This was marked by a weird alternation in pitch between the swooping vowels of Yorkshire and the clipped consonants of received pronunciation. We were all pretty good at doing Mr Vello, but I was the best.
‘Now then, boy-yz!’ he came at us again. ‘I have no patience any more with your in-disci-pline. None at all. I have noticed that your Indian colleagues maintain a healthier respect for authority than the rest of you, so I am going to adopt my own Martial Races policy.’
He got all the Indian boys to stand up and then he lined them up in the aisle in order of height. Jayesh Rabindirath at the front, behind him Dhiran Vaz, behind him Krishna Patel and so on, all the way down to the minuscule Surrinyalingam (no one ever knew his first name), a tiny blackened block of a boy, who wasn’t an Indian at all but a Tamil; however, Mr Vello chose to ignore this fine distinction.
‘I commission all you Indian boyz into my Indian Army.’ He paced the next aisle, ruler on one shoulder like an officer’s swagger stick. ‘It is no longer my task, but yours, to maintain ab-so-lute order amongst this miserable, unlettered rabble – ‘
As he spoke my attention sideswiped out the window. A bus had pulled up and shook in mechanical ague by the concrete bus shelter. I could see fat old women coming out of the library across the road from the school and donning plastic rain hats. Life seemed to be proffering a teasing and perhaps crucial juxtaposition. I raised my arm. Mr Vello whirled on me. ‘Yes, Fein?’
‘Please, Sir – ‘
‘Yes, boy?’
‘Please, sir, I want to join the Indian Army.’
‘Don’t be bloody stupid, boy. Enlistment in the Indian Army is open only to boys of Indian descent. You, Fein, are of Semitic descent, you are a Levantine, not an Aryan, therefore you shall not be called to the Colours.’
‘Or the coloureds . . .’ Simmo sniggered in the corner.
‘But, sir, Mr Vello, sir,’ I kept on at him, ‘my dad says we’re Ashkenazi Jews, not Sephardim. He says we aren’t really Semites at all.’
And this was true. My father had a touch of the Mr Vellos about him as well, a fondness for the Daily Telegraph (ironed) and village cricket. A relentless autodidact, he had been much taken by Arthur Koestler’s theory that the Ashkenazi were in fact the descendants of the Scythian Khazars, Turkic tribesmen who had converted to Judaism in the seventh century. Dad discoursed on this in the garden of an evening, smoking a briar pipe (his plumed flag of utter assimilation).
‘Oh, and what are you if you’re not a Semite?’
‘I’m an Aryan, sir. My ancestors were Turkic tribesmen. My dad told me so, he’s really interested in Jewish history.’
Mr Vello was nonplussed, he left off drilling the Indian Army and took to his desk where he cradled his head in his hands. And here’s one of the sickest bits of this sick, sad tale, for Mr Vello really was a conscientious and unbigoted man – he was giving this matter of my lineage real thought, heavy consideration. The class was strangely silent. At length he stirred.
‘All right, Fein, I’ll make an exception as far as you are concerned, and in deference to your father’s scholarship. You may join the Indian Army.’
So it was that I became an Indian Army soldier. What a soldier I was: relentlessly enforcing the order I had so recently been determined to disrupt. With my fellow soldiers I patrolled the aisles of the classroom swiping hair-covered collars with my ruler, confiscating fags and sweets, strutting my skinny, flannel-legged stuff. I exulted in the power. My sharp tongue grew sharper still. And was discipline imposed? Did Mr Vello’s writ run class 4b? Did it hell. For in as much as I was an Indian Army soldier I was also its principal mutineer. I was the Fletcher Christian to Mr Vello’s Captain Bligh (‘Why did the mutineers throw away the bread fruit plants?’ ‘Please, sir, please, sir,’ ‘Yes, Fein?’ ‘Because they were stale, sir!’ Ha, ha, bloody ha).
Yes, it makes me sick now. Sick to think of it. Trim girlies come in and hand me things: write-ups and intelligence files on the guests I’m about to goose and humiliate, promote and patronise, fawn over and psychically fellate. That’s my job. But if only I could get Mr Vello back, get him on the show. I’d recant, I’d apologise, I’d vindicate myself, and in doing so I’d make him whole again, make him live again, abolish the ghastly Vello golem that parades through my unconscious.
He got worse and worse. In one lesson he insisted on giving us a graphic description of the way he prepared his vegetable patch in the spring. In another he showed how, while on hazardous service during the latter war, he was taught to signal using a windproof lighter and a pipe. The Indian Army grew restless. It wasn’t their idea, they just wanted to carry on being unobtrusively unobtrusive. After one particularly surreal lesson Dhiran Vaz and Suhail Rhamon got me in the corridor.
‘You’re a jerk, Fein,’ said Vaz; he gripped and twisted my collar, ‘the poor man’s having a breakdown, he’s really going nutty and you’re just goading him, making it happen. D’you like watching people suffer?’
‘Yeah,’ Rhamon concurred, ‘we’ve had enough of this, we’re going to talk to the Headmaster – ‘
‘Now hang on a minute, guys – guys.’ I was emollient, placatory. ‘I agree with you. I don’t like it either, but I still think we should settle it ourselves. End the rule of the Indian Army in our own way.’
I won them round. I stopped them going to the Head. I implied that if they did the full weight of both the Yids and the Yocks would come down on them. They had no alternative.
The bubble burst the next Thursday. Mr Vello was ranting about the abandonment of the Gold Standard when I gave the signal. The soldiers of the Indian Army took up their prearranged positions: at the door, the windows, the light switches. While they flashed the lights on and off I strode to the front of the class and deprived Mr Vello of his ceremonial ruler. He blinked at me in amazement, his eyes huge and bulbous behind the concave lenses of his glasses.
‘What are you doing, Fein?’ I couldn’t help giggling.
‘This is it, sir,’ I said. ‘What we’ve been waiting for. It’s the Indian mutiny.’
Mr Vello looked at my horrible, freckly little face. His eyes swung around the room to take in the rebellious sepoys. He sat down heavily and began to sob.
He sobbed and sobbed. His heavy shoulders heaved and shook. His wails filled the room. When Simmo opened the door to the corridor they filled the corridor as well. Eventually the Headmaster came with Mr Doherty, the gym teacher, and they led Mr Vello away, for ever.
So now you know how it was that I killed Mr Vello. Murdered him. You don’t think that’s enough? You think I’m being hard on myself? Children can be nasty after all – without meaning to be. But I meant to be, I really meant to be.
Last night I had one of my worst Mr Vello dreams yet. I was in Calcutta, it was 1857 – the Indian Mutiny was in full swing. Screaming fourteen-year-old sepoys broke into my villa and dragged me away. Their faces were distorted with blood lust and triumph. Dhiran Vaz hauled me along by the collar of my tunic. He and Rhamon took me and threw me in a cell, a tiny close cell, no more than twenty-feet square. And then they threw in the others, the other victims of the Mutiny: all my guests. All the guests I’ve ever had on Fein Time Tonight, one after another they came pressing into the cell, and each time one entered there was new roar of approval from the crowd of sepoy classmates massed on the dusty parade ground
