showed only his daily recalcitrance and disregard our fear only enlarged. We felt it like a pressure growing, sitting over us, the certainty of a coming doom. We felt the slow suffocation of our haphazard reprieve.
Neither teachers nor servants knew of Krishnanthropus. Howard kept his find well hidden. “If they get it,” he said to us, “they’ll take all the credit. I’ve written letters to scientists in Europe and America and even Africa. I’m sure someone will come soon.” The writing of letters was to us an incredible endeavor, almost Herculean, because it pushed us out into the world, the far wide world, and we all believed we were not a part of it, that we lived on the fringes of its farthest periphery. What splendid arrogance on the side of Howard, an arrogance that awed us all.
He kept the skull secured in a place none could find, though twice we organized expeditions to search fruitlessly for it. He brought it out at night. He displayed it on a wooden table standing on shaky legs at the back of an abandoned room in what was once a prison; the window, which housed no glass, displayed holes in the upper and lower edges of the frame where bars must once have stood. The skull would sit alone and we were required, if we wanted to view it, to bring a present or offering or garland. We brought sweets and flowers and comic books and fruit and toys and piled them up around it, all the while Howard standing behind the table following our every motion with his eyes. He said nothing as the procession of children pushed inside. Behind him, in niches in the wall, two candles burned and bathed us in their vacillating glow. After we had presented our gifts we knelt down, even Howard, and lowered our heads in obeisance to this strange god out of which we were all, or all except Howard, created. That would be the end of the ceremony. Nothing was ever said and the meeting was always brief. The next day we would see Howard walking casually with the comic book one of us had left fluttering in his hand, nibbling on the sweet some child had offered, quite openly and without comment, and we all accepted it as his privilege: he was not descended from the skull, we were; he was its discoverer, the discoverer of our origins, and this placed a distance between him and the rest of us, only increasing our restrained admiration and fear.
We acted differently towards him. Up to then, I had been the kid everyone knew could answer any question; it was me the others came to if they needed help on their French or Latin or geography or history. Howard was little more than an athlete and a poor student. But finding the skull and naming it, giving it a history, his letters to scientists, now made him preeminent amongst us not only in physical activities but in everything. If anyone had a question, they all now turned to him. No matter if he didn’t know, he would make the answer up or say he would tell them later. If he delayed answering he often came secretly to consult me and I would always tell him. He never revealed who asked the question and so I could not find that kid and answer him myself, and I could not refuse Howard either. We were all a little in love with him, with his white skin and brown hair that in the sunlight shone almost red or blond. He was seldom angry, even when he lost to a kid he knew was weaker than himself; we believed this was a magnanimity, a largeness of his person, we believed he had a right to beat up any kid he chose. It was something taken for granted, something in the air we all breathed; we could see how the teachers treated him; they never scolded him, even when he scored poorly on exams. If another student failed he might be sent to wash the walls of the kitchen, to give him time to think over poor study habits or lack of diligence, but when Howard failed, and he failed often, he was simply given a lecture: “This is not good enough, is it? Not your usual, is it? Well, better next time, eh.” And that was all, as though some divine dispensation was invoked over his every failure; and his successes were transformed into the equivalents of great military victories: a mediocre essay by Howard would be read as an example of brilliance, of that towards which we should all strive (even though in all likelihood I had written the essay and had dumbed it down to the expectations of Howard).
One day Howard received a reply from one of the scientists. None of us recognized the name but the envelope, which he showed us, presented a crown on its reverse side, the Royal Academy of something or other, and we were all impressed and a little terrified at its meaning: for not only had Howard dared to send a message out into the world, a bottle from our island of shipwrecked isolation, but he had received a reply. A ship’s sail cut across our horizon and we were all afraid of its imminent arrival, of the nearing end of our lost condition. He read it that night at a special meeting called in the prison. The skull rested in its usual spot, sitting on large, green leaves and surrounded by a mass of offerings almost hiding it completely from view. The offerings were far larger than usual, and far more than had been left the previous several meetings (for all of us had grown a little tired of the game). We children sat on the floor. Up to now, no one had ever spoken at these meetings. There was a bond of silence born both out of a reverence and awe for the skull and a fear of being discovered, and even Howard appeared reluctant to break this tradition, as though words might shatter what tenuous web had been strung between us these past several weeks.
