Forgotten Remembrances
I can remember weird things in the murkiest corners of my mind. There doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of things that I have forgotten from my childhood.
I still remember the whiff of fresh air at dusk near the “Ala maram” of St. Anthony’s Higher Secondary School, Thanjavur; my “Palingu” sessions with Kandasamy and Charles at “Selvam Colony”, Arulananda Nagar; my walk back with Sushila, the maid, from Shankara School, RA Puram, my first bicycle and my first cricket match at Chepauk. I even remember the day Manish, my fourth standard classmate, drank lukewarm rose milk at my newly constructed home in Thiruvanmiyur. And about Swami, my dear friend of primary school years, my escapades with him are as fresh in my memory as my mom’s Rasam that I devoured over last night.
But why do I so inexorably sham ignorance of all those crystal-clear memories when a cousin or an old high-school friend rekindles them. Am I afraid of my past? Or ashamed of it? What is the reason for this fake Alzheimer’s?
The most striking of such incidents took place in eleventh standard when Swami, my biggest juvenile influence joined MEI Higher Secondary School.
When our class teacher, TRR, in her embroidered English accent asked the new students to introduce themselves, I glanced around and instantly recognized the dark-complexioned, sharp-eyed cynic in the bench beside mine.
“Swaminathan, miss” Swami introduced himself in a hoarse voice but a reminiscent inflection.
…
Swami and I were the thickest of pals since the time I enrolled into second standard at Modern Higher Secondary School, Adayar. We hit it off instantly and would seldom be spotted without each other. We sat in the same bench, exchanged notes, tried to copy each other’s handwriting, wore the same colors on “color dress day” and plotted to overturn the hegemony of John as the “most powerful” in our class. Swami was consistently amongst the top three and I among the top five in a class of thirty-five students, which Navin – on virtue of being the tallest in the class – filled out on the top left corner of the board in gaudy chalk-piece colors. Our cheruby world was simple and exciting in the quiet and secluded school campus in Adayar insulated to the competitive world in the relative simplicity of the asbestos-roofed building with six classes separated by ceremonial five-foot, wooden dividers.
We would, during lunch time, eat from our “ever-silver” Tiffin boxes, make fun of the reticent and gold-hearted Madhavi Latha by masquerading her demeanor and contorting our mouths to indicate to her how she looked, and cram lessons on “Rocks and Minerals” and “Festivals of India”. Swami would always find fodder for his jokes and gibes at the most unlikely targets. I was only too glad to copy his demeanor and shadowed him between 9 and 4.
At 9 every morning, we stood outside for the assembly surrounded by a thick undergrowth of scented grass and wild flowers, the center of which was shaved off sporadically by the geriatric Munusamy, our watchman, who lived in a shed on the eastern side of the vast two-acre campus.
A be-spectacled student from the fifth standard stood on the steps of the asbestos-roofed building and shouted out the “Stand At Ease”, “Attention” routine and protruded his hand at shoulder length and parallel to the ground to “pledge”…
India is my country,
All Indians are brothers and sisters,
I love my country…
Swami’s cynicism was a revelation to me. There was not one routine or norm that he did not challenge and not one student that he did not ridicule. I found it more appropriate to join him than be the object of his biting sarcasm. Slowly, I became his inseparable friend, his loyal deputy, and assisted him in pulling pranks on any person he targeted.
Every morning, he waited for me and spelt out his strategy and theme for the day.
“Let us tease Nandagopal today!” Swami would suggest animatedly.
He pasted “Hit me” on Navin Gagan’s back, hid Sri Krishnan’s most priced possession –his Tiffin box – , robbed Venkata Subbu’s Venkatachalapati insignia, and tied a 4-feet rope to Madhavi Latha’s skirt.
There was one person whom Swami didn’t mess with. That was Gayathri. Gayathri always topped the class (and towered half a foot over the both of us). Swami dismissed this incongruity to sexism (and hormones!).
“Girl teachers always favor girl students.” He corroborated his theory with evidences of how Gayathri didn’t have “GK”, which he stressed to me was more important than “Science and SST”.
“What is ‘GK’?” I had asked him.
“General Knowledge,” he said proudly, “since you don’t even know that, your GK is bad” he quipped.
