And now the father turns to what stole the son. He scrutinises the general stain of your children and they shrink back at what is vivid in his face. Hate. They are rats, mosquitoes, swattable, nothing; beneath human. And hatred at the leaking of your ways into his son, at the daring to lure him across. But there is something else too and you lean: it is the look of someone threatened. You saw exactly that face, years ago, as a child yourself, in the father of a girl in your class who was pushed to be the best and he never let up with his pushing and one day you beat her in a test and then did it again, and her father marked you out from that time, marked you out with his hatred, wanted you vanished from the grand plan of his daughter’s life. Grownups aren’t meant to look at children like that but they do. And in Pin’s embarrassed scowl now is the beginning of something this man dreads. A boy newly questioning the ideology that has spined his entire existence; journeying into the terrain of skittery, independent thought. And their holy book above all holy books thunders against the tempters who whisper into hearts. Question everything, oh yes.
Though they learn it all by heart, but fail to study its import — learning by rote — they do so to their lasting hurt and ill.