The bell rang. Shirt sticking, drips of sweat trickling from his temples, Rudy took his place before the five rows of uniformed boys and girls, looked past Kanda, and said, “Good morning.” As the buzz of conversation quieted, he mopped his face with his handkerchief. “We’re going to start off with some of those exercises on identifying point of view,” he began. “I think we got up to page sixty-five last time.”
Textbooks were opened, pages flipped. When it seemed to Rudy that most of them were ready, he began reading the page sixty-five excerpt from Robinson Crusoe, his voice strangely crisp in the languid air. His students listened politely, not taking in a word of it, he was sure. With the exception of Kanda. By the end of the passage, not five minutes into the class, the boy’s hand was up. Wiping his forehead, Rudy braced himself wearily against the possibilities—a comment on Defoe’s racism, perhaps (though the selected excerpt was innocent enough), a question about the meaning of distemper ... or maybe that challenge he would be unable to answer. He lowered his eyes and met Kanda’s stare.
“Yes?”
The boy hesitated a moment, then cleared his throat. “Are you feeling ill, sir?”
Around the room heads turned and eyes widened. Rudy coughed involuntarily. “What do you mean?”
“I was only wondering, sir, as you seem to be perspiring very heavily. I thought you might be ill.”
If it was a joke, or an insult, the kid certainly had balls. Rudy mopped his face and studied his student. Kanda himself was tidy to a fault—navy tie knotted snugly around his white collar, black hair trimmed and gelled, spine straight, skin dry. I’m not the impostor here, his appearance insisted. Yet his expression was sympathetic. Not a hint of ridicule or sarcasm.
“I’m not sick, Kanda. I just don’t handle the heat very well. Anymore. But thank you for your concern.” He glanced at James Fernando, the caricaturist, and snickered in spite of himself. “You see, when I first came here, I applied for a job as a garden sprinkler,” he said, folding his handkerchief into a neat square. “But I wasn’t quite sweaty enough, so they made me a teacher instead.”
While James shrank behind his desk, the others laughed. Rudy risked a wink. Then Kanda raised his hand again.
“I have an idea, sir. If we put the desks in a semicircle and you stood under the fan, you might be more comfortable.”
Around the room there were murmurs of approval. Rudy dragged the folded handkerchief along his jaw. Finding no good reason not to take Kanda’s suggestion, he nodded, and the boy stood up. It seemed that he intended to organize the desk-moving himself, and indeed he got right to it, directing his classmates, even reminding them not to scrape the furniture across the floor. “Lift it up, or it leaves marks,” he said, his manner neither condescending nor bossy. When the brief chaos had subsided and the students were again seated, their desks forming a horseshoe that opened toward the front of the room, Rudy took his place under the ceiling fan. Chamika Heenatigala, seated closest to the regulator dial, got up and adjusted the speed to full. In the rush of cool air, Rudy’s shirt pulled away from his skin, and his pores tightened in tiny, euphoric contractions. He pocketed his handkerchief, cleared his throat, and returned to the lesson with an awkward smile in Kanda’s direction.
At the end of class, he called for the essays he’d assigned. There was a brief stampede at his desk, and when this had subsided, Kanda came up, paper in hand. “I hope this is acceptable, sir.”
Rudy straightened the stack of essays on the desk. “I’m sure it’ll be fine. Would you like me to consider it a practice run? I mean, I’ll mark it, but we don’t have to count it. You weren’t here when I explained the assignment.”
“I’d like you to count it, please.”
Rudy nodded and took the essay. It occurred to him suddenly that he should thank his student for the new seating arrangement. In his head he fumbled with the words, but the longer he hesitated, the more lodged in his throat the message became, until it seemed that to cough it out would sound ridiculous. Just as Kanda was about to disappear out the classroom door, he called to him to enjoy his holiday, but the boy didn’t seem to hear.
Rudy stared blankly at the door, then he lowered his eyes to the essay in his hand. The title, “A Defence of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and Their Fight for a Tamil Homeland,” made him frown. He’d asked his students to write argument essays, and predictably most of their chosen topics were banal. Kanda’s topic challenged even more than his classroom manner did. At the same time, Rudy felt his ambiguous antipathy toward the boy taking root in the unequivocal words. He checked the clock then added the paper to the pile.
THE BUS HOME WAS CROWDED AND HOT. Arms and legs, shopping bundles and briefcases nibbled at the boundaries of the tiny space Rudy managed to secure on a padded vinyl seat behind the rear doorway. He eyed a bent woman hoisting herself through the door, clutching the skirt of her sari, and held his breath until another man offered his seat. Then he shut out the faces around him, leaned his head against the metal window frame, and began his hunt for the saints.
They were all along his route through the teeming city, painted plaster statues gazing at the hubbub from behind glass casings: brown-robed Anthonys, arrow-impaled Sebastians, anorexic Marys. Like the faith that had brought them to the island centuries before, these statues had acquired a local character as unremarkable as that of the fruit vendor tidying his mound of yellow coconuts on the sidewalk. Two saints shared a corner with a cross-legged Buddha; the Virgin herself greeted customers on their way to Ganesh Bookshop. One of the Anthonys, without the protection of a glass case, served as a perch for birds and was splattered with droppings. As a private game, a sort of meditation, Rudy counted them. His most recent tally had boosted the total from fourteen saints to seventeen. He was sure there were more, eluding him in obscure nooks and alcoves, but on this particular ride he lost track at the bookshop. Eyes fixed on the blue Virgin stationed a few metres from the shop’s door, he thought of Clare Fraser, his sanctuary. He saw her solemn face watching over him, and he drifted. Unlike other visitants from his Morgan Hill past, she came to him unencumbered, provoking neither remorse nor irritation, though sometimes there was a vague pang of longing, like the echo of a desire he’d ceased to experience first-hand. He didn’t mind forsaking his saint-hunt to be with her—her presence had the same calming effect—but when the bus jerked to an unexpected halt, he lost her as well.
It was a military checkpoint, or police. Rudy was never sure which was which. The men, dressed in khakis and carrying guns, represented a danger he couldn’t quite manage to fear. Not from courage, certainly, or even indifference. Rather, it seemed to him that his years on Morgan Hill Road had left him with a thick, invisible shell that kept him separate, both from the danger and the fear. Mechanically he shouldered his knapsack and stepped out to the side of the road with everyone else. There was no shelter from the sun, but the ID check was carried out with reasonable efficiency, and the passengers soon filed back into the bus to reclaim their spots. Rudy searched his bag for Kanda’s essay. If he couldn’t fear the country’s troubles as he should, he would at least acknowledge them in the abstract. He mopped his face and began to read.
I have been studying in English medium schools because my parents believe that knowing English is the only way to have a good profession. I would prefer to study and work in my own language, but unfortunately, my language and