The Anti-Hindi Agitation
The surroundings were alien. The pretentious exterior of the school building seemed more intellectual than the unimaginative white-washed buildings of St. Mark’s where Ravi had been his previous academic year. Scores of aspirants pored in through the two gates of the school and seemed suave and from the well-bred nobility of northern Bangalore. Ravi felt an overpowering sense of nervousness as he tagged on to his elder sister, waiting for their appointment with the Principal.
The Principal’s office was right next to the entrance and Mr. Radhakrishnan was conversing with a deferential parent inside his cabin. A score of desperate parents unabashedly starred through the window trying to catch a glimpse of the celebrity principal.
“I heard he is very strict even with the parents!” a parent told her spouse in Tamil.
Ravi’s sister, Kala, glanced at him and parted with a nervous smile. Ravi reciprocated.
The security guard, in a ragamuffin uniform and a Hawaii slipper, rushed towards the crowd thronging the principal’s window and ordered it to clear the area, raising his home-made lathi, as if it were a crowd in a cinema theater. He closed the window, murmuring unpleasant epithets, and rushed to bolt the window from inside.
“Even the watchman is strict with the parents!” Ravi whispered to Kala. Kala gave a severe gawk at Ravi meaning to shut him up and then managed a surreptitious smile.
At around 9:50 am, they walked towards the Principal’s cabin for their ten O’ clock appointment.
“Don’t worry about it, Ravi! We will talk to him and see what he has to say! You have performed well in the previous year. The only thing is this is a CBSE school and there would be Hindi. You think you will cope up?” his sister asked him apprehensively.
“Yea, yea! That wouldn’t be a problem!” Ravi replied with an air of overconfidence.
Ravi had studied the last three years in Thanjavur and methodically topped his class of sixty, in St. Mark’s Higher Secondary School. It didn’t take much to do that because most of them were in the school because they were sportsmen or Catholics – or both. The few others from rich homes were there to witness the entertainment of the physical assailment that the students suffered in the hands of Arokyaswamy – the History teacher cum Catholic propagandist - who lifted people off their necks for mild transgressions and Nagaraj who realized vicarious pleasure caning students with freshly-cut bamboo sticks, which he made Dorairaj bring from his estate. The students nicknamed him Bambooraj.
Hardly thirty percent of the class passed all the subjects and that would mean a further bashing to the rest seventy percent from the principal – Father Susai – when the report cards were distributed every month.
“Those were the days!” Ravi thought deliberately not remembering the one occasion when Nagaraj caned him for not answering a question in elementary geometry.
Thanjavur was a stagnant little town with people who loved to spend the rest of their lives sitting in their garrulous “thinnais” discussing neighborhood politics. Ravi’s father was frequently transferred to various shantytowns in South India and Thanjavur was still better as it had a few renowned schools and a pedigree of producing educated people.
Ravi had spent the last seven years of his life bouncing off mediocre schools in Sri Vaigundam, Tirunelveli, Chennai and Thanjavur, but faring very well in spite of the frequent shifts. But Bangalore seemed an entirely different terrain.
Mr. Radhakrishnan called in Ravi and his sister after a half-hour delay. The other parents, waiting for their turn, looked furtively with jealousy as Ravi and Kala entered the Principal’s office. Mr. Radhakrishnan seated in a corner of his capacious office, which obviously had expansion plans, beckoned them to sit in chairs opposite him without looking up and studied Ravi’s report card from the previous year pokerfaced.
“Thanjavur!” he exclaimed with apparent sarcasm and glanced at Ravi and then at Kala.
“Your percentages are good, Mr. Ravikumar! But…” he paused.
Ravi and Kala looked at him expectantly. Radhakrishnan took a charitable pause and starred into the distance through the window, which revealed the scenic ambience on the rear side of the school.
“But…you don’t seem to have had Hindi as a language!” he said.
“Yes, sir!” Ravi said, almost beaming.
“OK…so…” he turned to Kala, “…how is your brother going to cope with Hindi as a second language?”
“Sir! He has learnt Hindi before and I know Hindi and I can teach him, sir!”
Mr. Radhakrishnan laughed.
“Miss Kala, don’t mean to discourage you! But you just cannot teach somebody a language! That too, Hindi as a second language at ninth standard!”
“He has also done ‘Prathmic’ and ‘Rashtrabhasha’ sir!”
“What are those?”
