In the opening paragraphs of Ajithan’s short story, we enter a seventh-grade classroom in small-town Tamil Nadu where no one uses their given name. வாத்து (duck), மண்டைஓடு (skull), ஆடு (goat), மீன்சட்டி (fish basket) are not playful additions to identity but parallel identities – sometimes carved into wooden desks like territorial markers. The narrator, called வாத்து for his protruding teeth, moves through this world with ease precisely because he understands the advantages of accepting the nickname system:
எனது எம்பிய பல்லை கேலி செய்து அவன்தான் எனக்கு வாத்து என்ற பெயரை வைத்து அழைத்தான்… வகுப்பில் எல்லாரும் என்னை அதன் மூலம் அறிந்துகொண்டார்கள். அவர்கள் என்னோடு மெல்ல பேசத் தொடங்கினார்கள். அப்படித்தான் மண்டைஓடும் ஆடும் என் நெருக்கமான நண்பர்கள் ஆனார்கள்.
Ajithan is not writing a nostalgic account of childhood cruelty, though cruelty is everywhere in the story. Instead, he constructs a working model of how social systems manufacture belonging through exclusion, how violence gets disguised as play, and how mechanisms meant to include can also enable abandonment. The story then performs a careful autopsy on this system.
The classroom functions as a complete social universe with its own economy of recognition. Nicknames are not descriptors but membership cards. To have one is to exist; to lack one is to hover in a dangerous limbo. Ajithan shows us one boy, லட்சுமண பெருமாள், for whom no nickname ever sticks. Rather than granting freedom, this absence produces invisibility:
நாளடைவில் அவனை யாரும் அழைக்காமலே ஆனார்கள், எதிலும் அவனை பொருட்படுத்தாமல் கடந்தார்கள்.
Eventually, he pleads for a nickname, any nickname, just to be acknowledged:
அவனே எங்களிடம் தனக்கு வட்டப்பெயர் வைக்குமாறு கெஞ்சத் துவங்கினான்… அவனே வித விதமான பெயர்களை கொண்டுவந்து கொடுத்தான்.
The system’s cruelest mercy is its bureaucratic resolution: his given name is declared his nickname. “லேய் உன் பேரு தாம்ல உனக்க வட்டப்பேரு, சரியா? கொண்டு போ.” Existence is granted, but emptied of meaning.
The narrator’s friend ஆடு is the classroom’s most skilled practitioner of this economy – a nickname virtuoso who can distill a person into a single inescapable trait. His talent reveals something unsettling about social cohesion itself. The nickname system operates like a mutual reduction pact: I allow you to compress me; you allow me to compress you. Through these reductions, a shared language of belonging emerges. Everyone trades multidimensional humanity for social safety through inclusion.
But this economy requires willing and capable participants. This is where George Bush enters the classroom. The nickname, given to an albino boy with cognitive disabilities, already signals a strain on the system. But what truly destabilizes it is not his appearance, it is his aloofness. He speaks rarely, in fragments. He smiles constantly, not from joy but as a neurological response to all stimuli, including pain. When the narrator looks into George Bush’s eyes, he sees himself and his classmates reflected as strange creatures:
அவன் கண்களில் தெரிந்த எங்கள் பிம்பங்களை பார்த்தபோது அதில் நாங்கள் ஏதோ வினோதமான ஜீவராசிகள் போல தெரிந்தோம்.
Ajithan captures this non-traversable emotional distance with devastating clarity:
எங்கள் ஒளி அவனுக்கு இருளாகவும் எங்கள் இருட்டு அவனுக்கு வெளிச்சமாகவும் இருந்தது.
To participate in the system, one must accept the nickname. George Bush is socially incapable of doing so. One boy remarks, “அவன் ஆளே ஒரு வட்டப்பேருதான்” – that he is not a person who has acquired a nickname but a walking caricature, a nickname without a prior self. This distinction is crucial. George Bush recognizes that a parallel order exists, but he does not, and cannot, understand its terms of contract. He sits inside the classroom while remaining outside its logic.
This creates a category problem. George Bush is assigned to the narrator’s bench – the third bench, left side, aligned with குலசாமி’s faction in the classroom’s cold war. Technically, he belongs to a group. Functionally, he does not.
The classroom’s power structure forms the story’s political backdrop. குலசாமி leads the left side through restrained dominance – he is the tallest boy and has never hit anyone, which paradoxically makes him more threatening. தொறை rules the right side through open aggression. The class exists in a tense equilibrium, fully aware that violence is inevitable. This is not subtext; the children know they are living inside a political drama.
When a teacher loses control and beats both வாத்து and George Bush, the familiar pattern initially holds. For வாத்து, such violence is routine; he survives by dissociating, dreaming of escape. But this time, something interrupts the ritual. George Bush speaks for the first time, his lips trembling:
“அஜிதா, வலிக்கி.”