I knew Swami had the GK. He had introduced me to the concept that every country had something called Capitals and Currency. I had started cramming up names of capitals and currencies, on his direction, without realizing that these were names of places and money. He introduced me to cricket players, their techniques and what is considered lack of technique. He had an opinion about everything and taught me the trick behind having one.
When we left for the summer vacation that academic year, he handed me an assignment to try a chair prank on my uncle (I attempted it and got slapped for it), and spray chalk-piece powder on my cousin’s shirt (I didn’t attempt that).
After the summer vacation, back in school, now in third standard, Swami was a changed boy. He now wore a more baleful look and spoke in a more cynical mein. The reason for that was that he had learnt to speak “bad words” – he told me self-importantly. Over summer, in the serene Besant Nagar beach and the vicinity of “Velankanni”, he had learnt from his idols Pradeep and “Periya” Swami, the art of maligning somebody with powerful words; expletives which sounded so grave that the first time I mouthed them in my mind, my heart started beating fast. “Mairu”, “Lavade Kobaal”, “Thevidiya Paiya”, and so on. Each day, he introduced me to new words and explained to me the meaning (which was mostly exaggerated) and the nuances on pronunciation and the appropriate context of usage. I was scandalized but secretly excited about the power of these words, which could be used to disparage anybody.
There were enough reasons to use them as well. The vacant plots where wild grass and plants had grown in yesteryears had been supplanted by officious-looking white buildings. The school had just gotten bigger and more formal and hence more illustrious pupils had joined it. Swami and I slowly slipped out of the race for the top ranks in the class and eventually out of favor with the teachers who had initially given us the benefit of doubt refusing to believe that the new students could so swiftly take over the old order. The only solace to the old teachers was that Gayathri continued to reign supreme. And that was the cause of the deepest malaise for Swami and me. Swami and I beguiled ourselves aided by “bad words” which helped us vent out our anger and frustration at the new students and Gayathri.
Swami’s daily themes also became darker and ominous.
“Today I am going to use a lot of ‘bad words’!” he exclaimed.
“Today, I will make two of these new guys kneel down in the lawn!” and made fake complaints to teachers which I quickly seconded.
In my conscience, I was bothered by his audacity to use expletives (on the girls and teachers, especially) and his use of devious tactics to punish students but it was also my only defense mechanism to counter the rush of students who took over the coveted top positions in the class.
Swami and I felt utmost satisfaction when he made Radhika, a new student, break down to tears by verbally assaulting her with lethal sounding words, which she couldn’t make an inkling of, but cried nevertheless.
When Swami tried this on John once, John removed his thick waist belt and gave Swami – and me who as the loyal lieutenant came to Swami’s support – a sound thrashing. The “Brahmin brigade”, Sri Krishnan, Venkata Subbu and S. Thyagarajan tried to come to my aid but their afternoon “thair saadam” was no match for the thick leather belt that John was menacingly swooshing in the air.
Navin Gagan, hitherto slighted by Swami’s sardonic witticisms didn’t care about supporting us. But he didn’t take it well when the girls looked at John admiringly. So he joined the ring to confront John armed with a one-foot scale. He realized that he couldn’t go anywhere near John as John observing Navin joining the fray, increased the RPM of his belt. Navin ran towards the school building promising to be back with a bigger weapon.
What started off as a skirmish over a few bad words now resulted in a full-fledged war with John on one side, and a significant section of our class on the other.
Pradeep, Swami’s guru had just come out of his class after having his lunch and noticed the spectacle on the far-off junior school ground, which as a matter of prestige he never crossed from the high-school side of the campus.
But his dad was in RSS, and he liked to take up challenges to punish people from other religions. Being several classes senior to us and a few inches taller than John, he and his friend (and a possible RSS comrade), removed their belts and advanced lethally towards John mouthing invectives in chaste Besant Nagar Tamil – the ones they would never encourage in a RSS shakha – that Swami had been coaching me on, swishing their respective belts.
John, sensing the formidable opposition gradually building up against him, backed off while still vigorously maintaining the centrifugal force of the belt and ran out of the school campus through the western side gate – to applause from the girls and the boys who were enjoying the spectacle.
Sharadha miss, the wiry, Tamil teacher who taught us “Thirukkural” in her “butler” English was the only teacher who had witnessed the incident and much to our chagrin lodged a complaint with the Principal. She collected her share of brownie points.