“Sir, those are the Hindi courses conducted by Dakshin Bharat…!” Kala rummaged around in her head searching for the name of the organization.
“Dakshin Bharat Hindi Prachar Sabha, sir!” Ravi completed.
The principal glanced at Ravi with his half-open, wary eyes and spurted out, what he would later understand, one of his rare chortles.
“No, no! Miss Kala!” he said between his sniggers, “I cannot accept some courses conducted by a Sabha and all that!”
“It is not a Sabha, sir! It…!”
“Miss Kala, did you try in one of the state board schools here?” Mr. Radhakrishnan asked gravely, to the siblings’ surprise.
“Sir…I wanted to let my brother have the best school! And I think he will perform well if given the chance, sir! He is a bright boy! He just needs the opportunity!”
The Principal listened to Kala and looked at the distance in grave introspection.
By now Kala and Ravi were used to these lingering pauses and they got into their routine of examining the furniture, the ceiling, and the view through the window and had another glance at the shields, cups and mementoes that the students had won for the school.
There were photographs of the principal with Pandit Nehru probably during his college days, with the Karnataka Governor during the opening of the current school complex and then with the students of “Classes of X” from the previous years, three large shields from the Rotary Club of Jai Nagar for a quiz competition the school had won – thrice in a row, and a life-size photograph of the Kanchi Sankaracharya.
“Wonder how good a student this guy was when he was in school!” Ravi thought. He felt a sudden inquisitiveness to look at the Principal’s report card.
Radhakrishnan broke the stillness by clearing his throat.
“Ok, Miss Kala, I wanted to ask you! Where is his father?”
“Sir, he is no more!” Ravi replied.
“Ah…!” Radhakrishnan expressed in anguish.
“ Sir, he expired last year!” Kala rushed to add with her eyes almost moist with tears.
“Come here, Ravi!” the Principal beckoned Ravi towards him.
“You are a young man! You should be brave!” Radhakrishnan said patting his back. Ravi, who was quite normal till then, somehow felt these words choking him. He shed tears profusely.
“I just said you should be brave and you have already started disobeying me like all my other students!” Radhakrishnan joked. Ravi smiled.
Another pause. “OK, Miss Kala! I am granting him admission now!”
“Thank you sir! Thank you…”
“Wait, wait…!” Radhakrishnan stopped with both hands outstretched.
“This is only a provisional admission! I am going to see how this young man here fairs…”, he gave another encouraging pat to Ravi, “Two months… three months… maybe!”
“OK Sir! Yes sir!” Kala said vigorously. Ravi shook his head in unison.
“…especially, how he fairs in Hindi… OK?”
“Yes sir!”
“I will fair really well, sir!” Ravi reiterated with earnestness.
“OK, Miss Kala! Pay the fees! And admit him!”
…
Ten days later Ravi stepped into the school for his first day at Modern Senior Secondary School, two minutes to eight. He was turned back by the security guard - he remembered from his first trip, to come into the school through the “Students’ Gate”.
Ravi ran across to the other side of the school and tried opening the “Students’ Gate”. The gate wouldn’t budge. He tried shaking it open. The watchman came out from his den and asked Ravi to wait till the assembly was over.
When the gate opened, all the latecomers entered the sprawling campus. The headmistress, Ms. Joseph, was waiting for them, clad in an unexceptional sari teeming with sobriety – “due to her Pentecostal roots”, Mahesh a know-all briefed Ravi later – and clasped tightly around both her uptight shoulders.
“This is not expected of you! This is going to be taken seriously…” she looked around and spotted Ms. Jose the Physical Training teacher.
“Ah! Miss Jose! Let their names be noted down!” In later dates, Ravi would observe that the headmistress had a penchant for the passive voice. Nothing was “you do it”, “I will do it” for her. It would have to be “that would be done” and “it has to be done”.
It was not a great beginning for Ravi. Ms. Jose, with her inimitable Malayalam accent, chastised the students for their lethargy, using quotable quotes, fit enough to find a place in the comical school moments of any school.
“Why didn’t you polish your leg?” she asked once.
“Childraen! Domorrow, ve hawe adheletic prectize!” she would instruct to the giggling students.
By the time, Ravi entered into his class, it was the second period.
Mrs. Sharma, the Hindi teacher, waved at him, asking him to approach her.
“You are a new student?” she asked in her Delhi accent.