Arjun sat beside me, fidgeting and afraid. He never enjoyed these meetings. He was afraid of the dark and of cramped places and was always the last to enter and the first to leave. It was a surprise to me he could ever tolerate the library, but he would often scurry in, searching for some particular volume and take it with him to read outside in the dusty courtyard. Howard’s silence lengthened. I could feel his nervousness growing and it infected me with a restlessness and a fear different from his. I looked at Howard’s face. It was difficult to make out his features. The candles stood behind him and what little light shone on his face was reflected light and so it was more a shadow with the vague inscription of eyes and mouth and nose, like a copperplate with an etched design.
In the letter the scientist thanked Howard for his note. His name was Dr. Wilson, a professor of dentistry. He said the skull described sounded more like a modern chimpanzee’s or baboon’s than any human ancestor, though if Howard wished he could certainly send along a photograph. He would ask friends who knew about these things, charm-stones and bones. Had Howard read much about the Egyptians? There was a people, eh? The letter ended with a note saying that the world needed more such bully observant and intelligent boys like Howard, and when he grew up he should send along another letter. Maybe there’d be a spot in the school of dentistry.
I could not see Howard’s expression when he finished reading but I could guess from his faltering voice a growing and stiffening anger holding his body tight in the dim light of the old prison. Finally he bent forward and in that single bending forward was contained his defeat. He took the letter and tore it in two and then he tore these pieces again and again until only scraps were left. These he let cascade through his fingers and drop onto the floor and onto the table, some landing among the piled gifts to our strange ancestor. We did not bow down, instead Howard, in a voice holding back a childish and compressed rage, said simply, “What can that old fart know? What can anyone know?”
Arjun was shaking. I could feel his arm pressed against mine. It was hot with sweat. I turned to look at him. His eyes were closed and his mouth was shut tight and his body dipped forward and backward with slight undulating motions like a cat drinking milk. He sprang up when Howard said we should go and was out through the door and lost in the night of the buildings and stars and trees and the intimation of a village beyond. The night was cool and starless, a conjuring blackness, and as I stepped briefly into it, the other children around me, I felt the sudden oppressiveness of their bodies surrounding me.
The following day Howard came to see me. I was hiding in the library. I had found a book on London in the thirties, the London before the war, and I was dreaming of the Lambeth Walk and “Knees Up, Mother Brown.” I thought of myself traveling to London or to Paris. I would be like Vasco da Gama on his voyage to India, slaughtering infidels along the way, being guided by the gods, and finding there a land so strange, so different, a whole other world. It seemed like that to me, these creatures who did the Lambeth Walk, who drank pints and played billiards and darts, and offered as real a world to conquer as did the India of da Gama’s time, and to me, England, France, the United States were all constituents of a single continent whose features I could not easily define, but within which Shakespeare lived alongside Hitler, The Beatles sang and Mozart composed, where George Washington had crossed the Potomac and Coca-Cola was drunk in draft pints.
Howard said to me, “Something’s got to happen.” He was wearing a white shirt and black shorts and suspenders and the white of his legs and arms was stark and unmitigated in the dimness of the library as though he was a being visiting me from another dimension, from a heaven or a hell. He brought his face close to mine, ignoring what I was reading.
“Happen? What you mean?”
“We have to do something for Krishna.” He called the skull simply Krishna now because when he tried to pronounce the whole name he often got it mixed up or confused. His voice was charged with an excitement I had never heard before in him and his breath tickled my cheek in quick, easy puffs. “We have to get the chaps together and do something. They’re already losing interest. You saw it last night. Some didn’t want to be there. They didn’t care.”
I thought he was accusing me directly, because I had already lost interest. I didn’t know what the fuss was about anymore, and though the secretiveness of the meetings had originally excited me it was clear Howard had no idea what to do with them or how to use them. He simply stood up there and took the gifts as though that was sufficient. I wanted to tell him we all worshipped him, we all waited for a word from him; we would do anything, but he had to tell us, to lead us.
“It’s boring,” I said.
