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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