In that world unto itself, our human interactions did not resemble anything we had experienced at home. Fear blanketed the school. It stemmed from the relationship between the school’s senior class and the rest of its cohorts. Outside our hours in the classroom, the seniors governed our lives as prefects in a system that dated back to the founding of the school in 1935, when India was still a colony, replicating the prefectorial systems of Eton and Harrow—where Doon’s first headmaster and his deputy, both British, had taught before moving here.
Our residential dorms were the prefects’ fiefdom, places they ran with only minimal interference by the housemasters. The prefects supervised us through our tightly regimented days, every waking hour of which was governed by the clamor of massive brass bells ordering us from one activity to another. We sprinted from our dorms to the academic buildings, the playing fields, and the arts and crafts workshops, speedily getting into and out of unending sets of uniforms.
We obeyed the prefects because they enjoyed practically unrestricted powers when it came to administering punishments: levied if we were late in answering any bell through the day, if we did not execute every uniform to perfection—whether it concerned the knot of our ties, the sheen of our shoes, or the precise height of our knee-high socks—or, often, simply because the prefects arbitrarily disliked something about us.
Physical punishments included grueling sessions of extra PT, jackknives and star jumps, crawling on all fours on gravel paths until we bled from scuffed knees and palms, and holding convoluted positions for an unbearably long time. The corporal punishments that they were allowed to administer included brutal practices such as “putting”—where they whacked our backsides with hockey sticks or cricket bats, often using the edge to inflict even more pain. All those punishments were carried out in the absence of teachers, allowing prefects to be as violent as they wished.
Their power and our oppression were multiplied by the tradition of “fagging,” a practice that had also been adopted from elite British schools. Under that system, boys in junior grades worked as house slaves for the seniors by attending to every task put before them: making their beds, shining their shoes, lugging pails of hot water for their baths, even massaging them if required. So, from our perspective as juniors, the school administration seemed to have given the prefects life-and-death power over us, to manhandle and punish us as they pleased.
Inevitably, that scenario made abuses a certainty. The prefects were strapping, hirsute young men of sixteen to eighteen compared to the diminutive boys aged ten or eleven who had not even begun the growth spurts of male adolescence. They were, however, still immature, and their newfound sense of power over others often went to their heads.
Endemic bullying was one consequence. The perpetrators included not just the usual minority of cruel and psychopathic boys but also a sizable number of innately decent ones whose sense of empathy and of right and wrong went awry because of the savage atmosphere and often from being victimized themselves.
The novelist Vikram Seth, a decade my senior at Doon, said during a Founder’s Day address at the school in 1992, years after he graduated, “For years after I left, I thought of school as a kind of jungle, and looked back on it with a shudder. . . . I was teased and bullied by my classmates and my seniors because of my interest in studies and reading, because of my lack of interest at that time in games, because of my unwillingness to join gangs and groups.”
The bullying regularly escalated to terrifying extremes. At that young age, I was unable to comprehend the nature of these predations, and thought of them as bullying, though they were something else altogether.
One of my sharpest memories is of an afternoon in the summer months of my third year at school. A prefect in my residential house had developed an inexplicable hatred for a roommate of mine, an awkward, harmless boy. The prefect was a powerful young man, his face marked by volcanic clumps of acne and a perennially enraged gaze. He started persecuting my hapless roommate by subjecting him to unending punishments through the day, interspersed with blows and kicks.
One afternoon, a few weeks into this persecution, my roommate had become so withdrawn and anxious that he looked visibly ill. The four of us who shared the room with him were worried to see him like that, but our awareness of being helpless ourselves kept us from trying to comfort him. We knew, without having to ask, that matters with his persecutor had taken a turn for the worse. We were all half asleep in the summer heat when the prefect entered our room, yelling at us to get up, which the five of us did with alacrity, our hearts pounding.
He slapped our roommate hard across his face, then told him to remove his shorts and underwear and bend over his bed. Weeping, our roommate followed his orders. Then his persecutor yelled at us to take one of the long bamboo poles used to hold up the mosquito nets and push it up our roommate’s rectum.
We were stunned. By now we had learned to obey the prefects unquestioningly. But we still retained enough sense of what was right and wrong from our homes to know that this was going too far. We hesitated. The prefect punched and slapped several of us, painfully hard.
With no choice but to obey, we all gripped the bamboo pole and placed its fist-thick end against our roommate’s anus. He was weeping uncontrollably. We held the bamboo there, not applying any pressure.
The prefect hit us again, more violently this time. Terrified, we pushed the bamboo lightly. We were hit some more. The bamboo’s gnarled end went in a bit. Our roommate screamed.
Afterward, we helped our roommate dress. None of us said a word. We were all too terrified to discuss whether we should collectively complain to our housemaster.
Astonishingly, none of us ever discussed that atrocity in our remaining years together at Doon. And that was one key reason why abuse continued to flourish there through the decades: both the victims and the witnesses learned to hide it behind silence, suppressing any knowledge or memory of the brutal things we underwent or witnessed.
Sexual abuse flourished at Doon.