“Yes, Miss!” Ravi replied nervously. There was a mild laughter. Ravi learned later that it was because the students were used to referring to their teachers as Ma’am rather than ‘Miss’.
“OK. Go be seated”, Mrs. Sharma said.
Ravi browsed around the class for an appropriate seat. There were none in the last few rows, which he preferred. The second bench had a seat where he seated himself next to a guy named Sunil, whom he would learn later had topped the class since his kindergarten years.
Sunil was immediately inquisitive to find out the whereabouts of Ravi.
Mrs. Sharma wasn’t so interested and intervened.
‘Na, na! Abhi Nahin! Baad mein kar lena!” The class giggled in approval. Ravi smiled as well. See, Hindi is not tough at all, he thought.
That was about the only thing he understood for the next fifty minutes when Ms. Sharma dwelt in detail on the “kehne ka taatparya” of “Kabir ke dohe”.
Ravi was relieved when the class ended but only to be subject to the abrasive teaching style of Ida Rajkumar, who taught History and English. Ida made the environment in the class gloomy and the subjects she taught gloomier and targeted everybody in the class for punishment and reproof. Ravi would come to hate Ida and her him, so much that when he left Bangalore a year later, Ravi cited Ida as a major reason for it.
By the afternoon Ravi was doing admirably well acclimating to the new environs. He liked his classmates in cosmopolitan Bangalore who had no qualms walking up to him and introducing themselves, which would have never happened in Thanjavur for sure and probably not in Chennai either.
As if intuiting that Ravi is getting too comfortable for his first day, the Physics teacher absented herself and Mrs. Sharma sprinted into the class, as a substitute, in glee of having acquired an extra period to teach Kabir’s Khadi boli. Ravi was distraught by the end of the class and had to leave school in a somber mood.
“What Hindi is this? So different from the one spoken in movies?” Ravi thought.
“Jaan se maar daloonga”, “Khoon pee jaaonga”, and “Mujhko tumse pyaar hai”, that he was used to in Hindi movies or the “Mej par kalam hai” and “Kowa kaala hai” from the Prathmic classes, never figured in Mrs. Sharma interpretations of Hindi poetry.
He was perplexed that he was not even able to make out the context of what the Mrs. Sharma was uttering in fifty minutes. What is it that Kabir had written about, Ravi thought? Were his couplets about life, God, morality, science, religion? How could he write a couple of lines which required so much explanation deliberately forgetting Thiruvalluvar’s 1310 couplets which probably is the subject of the most treatises and analyses in Tamil?
Ravi reached home and hurled his new military bag into a corner.
“What happened? How was Hindi?” Kala asked probably sensing his anxiety.
“What ‘Hindi’?” Ravi asked in exasperation as if that was the last thing on his mind.
“How is the standard of the school?”
“OK!” Ravi replied avoiding Kala’s eyes.
“How is the standard of Hindi? You will manage?”
“How many times you will ask me? I already told you!” Ravi said in anger.
“What did they teach you?”
Ravi gnashed his teeth. He just couldn’t take his sister questioning the worst time of his first day. Ravi decided to ignore her sister’s question.
“What? I am asking you something. How is the standard?”
“I TOLD YOU” Ravi shouted trembling with anger.
The next day was a bigger torture for Ravi as there were two consecutive Hindi periods. Mrs. Sharma, loved Khadi Boli and was in no mood to move on to other dialects, it seemed. The students seemed to enjoy Kabir’s metaphysical musings and had no objection attending Mrs. Sharma’s class for two hours.
At the end of the period, Mrs. Sharma spoke in English after her first words to Ravi the previous day.
“Day after tomorrow, we have the first unit test on ‘Vyakaran’!” People reacted predictably twisting their faces in despondence.
“OK! These guys are normal…sometimes!” Ravi thought.
“I understand, I understand! But I am giving you a concession!” she said
All the students looked at her in anticipation.
“Students who have joined two days back need not write the exam… for the rest of the year!” Ravi expected her to say.
“We will have only essay writing for this unit test!”
The class yowled in jubilation.
“Ssshhh! Principal is expected on rounds!” Mrs. Sharma whispered.
Sunil was extremely excited though he could have taken the “Vyakaran” exam for the whole year right that instant and scored ninety percent. Ravi tried to act excited as well and smiled at Sunil and Mahesh who was seated to his left.