“But this is your ancestor. That’s what you come from. Don’t you understand?”
I knew I didn’t come from that and I thought of telling this to Howard, but demanded instead, “But where do you come from?”
“Not that.” His tone was dismissive and this angered me. “Only you come from that,” he carried on. “Only you blackies.”
“You’re not bloody different.”
“But I don’t come from that. I can’t. I found it. I come from some European ape.”
“My mother was French,” I said, unsure why.
“Liar!”
“Yes she was!”
“She was one of those whores in town. Haven’t you seen them? You must have seen her, the ones with the – ”
Before he could finish I raised a punch and hit him in the stomach, though weakly. He fell back, mostly from surprise, into the wall of books. He was up in a moment and on top of me, scrambling his fists and attacking me with sudden fury. I fought back as best I could but I was no match for him and soon my weak kicks and thrusts were completely smothered. He took my head in his hands and thrust it against the tiled floor. “She was a fucking whore! A fucking whore! They were all fucking whores! Don’t you get it? Don’t you know why we’re here?”
I began to scream and Howard only knocked my head harder against the tiles. My head erupted in pain. Soon I heard footsteps running and a voice and I could see Mr. Babcock’s feet and legs standing close by my head. He said, “Howard.” His voice was thin and weak. It was closer to a question than an injunction. Then again, “Howard? Let Vijay go?” And after Howard raised and dropped my head once more, Babcock repeated, “Howard, will you let the little chap go now?” Howard’s breath was hard and fast in my ears. He was transformed and I had never seen him like this.
Howard eventually stopped, though more from exhaustion than from Babcock’s pathetic entreaties. Babcock knelt down beside me. I could smell tobacco and alcohol on his breath and he looked weakly at my face as though I was both there and not there, as though to him I existed in two possible states and he had not yet decided which of those two was dominant, was real: was I there or not? He fell back a moment, losing his balance, and then he righted himself again. Finally, he seemed to decide. “Vijay?” he said in a voice expressing surprise and recognition. “Why did you make Howard do that?”
I began to cry. I looked down at the tile. There was a smear of blood there and I raised a hand to my head and felt my wet hair. I brought the fingers to my face. They were red and I showed this to Mr. Babcock as though it was an explanation for everything, and if not an explanation, then at least an expiation, a confession of my guilt and complicity. Howard stood silently behind Mr. Babcock. He did not look at me but instead looked away and out through the door, though from his angle he could see only a few feet down along the hall. Perhaps he was expecting someone else, perhaps this had all been strangely planned. Mr. Babcock looked at my hand and shook his head. “You’re cut up,” he said and I was surprised because I thought he must be saying something more than the plainly obvious but that I was too dumb to comprehend it.
“Before I take you to the nurse, will you say sorry to Howard.”
The look I gave him must have shaken him because he did not repeat the request, instead he told me brusquely to stand and walk with him. To Howard he said, “You go clean yourself up, young chap.” Howard nodded but did not move, waiting for us to leave before he followed us out of the library.
I walked with Babcock’s wavering hand on my shoulder, Howard’s steps shadowing mine. I could feel the blood dripping along my face, mingling with tears. I was furious and hated Howard and hated Babcock and hated myself for not fighting, for following Howard for as long as I had. I was ashamed and every step I took battled with that shame, held it up, magnified it, toppled it, recreated it.
That night I slept in the infirmary and in the evening I watched as several kids, fewer than usual, crept from the dormitory and out across the courtyard to the prison. Arjun was among them. They looked like ghosts floating over the ground, gliding in and out of light and dark, the faint sound of their steps disappearing into the swallowing blackness.

The first command Howard delivered from the skull of the Krishnanthropus was that all children must play only those games Howard decided upon. This was not a large demand as Howard already controlled most games played in the courtyard and around the ancient stone pillar; if he wanted to play king of the hill, that’s what we played, and if he wanted to play cricket, that’s also what we played, and for several days there was no outward change from the regular round of games between or after classes. The Krishnanthropus had simply codified a part of the structure of our lives and many continued to play as we wanted to, ignoring Howard completely, asking him to join or not join as we wished, and I, soon after that first pronouncement, forgot it until the afternoon when I was sitting in the shade of a large tamarind tree playing chess with Arjun. Arjun was winning and we were approaching the game’s end when Howard walked up, shifting from foot to foot as he stood there in the bright sunlight.
