July 3, 2000: I am reading Beach Boy, a novel by the contemporary Indian-British novelist Ardashir Vakil. The narrator is remembering his boyhood education at the Catholic school St. Mary's in Bombay: "The worst of the teachers was an Indian man called Father D'Mello. I was trying at the moment to hide between the wall and the door of the classroom because I knew that this demon, this dreaded Vice-Principal, in his white robes with his wide cloth belt would soon be on his rounds of the corridors, his tortoise-shell spectacles gleaming on his vulpine nose. He had something of Mr. Krishnan [another character in the novel] in his demeanour. The same cleanliness of feature . . . the same candid violence in his eyes."
Father D'Mello turns up and catches out the narrator. Father D'Mello says to him,"Fooling around, eh? Fooling around." He turned the words over with different emphases, as if searching for some profundity. I could feel his cruel digits tighten around my collar. "When we get to my office we shall have to see what we can do about this fooling around. What do you say, eh?" I found it impossible to answer his question. All I could think about was the cane in the bottom drawer of his desk.
[The narrator is taken to Father D'Mello's office]I could see from the edge of my eye that he was taking the foot ruler in his left hand and placing it in his right. Then D'Mello raised his arm behind his back. I felt a burning slash against my calves. The first surprise was how little it hurt. He hit me with the ruler across the legs again and again. I could feel a kind of heat building up as the beating went on. D'Mello seemed to be losing control of himself, perhaps it was my witless stoicism that irritated him. He pushed me slightly away from himself so that he could get more leverage for his swings. His head and body bent over to one side as he took great swooping hockey-stick strokes at my bare thighs and legs . . . As I went to the door I could feel his eyes on my legs surveying the damage his hands had done."
[A few pages later, the narrator meets a fellow schoolboy.]
"What did D'Mello do to you, yaar?" he asked.
"He's a bastard man. He's always after me. It doesn't matter what I do. He must have something against me."
"_s_h_i_t_, look at your legs!" he took a deep inward suck of air. I turned around to look at my calves. There were little red lines like cuts from a razor, scars that had already begun to heal all the way up my calves.