How could essay writing in Hindi excite so many people, he thought!
“You have to write only one of the two topics – ‘Bus Durghatna’ or ‘Ek Adbhud Rishi”. Mrs. Sharma, leveraging on the excitement of the class, also gave the course for the second unit test. Ravi understood not a word of it and scribbled some baloney into his notebook. Sunil glanced at Ravi’s notebook; Ravi hid it casually by holding up the right side of the notebook and closed it down after a few seconds.
Ravi didn’t understand what ‘Bus Durghatna’ meant. So he thought he would take the other topic. Writing about an exceptional Rishi shouldn’t be that hard, after all. Maybe not. In his insipid Hindi classes of yesteryears, nobody had asked him to right about a Rishi. In fact, even his Tamil lessons never had him writing essays on ‘Agasthiyar’ and ‘Veerama muni’. These North Indian guys surely teach language differently.
He remembered his favorite Rishis. He didn’t have one. He remembered a movie called “Brahmarishi Viswamitrar” which had Shivaji Ganesan starring as the Brahmarishi. Shivaji’s waning popularity and his failing health and interest in cinema made for one of his worst cinema. But now, Ravi remembered some of the scenes from the movie and tried to transport his thoughts to an essay in Hindi. It was unbelievably difficult. He remembered the structure of some of the essays he had written in Hindi. ‘Mera Priya Neta’, ‘Mera Priya Shehar’, ‘Mere Pitaji’. He would normally begin the essays by mentioning dates, places and persons, which he would list out without any grammar. But now he wouldn’t be able to do that for ‘Viswamitra’!
Ravi remembered his life in Thanjavur and how tranquil and predictable it was. He topped his class without much ado and enjoyed his time in school with his friends KK and Sivaraman. His father’s untimely demise had uprooted his family and scattered them into different towns in South India. His younger sister was in his uncle’s house in Erode, he was now in Bangalore with his elder sister, Kala, and his mother in Chennai with her sister.
When he was in Thanjavur he had always wanted to leave the place, as the stagnant little town had nothing to offer him, he felt. Now, barely a couple weeks in Bangalore and he was already nostalgic about Arogyasamy’s History class ignoring the physical retribution that students had to endure and all the missionary talk that he would frequently engage in, denigrating Hindu Gods. At least, he wouldn’t have to learn this appalling language of Kabir’s dohas and Surdas’ kavitas and Mrs. Sharma’s lectures.
Ravi felt tears in his eyes. He drank a glass of water and looked out through the living room window at the ruthless Bangalore night. There was nobody walking on the streets and the posh houses in the distance seem set for a comfortable night’s sleep.
Two days later, when he got up, he wished fervently that he had a high fever. He touched himself with the back of his palms. His body was cold. He tried to titillate his other body parts to make them succumb to some ailment or the other. He wished he would fall down in the bathroom and get his leg fractured or cut his right hand so that he would not be able to write anything for the next one month.
When he finally made it to school not able to find an adequate excuse, he wished Mrs. Sharma would absent herself due to a fractured leg or a cut right hand. But after offering mild hope, she arrived half an hour late and in her usual style rushed into the class with her bob-cut hair swinging and surplus makeup struggling to hold to her face.
Ravi wrote about two lines in the next one hour of the unit test. Sunil took permission twice to tear off more papers from his rough notebook as he filled page after page about his “Adbhud Rishi”. Twice, he glanced at Ravi curious to find out why the pen was not progressing beyond the first few lines. Ravi closed it with another book and scribbled some more gibberish.
When the bell struck, there were students who were fervently trying to fill off a few more last lines on their favorite Rishi or their favorite bus. “Losers”, said Ravi to himself. Mrs. Sharma called out to the students to return the papers. After five more minutes, she snatched the papers from Sunil, mock-scolding him for writing so much.
Sunil had filled out five additional sheets. He was a Malayalee. Ravi’s Grandfather had once said “All Malayalees are communists! Don’t trust them!” When exactly did Malayalees become exponents in Hindi and Rishis, Ravi thought?
When Mrs. Sharma walked out of the class, profusely apologizing to Mrs. Chari for usurping some of her fifty minutes’ time, she did not notice that she had one paper less. Ravi felt sick in his stomach. He wanted to run away to Chennai. He shammed a stomachache to his classmates and left for the rest of the day.