Howard didn’t look at me. Since the day in the library he had avoided talking to me or finding himself alone with me, and now his face conceded my presence only through the stiffness and withdrawal of his expression. In his hand he held the branch of a tree with two tapered green leaves still attached. Earlier I had seen him playing some game of war, acting the general in command.
When he spoke he looked directly at Arjun. “You can’t play that anymore. It’s not allowed.” He sputtered this quickly, almost breathlessly.
Arjun looked first at Howard and then towards me and then back to Howard.
“But – ” Arjun protested.
“That’s what it said, remember. You agreed. I was to decide.”
I broke in, “You can’t tell us not to play.”
Howard ignored me. “Are you coming?” he demanded of Arjun.
“But the game’s almost over,” Arjun offered. “I’m winning.”
“It’s a forgidden game now.” Howard spoke with a strained authority that didn’t match his voice, making him sound foolish, and I mimicked his anxious command.
“It’s a forbidden game now.”
Arjun looked back at me but now his eyes displayed clear unease. He moved his head slowly back and forth along a compressed arc. Howard raised the stick by an inch and Arjun’s eyes flashed away from mine and across to Howard’s hand.
“Don’t listen to that monkey,” Howard said. His hand was shaking.
“It’s a forbidden game now,” I repeated, raising the pitch of my voice to make the command sound even more comical.
Howard turned to look at me. “We’ll get you,” he said. There was a pathetic violence in his voice. Even on the day in the library I had not detected this tone. He turned back to Arjun. “Come on,” he said. Arjun stood quickly, not looking at me or the chess board. Within a few moves he would have won, but now his figure angled away from me with Howard behind. The kids beyond still played war and from where I sat I watched Arjun walk away from me and felt a hot, suffocating shame spread up along my cheeks until it reached my eyes and I could feel it pressing at my eyelids. I called out in a mocking voice, “Forbidden game, forbidden game,” but neither turned and soon I could see Arjun joining in the game of war, holding high a quickly fashioned weapon, and shrieking as he ran in a pack with his fellow combatants.
From that time on most kids ignored me. I had few close friends among the other children except Arjun, and we knew each other the way kids know each other who are forced together, who play together and sleep together, with a friendship resting at the edges of our common interests: checkers, chess, books of travel, other countries and times. There was no real closeness between us and I was not wholly surprised when Arjun turned his back on me as easily as the others. Now when one of the kids spoke to me it was always a brief comment or a sentence and always said when we found ourselves alone together. This was how I learned the Krishnanthropus had ordered no one was to talk or play with me. Arjun told me this, for though he considered himself “one of Howard’s,” as he insisted, he didn’t accept all the skull demanded or claimed. At night, Arjun slipped notes to me, telling me of the latest commands of Howard and the Krishnanthropus. These notes were always brief and cryptic, speaking to another world coalescing on the edges of my own. I was both relieved and disturbed not to be a part of it. I told myself the skull was stupid and the games and orders that came from it all childish. My lonely hours in the library or in the long dormitory now lengthened and when kids would come across me or be startled by my form entering a room, hiding at a desk, playing alone in the courtyard or among the trees, they would look at me with a kind of pitying detachment. I hated them for this stare because it was the gaze I wanted to give back to them.
The notes Arjun left for me under my pillow or in the pages of a book I was reading contained the results of meetings or the demands for particular actions. They were short, impenetrable messages, edicts of an unknown, except we all knew the god was: Howard. They had all the blunt dullness of his head, the hard insistence of his bullying. This was now his world, and this was how he would rule it. These were some of the messages Arjun wrote down for me: “K says no more chess,” “Prison tonight. Extra gifts,” “Tell all no skull,” “Talk brings pain,” “Pillar is history says K,” “Play only in yard,” “K the old one,” “Avoid the pillar.” The day after this last note there were no children to be found on the pillar. It had existed as the center of our activities for so long that its abandonment surprised me. Howard’s power and hold over the children, particularly those who lived inside the school, had clearly grown. When one of the day students approached the pillar during the mid-morning break I watched Arjun run up to him and violently thrust him away. There was the beginnings of a fight between the two but several kids rallied behind Arjun and soon the one who had approached the pillar stalked off, waving a hand dismissively in the air.
