Cathedral and John Connon Boys’ High School is the Bombay school Saleem Sinai attends from nearly nine years old. The school marks his entry into a world of lessons, classmates, and declared ambitions, but also into a private divide: while other children present themselves as certain of what they will become, Saleem hides his uncertainty and, after developing telepathy, secretly mines other minds for schoolwork.

Setting and School Journey

In his nearly ninth year, Saleem begins attending the school on Outram Road in the Old Fort district. Each morning he is washed and brushed before waiting at the foot of the family’s two-storey hillock, dressed in white shorts and a blue-striped elastic belt with a snake buckle, his satchel over his shoulder and his large nose dripping as usual. Sonny Ibrahim and Cyrus-the-great are among the children waiting with him.

The school bus carries the pupils through a vivid cross-section of Bombay. It rattles around Kemp’s Corner, passes Thomas Kemp and Co. and the Air-India poster, then goes by Chowpatty Beach and Marine Drive before continuing past Victoria Terminus, Churchgate Station, and Crawford Market. The route gives the boys’ schooldays a distinctly public setting: advertisements, streets, beaches, and stations form the moving backdrop to their performances of confidence and status.

Classmates and Imagined Futures

On the bus, Sonny boasts that he will become a bullfighter in Spain, using his satchel like the matador Manolete’s muleta. Glandy Keith Colaco says he will run his father’s cinemas and make customers beg for seats. Fat Perce Fishwala, whose father owns a jewelry business, imagines possessing diamonds, emeralds, moonstones, and enormous pearls. Their futures are not private hopes so much as declarations made before an audience.

Other pupils make similarly emphatic claims. Eyeslice announces that he will be a Test cricketer despite having an empty eye socket. Hairoil says he will join his father in the Navy and defend the country; the other boys answer by pelting him with rulers, compasses, and ink pellets. Cyrus-the-great, by contrast, sits quietly, already imagining a future leading the nation’s nuclear research establishment. Their different forms of bravado, privilege, and ambition make the bus a small theater of social identity.

Saleem keeps silent when asked what he will become. While his classmates turn their ambitions into jokes and boasts, he imagines himself as Clark Kent protecting a secret identity. The boys mock his prominent nose with the nickname Snotnose and a chorus of Pinocchio taunts, giving his difference a public, humiliating visibility even as he conceals the much stranger faculty developing within him.

Telepathy and Schoolwork

After Saleem’s telepathic gift awakens, he listens to the thoughts of teachers and cleverer classmates. He discovers that some teachers mentally rehearse the answers they expect on tests; when a teacher is distracted, he can instead draw solutions from Cyrus-the-great’s mind. Saleem uses this access to raise his marks, but deliberately alters what he takes, adding mediocre touches even when he has borrowed an entire English essay, so his work will not look suspicious.

The cheating brings him academic success without discovery. Emil Zagallo watches him with furious suspicion, while the English master, Mr. Tandon, responds with baffled head-shaking; Saleem remains outwardly innocent and keeps his secret. He later describes the choice as a misuse of his extraordinary ability: afraid of losing his parents’ approval, he conceals the transformation, yet uses it to seek their congratulations through improved schoolwork. The school thus becomes the first clear setting in which his gift serves ordinary ambition rather than any wider public purpose.

Birthday and Exclusion

On Saleem’s tenth birthday, Cathedral School classmates attend his party alongside family members and other guests. The day’s company includes Sonny Ibrahim, who comes despite an embargo imposed by the embittered Evie Burns. Sonny passes on Evie’s message that Saleem is out of the gang.

The exclusion becomes physical when Evie, Eyeslice, Hairoil, and even Cyrus-the-great storm Saleem’s private hiding place and occupy the clocktower that had sheltered him. School friendships and rivalries reach beyond the classroom: the classmates can strip away not only his standing among the children but also a refuge of his own. Sonny looks upset, and the Brass Monkey becomes furious with Evie, promising to teach her a lesson. The episode leaves Saleem isolated, but not without allies.

Narrative Significance

The school’s strongest presence is mediated through its pupils and their journey rather than through descriptions of lessons or institutional life. The bus’s repeated movement through Bombay places children’s private self-inventions against the city’s commercial images and crowded streets; within that moving frame, the pupils rehearse adult identities before they have lived them.

For Saleem, the contrast is sharper still. His classmates announce futures as if identity were already settled, while he protects a secret and borrows answers from minds around him. The school is where the comic spectacle of childhood certainty meets the concealed power—and moral confusion—of his emerging telepathy.