Kala was surprised to see Ravi return so early from School. She inquired about the Hindi Exam, to which Ravi responded evasively. Kala did not press for an answer as she had her in-laws visiting from Delhi and didn’t want to have a showdown in front of them.
Ravi was tense about the outcome of his misdemeanor but did not care much for it. What graver physical abuse could Mrs. Sharma inflict on him compared to Nagaraj’s bamboo stick or Arogyasamy’s neck twirling, he thought.
The next day, when he reached school, the normally friendly guys were very uncomfortable around him. Sunil asked him about the “missing Hindi paper” and told him that Mrs. Sharma was fuming in the class the previous day. Ravi swore casually that he had already handed in the paper and even tried to haul Sunil to his side by trying to brainwash him to accept that he had seen Ravi hand in the paper to Mrs. Sharma. “I am not sure!” Sunil said.
When Mrs. Sharma came into the class on the third period, she was in a very foul mood and it didn’t take more than a few seconds to understand that it was because of Ravi.
“Where is your test paper?” she asked indignantly even as she entered the class.
Ravi tried to let out an expression of surprise, “I gave it to you, Ma’am!”
“Shut up!” Mrs. Sharma said trembling, “I gave it to you” she parroted Ravi’s words in contempt.
“This has never happened in my class! What will I tell the people?”
“Ma’am… but I gave it to you, Ma’am!”
“Come here! Come here!” Mrs. Sharma called out. She raised her hand to hit him. Ravi closed his eyes.
When Ravi was returning home the previous day claiming a stomachache, he took the single sheet of paper which he had crumpled into his pocket where he had scribbled a few words on Viswamitra before he suffered from “writer’s block”, had one glance at it, tore it to pieces and dumped it into a drain on the way home. Somehow, by discarding the only piece of evidence for his crime, he felt an unfathomable redemption and sinless. The Dravida Kazhagam and the Hindi opposition brigade of Tamilnadu would have been proud.
But right then, there were different things in store for him.
Mrs. Sharma reeled off innuendo about Ravi’s lack of culture and threatened severe action if he did not come out with the truth and said she would ensure that he is dismissed from the school.
“I am not sure where you are coming from; and maybe it is OK doing such an abominable act there! But here you cannot do such things!”
Ravi kept quiet and stared at Mrs. Sharma with incipient tears.
“If you keep quiet like this, like a rock, I am going to see to it that you don’t even get a TC!” Mrs. Sharma shouted between her tense teeth.
Ravi cried.
“Tell me, now! What did you do to that paper?”
“Eh? Where did you put the paper? Did you throw it away? Do you have it here?” Mrs. Sharma kept asking.
Ravi, by now, had started crying. He shook his head in denial.
“Then…where is it? You destroyed it?”
Ravi nodded, looking down in disgrace.
“Where?” Mrs. Sharma asked, not quite knowing how to continue her line of questioning now that she had forced a confession.
Ravi looked at her with tearful eyes. In the corner of his eyes he could see the class staring at him with despondence and Sunil shaking his head in disbelief.
“At your home?”
“No, Ma’am!”
“Then…in the road?”
“Yes. I am sorry, Ma’am.”
Mrs. Sharma seemed to soften a bit after that. Ravi repeated his apology to her and Mrs. Sharma looked at him with a certain empathy, he thought. I will see what I can do, she said when she left the class.
Mrs. Joseph interrupted Mrs. Chari’s Physics class, called Ravi out and walked briskly towards the Principal’s office. The class was abuzz with expectation of gossip from a deed, which they felt would beget the severest of punishments – dismissal from the school.
She shook her head in hopelessness and told her favorite dialog which she would repeat to Ravi several times over the year.
“This is not expected of you!” Ravi did not comprehend how “this” was not expected of him even after he had reached the nadir by the end of the academic year. It was expected of an errant student that he is caught and reprimanded several times a week, right?
Mrs. Joseph asked Ravi about why he did not take permission for leaving in the afternoon the previous day. Oh! This was not about the Hindi test? He spun a yarn around the severe stomachache and showed testimony of it in the leave letter that he had procured from his sister by emotionally blackmailing her.
Mrs. Joseph was not convinced.
“No, no, Ravi! That cannot be done! One cannot just walk out of the school at their will! Proper permission must be taken!”
“I am sorry, Ma’am! I didn’t know the rules! In my previous school this was Ok! I will not do this again, Ma’am!”