The recently appointed Principal, who sweated it out in office more due to the violet and Magenta three-piece suits that he wore in the sweltering Madras heat and less due to his work load, summoned Swami and me along with the two senior boys with “black belts”. We were made to kneel down in the ground for the rest of the afternoon.
John, last seen running out of the school with his belt, returned to school only the next week with his father in tow, to take his TC.
After a couple of months of lying low from the “John controversy”, Swami added a malefic twist to our nefarious activities on campus. He felt that since we had drifted to the fringes of the class in terms of performance and conduct, our classmates needed to be meted with suitable punishment for pushing us there. The best way to do that, he decided, was to “loot” them.
“Loot” was a Tamil word (!), which meant, to indulge in mild thievery. In the next several months, we would rob pens, pencils, erasers, insignias, photographs, key chains and other paraphernalia that our classmates kept in their boxes and bags. No school textbooks or notebooks and no tiff in boxes – Swami had warned. Our fringe group now had new members – JT (whom Swami called “Jetti”) and Nandagopal. Though Swami was extremely wary of them initially, he was impressed with the degree of anarchy that JT could manage and the bounty that Nandagopal amassed in a few days and accepted them as full-fledged members.
I had realized that of all the misdemeanors that we had attempted in the past this was the most sweeping and the one, which I was unable to “switch off” after school hours. I robbed a pack of “Erasmic” blades from my uncle’s home and a stamp album from my neighbor. I took a “scent” rubber from my cousin and an imported screwdriver set from my father’s cousin’s home.
Swami and Nanda, as if washing their hands off their sins, handed all their plunder to me and my “military bag” grew heavy with loot and my conscience with disquietude over our malefactions.
Two weeks before our half-yearly exam, I robbed a “Venkatachalapati” insignia from Manish and kept it in my box. I normally avoided keeping the loot in my box, as my father, a huge fountain pen aficionado, would often check my box to inspect the soundness of my fountain pens. He had inquired me a few times about the extra erasers that I had in my possession and since then I had cautiously hidden the loot in an inaccessible compartment of my corpulent military bag.
On that fateful day, by divine intervention – my mom would say later – my father noticed the “Venkatachalapati” insignia in my bag. I tried to grab it from him and in a split-second instinct decided to run away from home, but my sister, ever the main villain, caught me from the other side. My father, by now suspicious, seized my priced military bag and rummaged through the contents. The household was stunned into stoic silence at the magnitude and value of the entire loot.
My mom cried. My father said he wanted to stop my schooling and my sister wouldn’t speak to me for the next two weeks. But for the next one hour after the horrendous discovery, I refused to accept any felonious activity had taken place, and with an impudence that could only be termed laudable, maintained that all of that had been given to me as “gifts” by my friends.
My father went ballistic and took one of the robbed scales and parted with rhythmic pounding to my wrist and my knuckles, asking me all the while “was this the hand which did it?” I wept profusely out of pain (and definitely not out of shame).
Then like Senator McCarthy, my father asked me to name names. I refused to divulge any. Then, with a resolve, which was uncharacteristic, he went to the phone booth, made a call to his office and took “permission” from work and with the aid of the entire family (and with the luxury of the extra scales) tried to get out the gory details of when and why this abominable act had commenced and continued.
I gave them some details while withholding the most extreme thefts. Even that was sufficient to throw my family into a collective spasm. But I had, in spite of repeated grilling and grave threats, remained obdurate about my stand that there was nobody else who knew about this. Finally, I gave in mildly and revealed one name – Nandagopal.
About Swami, the initiator of this idea, I never told them about him – ever. Swami was my mentor and my only genuine friend. I was incapable of handling the vacuum that would fill my life devoid of Swami and his friendship. My camaraderie with Swami only congealed further after the incident.
My mom visited the school the same day and recounted the incidents to the teachers. She then called Nandagopal out and pounded him for maneuvering her innocent son into his web of misconduct and pilferage. Nandagopal frantically denied her accusations and attempted to say it was the other way around. But my mom was in mood to listen to him.
…
Now eight years – and several schools – later, when Swami glanced to his left and smiled at me in surprised acknowledgement, I looked the other way. During lunch, he approached me and asked me if I remembered him and educed several remembrances from our collective past. I stone-heartedly rebuffed his overtures. To add insult to injury, I told him, “Either you are lying or you are talking about some other person!”