Ajitha is the narrator’s given name (not to be confused with the author). This is the first time a given name enters the story. George Bush doesn’t recognize வாத்து, only அஜிதா. The moment does not produce empathy in any grand sense. Ajitha does not suddenly understand George Bush. What happens instead is more consequential: the narrator is addressed. Pain that was previously solitary, carried by வாத்து alone, is now shared by அஜிதா. Ajitha places his hands on George Bush’s shoulders and asks him not to cry. The exchange is brief, tender, and transformative. Two children step momentarily outside the classroom’s blind categorizations.
Only after this does George Bush begin to be folded, imperfectly, into the narrator’s circle. The boys adapt their games so he can participate:
‘ஒளிச்சுகளி’யில் கண்ணை மூடி இருபது வரை எண்ணும் மீன்சட்டியை சென்று தொட்டுவிட்டு “அவுட்” என்று சிரித்தான்… அவனது விதிகளுக்கு ஏற்ப நாங்களும் எங்கள் விளையாட்டை மாற்றிக்கொண்டே இருக்க வேண்டியிருந்தது. ஆனால் எப்போதும் அவனது விளையாட்டுக்குள் நாங்கள் போக முடிந்ததில்லை.
This accommodation is partial and fragile. It follows George Bush’s tacit acceptance that he lives outside the nickname system.
Ajithan’s critical insight is that the classroom’s violence is ordinarily digestible. Everyone knows how to process it. You get beaten, you return the next day. The nickname system enables this digestion: violence is enacted upon characters, not people. It occurs in a theatrical space where consequences feel temporary. You go home after your performance, and come back ready for the next day.
George Bush cannot inhabit this theater. He experiences violence as literal and permanent. He lives in a world of real people with real names; it is not refusal but incapacity. He does not know how to play the game that metabolizes cruelty.
The catastrophe arrives after தொறை’s victory. With குலசாமி defeated, the third bench boys go underground, meeting secretly, planning survival. And வாத்து delivers the story’s most devastating line:
“இந்த கலவரங்களுக்கு இடையில் ஜார்ஜ் புஷ்ஷை நாங்கள் சுத்தமாக மறந்துவிட்டிருந்தோம்.”
The third bench has four boys. But in a crisis, they count only three. George Bush sits beside them, yet does not register when cohesion demands strategy. This is not deliberate betrayal, but banal exclusion. He simply does not compute when participation requires planning, resistance, foresight.
This creates a protection vacuum. சடநாயி, a minor predator from தொறை’s side, finds George Bush alone and unleashes catastrophic violence, leaving him with a broken arm, and blood from ears and neck. When the friendlies gather around him, their helplessness becomes painfully clear:
மண்டைஓடும் நானும், ஆடும், மீன்சட்டியும்… அவனை சுற்றி அமர்ந்து தேற்ற முயன்றோம். அவன் எங்களிடமிருந்து முழுவதுமாக விலகியவனாக எங்கோ பார்த்தபடி சிரித்தான்.
A few hours later, his father arrives and takes him away. George Bush is never seen again.
I like Ajithan’s (the author’s) sociological precise observation. The violence itself is not unprecedented. Teachers beat harder. Faction leaders humiliate more thoroughly. But those violences could be processed. George Bush has no such pathway – not by choice, but by incapacity. He cannot treat violence as temporary, cannot read cues for return, cannot seek protection within hierarchies he cannot parse. So he exits. Permanently.
And this permanence collapses the system.
The next day, someone calls out, “லேய் அஜிதா.” The narrator freezes. Inside the classroom, faces emerge from darkness, but attached to unfamiliar names: சுனில், பிரேமன், ராஃபி, ஜான், அனீஷ், கோபி, பிரஜித், பார்த்திபன், டெஸ்மண்ட். Real names. The nickname economy has collapsed overnight.
The story offers no explicit explanation, and that is its strength. In my reading, when someone who cannot participate in the protective fiction is irreversibly destroyed, the fiction ceases. Not through moral awakening, but through structural failure. Like a game that collapses when someone gets actually hurt, the shared imagination dissolves.
What replaces it is not ethical clarity but disorientation, that I hope will be short-lived. These are the same boys, yet no longer characters. The narrator does not arrive at guilt or responsibility for failing to protect George Bush; that would require a sophistication from 12 year old boys the story rightly withholds. Instead, he encounters a world stripped of illusion:
உடல் பதைக்க நான் வகுப்பறைக்குள் ஓடிச்சென்று நுழைந்தபோது இருளுக்குள் இருந்து முகங்கள் ஒவ்வொன்றாக தெளிந்தன.
The nickname system depended on exclusion and reversibility. When exclusion produced permanent removal, the system collapsed. You cannot continue a game once it reveals it was never a game. The final image, real names emerging from darkness, carries the weight of permanence. These are people now, not characters. People who will carry what happened to George Bush without the comfort of respawning as someone else.
Ajithan has written what appears to be a school story but functions as a blueprint for how social systems manufacture belonging through structured exclusion, how violence is rendered bearable through collective fiction, and how such systems collapse not through ethical revelation but when confronted with someone they cannot process. The world of nicknames ends. What remains is the world of real names, and the irreversible absence of a pale-skinned boy who smiled strangely.
Transverse 