Mrs. Joseph did not find any use dwelling on that topic.
“What about your Hindi Test, Ravi?” Ms. Joseph queried knowingly.
“Ma’am…”
“The paper was not submitted after the test, I heard? In your previous school this was OK as well?” she smiled sardonically.
Ravi did not find it fit to weave one deception after another, as the punishment was not going to be any less severe either way. He knew Mrs. Joseph would continue to question him till he told the truth and then she would do exactly what she had set out to.
“I am sorry, Ma’am! I was not prepared! It was only my third day at school!”
“I cannot believe such an act can be performed on somebody’s third day, Ravi!” Mrs. Joseph said in her affected soft voice.
The Principal was busy with some important guests. Ms. Joseph made Ravi wait outside and excused herself into the Principal’s cabin and talked about Ravi to him.
She came out to a group of inquisitive teachers who wanted to know what happened.
“This boy…just joined three days back! Threw off his Hindi unit test paper!”
“Oh!” Mrs. Tickoo laughed, nudging her colleague, exhorting her to join in the laughter. The colleague half-obliged with a minimal chuckle. More people from the staff room and the office room joined to watch the spectacle of a student being punished.
“Give me your Diary!” Ms. Joseph asked Ravi.
“Ma’am! I am sorry, Ma’am!” Ravi begged.
“So am I, Mr. Ravi! So am I! But I cannot do anything about this. This is serious. You should have thought twice before such a despicable act was done!”
Ravi handed the Diary not quite sure what she was asking that for. She found a place in the office room and wrote in beautiful handwriting
Dear Parent,
Your ward has been indefinitely suspended from school with immediate effect. It is expected that the parent would meet the Principal or the Head Mistress within the next day.
By Order
The Head Mistress
Ravi did not expect such severe punishment for what he thought was a trivial misconduct. He begged with Ms. Joseph to slim down the punishment to something that was more palatable to his Thanjavur sensibilities. Ms. Joseph was unrelenting.
“Can I attend class now, Ma’am?”
“I have written with immediate effect, Mr. Ravi”, Ravi noticed Ms. Joseph referring to him with a new appellation.
Ravi returned home, again to the surprise of Kala and her in-laws.
“What happened? Stomach ache again?” Kala joked.
Ravi sat down on the sofa somberly and held out the Diary to her sister.
“What happened?” Kala asked seriously this time.
She flipped the pages of the Diary and hit on the only inked page in it. She was flabbergasted.
“What is this? “Suspended”? What for?” Kala’s in-laws got the diary from her panicky hands and read it within themselves with a lot of enthusiasm.
Thankfully, the Head Mistress, in her indulgence to get her passive voice right, did not mention the reason for the suspension.
“What happened, Ravi? Why are you suspended?”
“For taking leave yesterday afternoon!”
“For half a day leave, they cannot suspend you? What happened, tell me?”
“I told you! I showed the leave letter, but she is not agreeable to it and asked me to go fetch the parent!”
“Are you sure? I mean, however strict the school…nobody will suspend somebody for just being absent for half a day!”
“Some public schools are like that” Kala’s in-laws’ son, Saketh, commented.
“Arre! Tum bhi Public School mein hai! Have they punished you like that?” The probing irritated Ravi. His suspension had now become National news, thanks to these Delhi folks who would definitely feel apt to fill this sensational scoop to their illustrious family of overachievers with footprint across the globe.
“Come, let’s go and meet the Head Mistress!” Kala started off.
“No! She will not see you today! She has asked you to come tomorrow!” Ravi protested as if he is a stickler to rules.
“What about tomorrow? Let’s go and meet today before it becomes serious?” Kala wore her slippers and headed out. Ravi followed her helplessly.
Kala could not believe that after having obtained admission in a prestigious school in Bangalore, her brother would be suspended on the third day.
“How can they question you for a half-a-day leave?”
“I know…” Ravi replied.
“Did you show them the leave letter?”, she asked again, suspicious.
“Yes, but she is not agreeable to it?”
“That is OK, but we will tell her we will not do it from next time. That’s all!” Kala said confidently.
“Also, Kala, there is one more thing!” Ravi said.
“What?” Kala asked in fear.
“See, there was a Hindi exam yesterday!”
“Yeah! I know,” she paused, “Oh! You failed in it? I asked you yesterday how you did it?”
“Wait, wait! I didn’t know what to write! So I did not submit the paper!” Ravi said casually with a nervous smile.