As a pretty boy, I became a favored target of this abuse. Nothing in my short life had prepared me for dealing with the terror I felt or the shock at realizing that desire—the glorious thing I had instinctively responded to in Barbara Cartland romances—could take on so vile a form.
In my second year at Doon, a huge prefect named Nutty began tormenting me. He had looked at me with unsettling intensity ever since I had joined school, but now that he was in the seniormost batch, he felt emboldened to act as he wished. Nutty was notoriously crazy, hence his nickname. Even his classmates gave him a wide berth.
Though I did my utmost to avoid him, there was no escaping in the second half of the day, after classes ended and we returned to our common residential house. Unfailingly, several nights a week, instead of studying after dinner like my other classmates, I would do an unending series of somersaults on Nutty’s orders.
One after another, I did the somersaults virtually in the same spot of a study room I shared with a dozen other students, as there was just enough space for me to do two somersaults before I banged into the wall or furniture. Nutty stood right by me, staring down with a strange mix of lust and hatred writ large on his face.
Each time I paused out of exhaustion, half hoping that he’d relent, he yelled, “Who told you to stop, you pansy!” “He’s insane,” I’d tell myself angrily, and return to the somersaults, even though my head was burning from forehead to nape from chafing against the stone floor.
No one interceded. My classmates kept their eyes studiously trained on their homework, fearing that they would otherwise be made to share my predicament. The seniormost prefects charged with running our house would sometimes drop by to look at me somersaulting, crack a joke or two with Nutty, and then continue on their way. They did not intervene even when Nutty, a star hockey player, “putted” me repeatedly with all his strength—transferring his frustrated lust into agonizing blows of the hockey stick on my upturned buttocks. I never really expect
ed any of the other prefects to intervene, as some of them occasionally partnered with Nutty in abusing me. They would together corner a terrified civet—a catlike animal often found on Doon’s verdant grounds—in one of the study rooms and begin beating it to a pulp with hockey sticks and cricket bats, stopping only to fondle and slap me around as I angrily tried to stop them from killing the hapless beast.
Every so often, Nutty would make an offer: if I’d do just one naked somersault in the privacy of his dressing room, he’d stop punishing me. I asked Bharat, whose watchful presence had kept me from being subjected to even worse treatment, if I should comply with his wishes. But he yelled at me, his anxiety evident, that Nutty would rape me if he got such a chance. So I kept silent whenever my tormentor made his offer.
One night about a year later, I was sleeping in a long dormitory that I shared with about a dozen others. My bed was in a corner, by one of the windows. Gray-white mosquito nets covered each of the beds.
Suddenly I woke to find that I was lying on my back and somebody’s hand was on my groin. Another hand was holding up the mosquito netting. There was a large face pressed against the netting, staring down at me. Through the netting, the face seemed to be a featureless apparition, something from a horror movie.
I shut my eyes quickly. I wanted to scream for help, but I was frozen with terror.
The hand fondled me, moving from my penis to my testicles and then toward my backside. Even as the hand continued to fondle me, I just lay there with my eyes shut in dread.
The boy in the bed on my left turned and muttered. The hand lifted off my groin, and I felt the netting fall. Lying there with my pajamas pulled down, I began to cry. I even peed, unable to control myself.
The lights came on. There was chaos. Someone said, “It’s Dube. Let’s call his brother.”
Bharat came from his nearby room with two of his friends. I was still sobbing, eyes shut, lying where I was in a pool of pee. Comforting me, he led me to the bathroom to wash up.
When we got back to my dorm minutes later, Bharat was in a towering rage. He yelled, telling my roommates to get out of their beds, asking each of them if he had seen anyone enter the dormitory. Bharat struck one of my hapless peers who couldn’t force himself awake at that early hour.
The next morning, Bharat took me to our housemaster, a genial man with an obedient Labrador. He sat behind his large desk in the study attached to his house. Bharat and I told him about the events from the evening before. I could sense that the housemaster was irritated. At some point, my fear from the night gripped me afresh and I started crying. The housemaster brusquely told me to stop crying. “These things happen,” he said. “You need to become tougher.”
The only reason I escaped even worse sexual assaults in my most vulnerable years was that Bharat was such a strapping jock that even boys several years older were reluctant to take him on if they went too far with harassing me. Even though Bharat and I had never explicitly discussed the matter, I knew he would fight anyone who tried to rape me, though he was helpless to protect me from being felt up or threatened, as those abuses were too ubiquitous to be challenged.
But the school administration played no discernible role in protecting me in those early years. Later, after Bharat graduated, I was protected to some degree by the mere fact that I was somewhat larger in size by then—I had attained the age of fourteen—and because I had gained a reputation of being a ferocious fighter if pushed.
Nonetheless, though the intensity waned over the years, I continued to face sexual abuse and assault until my final year at Doon. I came to think of it as an unavoidable part of life there, to be somehow taken in my stride. Even so, every incident was inevitably traumatic—whether it was the lewd comments and leering by the occasional gang of students or the nerve-racking experience of being cornered by particularly aggressive seniors who would feel me up and try to make me touch their penises, shoving me around and threatening to punish me for refusing.