I found Arjun alone in the toilet that same day. He looked at me sheepishly when I spoke to him.
“I don’t know anything anymore,” he said, taking his eyes from mine and looking beyond me to the door. “I think Howard pays the servants. How else does he stop them from talking.”
“But why can’t you play on the pillar?”
“The old one says the pillar is a symbol of a false god, another god.”
“But it’s one of Asoka’s – ”
“The old one says that all history must be destroyed because it’s false. He was here before history. He wants to come back. To start history again.”
“The old one?”
“He speaks through Krishna.”
“Bugger the old one,” I said violently and loudly.
Arjun gave me a look of alarm and then cast his eyes down to the floor. “I don’t know who’s right.”
“Not Howard.”
“But Howard speaks with it. He does. He wants to start everything over, to begin the world again. He says we’re the only ones who can, without parents, without history. That’s what he says.” Arjun’s voice was almost pleading and he seemed very changed from the Arjun I had known.
“I don’t care,” I said. “He’s a bastard.”
Arjun shook his head and when I demanded more he said nothing. He pressed his lips tightly together and refused to look at me until finally he said, “The old one says you’re part of the false world. The false world will pass.” Then he walked out, not looking back at me. When he was gone I looked around at the stark, brown walls with a single window with no glass facing out to the back wall of the compound. I could see a kid looking at me from that wall. I recognized him as one of the younger dayschoolers who shadowed Howard’s every step.
That night Arjun returned to the bed next to mine and hid his face in his hands, moving stiffly in the dim light cast by candles burning at the far end of the room. He pulled the blanket up with tense motions of his limbs and later whimpered quietly as though troubled by nightmares. When I whispered his name he stopped making any sound. I lay awake for an hour watching the slow progress of his breath as it raised and lowered the sheet over his thin frame. In the morning I saw the bruises on his face. I gave a start but he turned immediately away and pulled on his clothes without comment. No one spoke to anyone and we all shuffled out of the dormitory to breakfast in a gaping silence.
All that day the children continued like this, hardly speaking to one another, and when they did it was a hushed sentence, a whisper pressed to an ear. After lunch, when we were allowed out to play, some gathered around the pillar, sitting on it, leaning against it. No one had gathered here for days. I watched them from a window in the library. I was reading a book written by a geologist in the middle of the last century. It was a journal of his travels around India, and contained information not only about the geology but about bird and animal life, about the landscapes and the people he encountered. In Oudh he discovered several tales of wolf-boys, children stolen from their families at birth by wolves and reared in feral packs. When they were found and captured they never assimilated back into society: they would eat only raw meat, tear to shreds any clothes they were given, run around on all fours, and never talk, only howl or whimper, pining for a lost freedom. I was affected by the description of the silence of the boys; I began to see myself like them, lost to the society of the orphanage children. I had been thrown out of its orbit, thrown into a state of feral silence.
Later I approached the pillar in the cool early evening. I didn’t care if anyone saw me. The pillar was covered in the initials of every student, newly inscribed. This is how they had spent the early afternoon when they had gathered on it in a pack. Their initials were all there, or all but mine. I felt a curious vertigo on seeing their initials scratched into the old stone, a sickening unease, and later when I found Arjun alone I stopped him with a hand and demanded to know what was going on.
“That’s my stone!” I shouted at him, hitting him in the chest with a light fist. “It’s mine! You can’t do anything to it. I’ll tell.”
Arjun looked at me and said nothing. Finally he pulled away and ran from me and I began to cry. I don’t know why I cried except that I felt a sudden and overwhelming isolation. I hated them.