I still remember the whiff of fresh air at dusk near the “Ala maram” of St. Anthony’s Higher Secondary School, Thanjavur; my “Palingu” sessions with Kandasamy and Charles at “Selvam Colony”, Arulananda Nagar; my walk back with Sushila, the maid, from Shankara School, RA Puram, my first bicycle and my first cricket match at Chepauk. I even remember the day Manish, my fourth standard classmate, drank lukewarm rose milk at my newly constructed home in Thiruvanmiyur. And about Swami, my dear friend of primary school years, my escapades with him are as fresh in my memory as my mom’s Rasam that I devoured over last night.
But why do I so inexorably sham ignorance of all those crystal-clear memories when a cousin or an old high-school friend rekindles them. Am I afraid of my past? Or ashamed of it? What is the reason for this fake Alzheimer’s?
The most striking of such incidents took place in eleventh standard when Swami, my biggest juvenile influence joined MEI Higher Secondary School.
When our class teacher, TRR, in her embroidered English accent asked the new students to introduce themselves, I glanced around and instantly recognized the dark-complexioned, sharp-eyed cynic in the bench beside mine.
“Swaminathan, miss” Swami introduced himself in a hoarse voice but a reminiscent inflection.
…
Swami and I were the thickest of pals since the time I enrolled into second standard at Modern Higher Secondary School, Adayar. We hit it off instantly and would seldom be spotted without each other. We sat in the same bench, exchanged notes, tried to copy each other’s handwriting, wore the same colors on “color dress day” and plotted to overturn the hegemony of John as the “most powerful” in our class. Swami was consistently amongst the top three and I among the top five in a class of thirty-five students, which Navin – on virtue of being the tallest in the class – filled out on the top left corner of the board in gaudy chalk-piece colors. Our cheruby world was simple and exciting in the quiet and secluded school campus in Adayar insulated to the competitive world in the relative simplicity of the asbestos-roofed building with six classes separated by ceremonial five-foot, wooden dividers.
We would, during lunch time, eat from our “ever-silver” Tiffin boxes, make fun of the reticent and gold-hearted Madhavi Latha by masquerading her demeanor and contorting our mouths to indicate to her how she looked, and cram lessons on “Rocks and Minerals” and “Festivals of India”. Swami would always find fodder for his jokes and gibes at the most unlikely targets. I was only too glad to copy his demeanor and shadowed him between 9 and 4.
At 9 every morning, we stood outside for the assembly surrounded by a thick undergrowth of scented grass and wild flowers, the center of which was shaved off sporadically by the geriatric Munusamy, our watchman, who lived in a shed on the eastern side of the vast two-acre campus.
A be-spectacled student from the fifth standard stood on the steps of the asbestos-roofed building and shouted out the “Stand At Ease”, “Attention” routine and protruded his hand at shoulder length and parallel to the ground to “pledge”…
India is my country,
All Indians are brothers and sisters,
I love my country…
Swami’s cynicism was a revelation to me. There was not one routine or norm that he did not challenge and not one student that he did not ridicule. I found it more appropriate to join him than be the object of his biting sarcasm. Slowly, I became his inseparable friend, his loyal deputy, and assisted him in pulling pranks on any person he targeted.
Every morning, he waited for me and spelt out his strategy and theme for the day.
“Let us tease Nandagopal today!” Swami would suggest animatedly.
He pasted “Hit me” on Navin Gagan’s back, hid Sri Krishnan’s most priced possession –his Tiffin box – , robbed Venkata Subbu’s Venkatachalapati insignia, and tied a 4-feet rope to Madhavi Latha’s skirt.
There was one person whom Swami didn’t mess with. That was Gayathri. Gayathri always topped the class (and towered half a foot over the both of us). Swami dismissed this incongruity to sexism (and hormones!).
“Girl teachers always favor girl students.” He corroborated his theory with evidences of how Gayathri didn’t have “GK”, which he stressed to me was more important than “Science and SST”.
“What is ‘GK’?” I had asked him.
“General Knowledge,” he said proudly, “since you don’t even know that, your GK is bad” he quipped.