I knew that many boys fared far worse than I, in great part because they did not have a protective elder brother as I did in Bharat. It was not just the markedly “pretty” ones. Virtually every prepubescent boy was androgynous and hairless, and consequently even those who later grew into masculine hulks often faced sexual abuse in their junior years.
But so overpowering was the atmosphere of fear and so complete the lack of redressal mechanisms that even though both physical and sexual abuse were widespread and flagrant, I can recall only three boys being even temporarily expelled for such atrocities in all my years there. Almost without exception, none of the victims, myself included, ever spoke of our traumas to even our friends or siblings. It was even rarer to turn to teachers, as the school environment valorized a boyish code of courage in which “sneaking” to teachers was the most unforgivable act. And, like victims of abuse universally, in our shame and self-doubt we blamed ourselves rather than the perpetrators, certain that we had been singled out for punishment for our own weaknesses and flaws.
In my worst years in school, I frequently had suicidal thoughts; killing myself seemed the only escape possible from this constant hell. Years later, I recognized that desperate wish in Vikram Seth’s Founder’s Day speech, when he said, “I had a terrible feeling of loneliness and isolation during my six years here. Sometimes at lights out I wished I would never wake up to hear the chhota hazri bell.”
Despite the continuing abuse, I found some kind of unhappy equilibrium by my middle years at Doon. A key element was to suspend thinking about what I was going through. I realized later that it was a common adaptive mechanism among us boys when faced with that bizarre world of regimentation and fear.
One of my favorite haunts was the swimming pool; I was happy every second of my time in the water, doing backstroke lengths effortlessly and incessantly, carving out an impenetrable cocoon. Another refuge was the library, where I pored over a vast number of the books and magazines over the years, investigating everything from atlases to bound back issues of Life and Time magazines. I took solitary walks around the sylvan campus, which had once been part of the colonial Forest Research Institute. My childhood habit of daydreaming about safe refuges inhabited by protective animals continued, providing me with an escapist sanctuary.
I also lost myself in songs about love and passion, which I listened to on a boxy cassette player, often breaking rules to climb up to the roof of my residential building so that I could listen in privacy. I loved Joan Baez, Neil Diamond, and Janis Ian, but the British diva Shirley Bassey was my obsession. Every lovelorn song of hers—from “I (Who Have Nothing)” to “Feelings”—seemed to echo my own deep yearning for romantic love.
I was too troubled to shine academically, barring in English and the social sciences, for which I had a natural aptitude. Nonetheless, to my surprise (because by now I had a deadeningly poor opinion of myself), I managed to pull in first-class grades. I was also too awkward among other boys to do well in team sports, but as I instinctively enjoyed exercise, I went riding at the nearby stables and was a star swimmer, eventually captaining the school swimming team.
In my later years, I was also sustained by close friendships. Those had been impossible to forge when we were juniors because the embattled terror most of us lived in aborted the potential for making real connections to others.
Invariably, my friends were also outcasts of one sort or another—for being bookish or artistic, for being frail, for being bad at sports, or simply for being too independent-minded to fit in. My three dearest friends, Gautam, Nimis, and Rahul, proved to be the handful who, like me, still actively sought out affection and close emotional connections. Those qualities had no place at Doon, where almost as if by osmosis we had rapidly learned that being affectionate was a despised girly trait. Our obvious need to be with one another set apart our friendships from the awkward jousting camaraderie of the other boys. We sat next to one another at meals, hung out at the end of the playing fields farthest from the action, defended one ano
ther as best we could from bullies, and went off together on midterm expeditions. During our long summer breaks, I unfailingly visited them in Bombay, which they all happened to be from.
With those friends, I felt a deep, almost instinctual bond, similar to my ties to my brothers. This closeness was practically a miracle. We all knew—sometimes just from the way we were looked at, even when there was no active jeering—that others sneered at the closeness of our bonds and any affection we displayed in public. Inevitably, that had a chilling effect on us. It was only away from school—on midterms or in the summer holidays—that we unreservedly expressed our affection toward one another. Then Gautam and I, who were especially close, would sleep every night cuddled like puppies in a shared sleeping bag or bed.
Yet in all our years in school none of us ever spoke to the others of our innermost thoughts—about what we prayed for, dreamed of, fantasized about, or feared most—the intimate disclosures that would be the lifeblood of my closest adult friendships. We were yet to develop into our full, independent personalities, where we would cease to be essentially our parents’ children and become ourselves by the conscious choices that would come to define us as individuals. So in a real sense, we didn’t know each other. Yet our friendships not only became singularly deep while in school but also proved to endure over our lifetimes. It was almost as if instinct had unerringly led us to find our soul mates.
To avoid attracting trouble, I tried to keep a low profile. I gave seniors and my more thuggish peers as wide a berth as possible. But my efforts to be left alone were never successful. Not only could I not escape the unwanted sexual attention of seniors, but my feminine mannerisms made me a constant target.
The tenor of the mocking was markedly different from that of La Martinière. There, my tougher fellow students had told me clearly that I needed to behave like a boy, not a girl. At Doon, I was given the confusing message that I should be a boy even though many of my critics secretly wished me to remain girly.
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