That night the children went to bed as usual. It was the cricket instructor, Mr. Ellis’s turn to walk the dorm. He stamped noisily, inspecting every bunk, shaking this child’s foot or peering closely at another’s face. He was a harsh, recalcitrant man who demanded roughly from each one of us whether we were asleep and we were all required to answer in bright voices that yes sir, we were most definitely asleep. When he was gone I tried to stay awake because I knew something would happen that night. But within minutes I was asleep and when I woke again I looked across to Arjun’s bed and found it empty. I looked at the bed on the other side of me. It was empty also. I sat up quickly, letting the sheet slide down my body. All the other beds were abandoned and I was left entirely alone. The room was cool and I felt the chilly night air playing over my body.
A window framed the dark courtyard and the black shape of the pillar. Only a thin moon shone and no lights showed in any windows. I could see almost nothing. The pillar looked like a darkening of the surrounding blackness, as though in this single spot night had curdled in the stiffening summer heat. The sounds of insects filled the air with their insistent scraping. It was some minutes before I made out the shapes of the children. They stood about the pillar and on it, thickening it, smothering it, engulfing it with their bodies, giving it a second skin with the gift of their own backs. I felt a sickening weakness come over me and for some seconds stood paralyzed, watching. They were on my pillar. I stood and walked barefoot towards the door with empty beds on either side of me, holding my hands out to protect myself against any objects obstructing my path.
The children were like locusts swarmed over the pillar and the motion of their bodies made the pillar appear to move and writhe, bucking and squirming like a massive pupa of a great insect beast waiting to be born. The sound of metal scraping against stone rose and fell above the noise of disinterested insects. No one looked at me as I walked towards the pillar. The ground shimmered in the thin film of moonlight, a membrane that hid below its translucent surface a buried fire, golden embers still glowing after some ancient eruption. Every boy was on the pillar now, or standing by it or on his knees at its sides. In their hands they held knives or forks with which they scraped against the surface of the pillar. I saw Howard on top of it, kneeling down among the other children, his arms working feverishly, battering at the stone, gouging at it with a knife in each hand. He would look up every few moments to goad the others on, “Come on, come on,” he demanded. Just that: “Come on, come on,” ever repeated. There was a haze of dust visible around the boys’ bodies that made them faintly unreal, phantomlike, offering the sight an ethereal, otherworldly appearance. I approached as though approaching an apparition. I could hear their breaths stark and insistent and years later I would imagine it an orgy nearing its climax. I found Arjun leaning against the pillar, working at one side of it. I pushed his shoulder violently and he turned and looked at me in surprise. His face was white with dust. I wanted to shout at him but found myself unable to express any words. For some seconds he showed no recognition and then his face transformed into something angry and ugly and he spat at my leg and turned quickly around and continued his rushing work with heightened fury; his body moved as though he was humping this beast, fucking it; they all looked like this, like creatures driven to an abysmal sexual fury, to a great and straining intercourse with the stone pupa, their young dicks entering it at all and every opening, cutting their own openings, fissuring and raping it, a furious initiation into the manhood of destruction, causing great white clouds of dust to rise and coalesce in the filmy light. Their voices were the pants of dogs, their tongues pushed out, pulled in, their small arms strained. They looked ridiculous and terrifying. I could taste the harsh chalk of the dust. I could feel it on my skin, between my fingers, clogging my throat. I wanted to stop them, to scream at them, but could only stand and stare, unable to do or say anything.
I watched this scene for minutes as their bodies heaved up and down, in and out, tossed on some wave, as though they had caught a great fish and now were riding its back, sticking their harpoons in, one after the other, trying to push in to the kill, trying to cut its life off, but the fish wouldn’t die, it kept them on, it kept the chase on, racing through more and more distant waters, pulling them along, raising them up, tossing them down, drowning them, rescuing them; they were losing home and ship, all hope of land, all hope of ever pulling in the flesh of this beast; their charts were gone, their instruments lost, the sky a black cave offering no stars for guidance, knowledge of the winds eradicated; their voices worked in snarling, urgent breaths and the knives and forks battled at the sides, trying to force any and all capitulation; but the fish pulled them along out out out to the farthest reaches of the oceans where even the islands believed themselves to be whole universes alone and without companion.

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Ranbir Sidhu is a recipient of a Pushcart Prize in fiction and his work has appeared in The Georgia Review, The Missouri Review, Zyzzyva, Other Voices, and a Houghton-Mifflin college reader.