I knew Swami had the GK. He had introduced me to the concept that every country had something called Capitals and Currency. I had started cramming up names of capitals and currencies, on his direction, without realizing that these were names of places and money. He introduced me to cricket players, their techniques and what is considered lack of technique. He had an opinion about everything and taught me the trick behind having one.
When we left for the summer vacation that academic year, he handed me an assignment to try a chair prank on my uncle (I attempted it and got slapped for it), and spray chalk-piece powder on my cousin’s shirt (I didn’t attempt that).
After the summer vacation, back in school, now in third standard, Swami was a changed boy. He now wore a more baleful look and spoke in a more cynical mein. The reason for that was that he had learnt to speak “bad words” – he told me self-importantly. Over summer, in the serene Besant Nagar beach and the vicinity of “Velankanni”, he had learnt from his idols Pradeep and “Periya” Swami, the art of maligning somebody with powerful words; expletives which sounded so grave that the first time I mouthed them in my mind, my heart started beating fast. “Mairu”, “Lavade Kobaal”, “Thevidiya Paiya”, and so on. Each day, he introduced me to new words and explained to me the meaning (which was mostly exaggerated) and the nuances on pronunciation and the appropriate context of usage. I was scandalized but secretly excited about the power of these words, which could be used to disparage anybody.
There were enough reasons to use them as well. The vacant plots where wild grass and plants had grown in yesteryears had been supplanted by officious-looking white buildings. The school had just gotten bigger and more formal and hence more illustrious pupils had joined it. Swami and I slowly slipped out of the race for the top ranks in the class and eventually out of favor with the teachers who had initially given us the benefit of doubt refusing to believe that the new students could so swiftly take over the old order. The only solace to the old teachers was that Gayathri continued to reign supreme. And that was the cause of the deepest malaise for Swami and me. Swami and I beguiled ourselves aided by “bad words” which helped us vent out our anger and frustration at the new students and Gayathri.
Swami’s daily themes also became darker and ominous.
“Today I am going to use a lot of ‘bad words’!” he exclaimed.
“Today, I will make two of these new guys kneel down in the lawn!” and made fake complaints to teachers which I quickly seconded.
In my conscience, I was bothered by his audacity to use expletives (on the girls and teachers, especially) and his use of devious tactics to punish students but it was also my only defense mechanism to counter the rush of students who took over the coveted top positions in the class.
Swami and I felt utmost satisfaction when he made Radhika, a new student, break down to tears by verbally assaulting her with lethal sounding words, which she couldn’t make an inkling of, but cried nevertheless.
When Swami tried this on John once, John removed his thick waist belt and gave Swami – and me who as the loyal lieutenant came to Swami’s support – a sound thrashing. The “Brahmin brigade”, Sri Krishnan, Venkata Subbu and S. Thyagarajan tried to come to my aid but their afternoon “thair saadam” was no match for the thick leather belt that John was menacingly swooshing in the air.
Navin Gagan, hitherto slighted by Swami’s sardonic witticisms didn’t care about supporting us. But he didn’t take it well when the girls looked at John admiringly. So he joined the ring to confront John armed with a one-foot scale. He realized that he couldn’t go anywhere near John as John observing Navin joining the fray, increased the RPM of his belt. Navin ran towards the school building promising to be back with a bigger weapon.
What started off as a skirmish over a few bad words now resulted in a full-fledged war with John on one side, and a significant section of our class on the other.
Pradeep, Swami’s guru had just come out of his class after having his lunch and noticed the spectacle on the far-off junior school ground, which as a matter of prestige he never crossed from the high-school side of the campus.
But his dad was in RSS, and he liked to take up challenges to punish people from other religions. Being several classes senior to us and a few inches taller than John, he and his friend (and a possible RSS comrade), removed their belts and advanced lethally towards John mouthing invectives in chaste Besant Nagar Tamil – the ones they would never encourage in a RSS shakha – that Swami had been coaching me on, swishing their respective belts.
John, sensing the formidable opposition gradually building up against him, backed off while still vigorously maintaining the centrifugal force of the belt and ran out of the school campus through the western side gate – to applause from the girls and the boys who were enjoying the spectacle.
Sharadha miss, the wiry, Tamil teacher who taught us “Thirukkural” in her “butler” English was the only teacher who had witnessed the incident and much to our chagrin lodged a complaint with the Principal. She collected her share of brownie points.
