‘Have you written anything about our teacher, Samuel?’
‘Plenty of things about him. When your headmaster reads it, he will probably dismiss Samuel from the school and hand him over to the police.’
‘What has he done, Father?’
‘Well, there is a full account of everything he has done in the letter. Give it to your headmaster. You must bring an acknowledgment from him in the evening.’
Swami went to school feeling that he was the worst perjurer on earth. His conscience bothered him: he wasn’t at all sure if he had been accurate in his description of Samuel. He could not decide how much of what he had said was imagined and how much of it was real.
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He stopped for a moment on the roadside to make up his mind about Samuel: he was not such a bad man after all. Personally, he was much more genial than the rest; often he cracked a joke or two centering around Swami’s inactions and Swami took it as a mark of Samuel’s personal regard for him. But there was no doubt that he treated pupils badly…. His cane skinned pupils’ hands. Swami cast his mind about for an instance of this. There was none within his knowledge. Years and years ago he was reputed to have skinned the knuckles of a boy in the first standard and made him smear the blood on his face. No one had actually seen it. But year after year the story persisted among the boys…. Swami’s head was dizzy with confusion in regard to Samuel’s character—whether he was good or bad, whether he deserved the allegations in the letter or not…. Swami felt an impulse to run home and beg his father to take back the letter. But Father was an obstinate man.
As he approached the yellow building he realized that he was perjuring himself and was ruining his teacher. Probably the headmaster would dismiss Samuel and then the police would chain him and put him in jail. For all this disgrace, humiliation, and suffering, who would be responsible? Swami shuddered. The more he thought of Samuel, the more he grieved for him—the dark face, his small red-streaked eyes, his thin line of mustache, his unshaven cheek and chin, his yellow coat; everything filled Swami with sorrow. As he felt the bulge of the letter in his pocket, he felt like an executioner.
For a moment he was angry with his father and wondered why he should not fling into the gutter the letter of a man so unreasonable and stubborn. As he entered the school gate an idea occurred to him, a sort of solution. He wouldn’t deliver the letter to the headmaster immediately, but at the end of the day—to that extent, he would disobey his father and exercise his independence. There was nothing wrong in it and Father would not know it anyway. If the letter was given at the end of the day there was a chance that Samuel might do something to justify the letter.
Swami stood at the entrance to his class. Samuel was teaching arithmetic. He looked at Swami for a moment. Swami stood hoping that Samuel would fall on him and tear his skin off. But Samuel merely asked, ‘Are you just coming to the class?’
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