The recently appointed Principal, who sweated it out in office more due to the violet and Magenta three-piece suits that he wore in the sweltering Madras heat and less due to his work load, summoned Swami and me along with the two senior boys with “black belts”. We were made to kneel down in the ground for the rest of the afternoon.
John, last seen running out of the school with his belt, returned to school only the next week with his father in tow, to take his TC.
After a couple of months of lying low from the “John controversy”, Swami added a malefic twist to our nefarious activities on campus. He felt that since we had drifted to the fringes of the class in terms of performance and conduct, our classmates needed to be meted with suitable punishment for pushing us there. The best way to do that, he decided, was to “loot” them.
“Loot” was a Tamil word (!), which meant, to indulge in mild thievery. In the next several months, we would rob pens, pencils, erasers, insignias, photographs, key chains and other paraphernalia that our classmates kept in their boxes and bags. No school textbooks or notebooks and no tiff in boxes – Swami had warned. Our fringe group now had new members – JT (whom Swami called “Jetti”) and Nandagopal. Though Swami was extremely wary of them initially, he was impressed with the degree of anarchy that JT could manage and the bounty that Nandagopal amassed in a few days and accepted them as full-fledged members.
I had realized that of all the misdemeanors that we had attempted in the past this was the most sweeping and the one, which I was unable to “switch off” after school hours. I robbed a pack of “Erasmic” blades from my uncle’s home and a stamp album from my neighbor. I took a “scent” rubber from my cousin and an imported screwdriver set from my father’s cousin’s home.
Swami and Nanda, as if washing their hands off their sins, handed all their plunder to me and my “military bag” grew heavy with loot and my conscience with disquietude over our malefactions.
Two weeks before our half-yearly exam, I robbed a “Venkatachalapati” insignia from Manish and kept it in my box. I normally avoided keeping the loot in my box, as my father, a huge fountain pen aficionado, would often check my box to inspect the soundness of my fountain pens. He had inquired me a few times about the extra erasers that I had in my possession and since then I had cautiously hidden the loot in an inaccessible compartment of my corpulent military bag.
On that fateful day, by divine intervention – my mom would say later – my father noticed the “Venkatachalapati” insignia in my bag. I tried to grab it from him and in a split-second instinct decided to run away from home, but my sister, ever the main villain, caught me from the other side. My father, by now suspicious, seized my priced military bag and rummaged through the contents. The household was stunned into stoic silence at the magnitude and value of the entire loot.
My mom cried. My father said he wanted to stop my schooling and my sister wouldn’t speak to me for the next two weeks. But for the next one hour after the horrendous discovery, I refused to accept any felonious activity had taken place, and with an impudence that could only be termed laudable, maintained that all of that had been given to me as “gifts” by my friends.
My father went ballistic and took one of the robbed scales and parted with rhythmic pounding to my wrist and my knuckles, asking me all the while “was this the hand which did it?” I wept profusely out of pain (and definitely not out of shame).
Then like Senator McCarthy, my father asked me to name names. I refused to divulge any. Then, with a resolve, which was uncharacteristic, he went to the phone booth, made a call to his office and took “permission” from work and with the aid of the entire family (and with the luxury of the extra scales) tried to get out the gory details of when and why this abominable act had commenced and continued.
I gave them some details while withholding the most extreme thefts. Even that was sufficient to throw my family into a collective spasm. But I had, in spite of repeated grilling and grave threats, remained obdurate about my stand that there was nobody else who knew about this. Finally, I gave in mildly and revealed one name – Nandagopal.
About Swami, the initiator of this idea, I never told them about him – ever. Swami was my mentor and my only genuine friend. I was incapable of handling the vacuum that would fill my life devoid of Swami and his friendship. My camaraderie with Swami only congealed further after the incident.
My mom visited the school the same day and recounted the incidents to the teachers. She then called Nandagopal out and pounded him for maneuvering her innocent son into his web of misconduct and pilferage. Nandagopal frantically denied her accusations and attempted to say it was the other way around. But my mom was in mood to listen to him.
…
Now eight years – and several schools – later, when Swami glanced to his left and smiled at me in surprised acknowledgement, I looked the other way. During lunch, he approached me and asked me if I remembered him and educed several remembrances from our collective past. I stone-heartedly rebuffed his overtures. To add insult to injury, I told him, “Either you are lying or you are talking about some other person!”
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