Kala stopped walking and starred agape at Ravi in petrifaction.
“What do you mean you ‘did not submit’ the paper?”
Ravi looked at her in shame.
“What is this da? Why did you do that?”
“What can I do? I didn’t know what to write! I didn’t even understand the topic!”
“You could have asked the teacher, right?”
“How can I ask the teacher? I was…I was…”
“Ashamed? Is this something to be ashamed of? If you had not been ashamed of asking her what it is, you need not be ashamed of this!” she beckoned at the School Diary.
”What will I tell the Principal? Already, he had said I am giving admission on a ‘provisional basis’ or something?”
Kala and Ravi entered into the school to peering eyes, as by now, most of the school had heard about the incident then. Mrs. Tickoo rushed out of the staff room to catch a glimpse of Kala and smiled. She called her other passive partner and insisted her not to miss on the fun.
Kala entered the Principal’s office. Ravi was made to stand outside. She was already in tears when she entered the Principal’s office.
“Ms. Kala! What happened? I never knew we would meet so soon and under such terrible circumstances!”
“Yes sir!” Kala replied managing a smile between her tears.
“I am not sure Ms. Kala. All my staff has insisted that Ravi should be dismissed from School!”
“Sir, please don’t do that sir! He is a young boy who has been through a lot in the past one year! He is from a very small town and didn’t know what he was doing!”
“Ms. Kala, there are people his age who are in a more pitiable state than him! I have NOT set out to do that kind of social service by running a school for ineligible pupils!”
“Sir, just excuse him this time, sir! I promise this will not happen again!”
“I told you Ms. Kala! Remember, he will not be able to manage Hindi here!”
“Sir, the problem was not Hindi this time. These are new environs. New times for him. Even I am not able to predict his behavior, Sir! He has always topped in School! Somehow, advising him on his studies has been the last thing on our minds as he never had to be urged to study! Now this is a surprise and a lesson to me…”
Mr. Radhakrishnan paused and looked out of the window in grave thought.
“What do I do with him Ms. Kala?”
“I understand you have a school to run sir! And one of very high reputation! But please consider this as an exception sir! He is from a small town. Half his problem seems to be only that. He is right now in a shell. He is afraid to communicate with people! He will definitely improve, sir! I have trust in him!”
“Ms. Kala, you are a very mature woman for your age! I am going to give him another chance just for you! It is up to you take that chance. Next time he does something, I will not ask him, I will ask you!”
Ms. Kala left the Principal, profusely thanking him for his generosity. She explained the problem to Ms. Joseph who was not as easy to convince. She lectured Kala on the School’s reputation and the standards they have strived to set and about Ravi setting a bad example. Mrs. Tickoo came out of the staff room to give her opinion on the matter and made Kala feel totally desolate.
Ravi was asked to go back to class. His classmates rushed around him wanting to know what had transpired. Ravi exaggerated the encounters peppering them with dramatic turns, enjoying the limelight of his classmates though he knew there was nothing to be proud of. He would never recover the rest of the year and would be the laughing stock of his class. Mrs. Sharma never quite excused him for what he did and made veiled references to “hidden papers” to laughter from the class, which Ravi swallowed with resignation. He never passed in Hindi even once the entire academic year, in spite of earnestly trying hard to achieve that.
…
A month after the incident, as Ravi was walking alone with Sunil, who had taken a liking for Ravi, he swallowed his pride and asked Sunil what the heck “Bus Durghatna” meant.
“Bugger! You didn’t know it all this time?” Sunil laughed with gentle derision.
“It means ‘Bus accident’! But again I had written on ‘Adbhud Dhrushya’!” Sunil noted.
“Me too…er…”, Ravi said not ignoring the funny way Sunil pronounced the topic, “what did you write?”
“You mean for ‘Adbhud Dhrushya’? I wrote about a great vacation that I had in Kerala last year and the excellent scenery there!”
“But which ‘Rishi’ did you write about?” Ravi asked perplexed.
“What ‘Rishi’? What bugger? Gone nuts or something?” Sunil laughed. Ravi joined him, puzzled for a moment. So this topic was not on a ‘Rishi’? It was all the time about a ‘Dhrushya’?
Ravi laughed out loud.
“What happened?” Sunil asked.
“Nothing…!” Ravi laughed again.
“Hey! Are you alright?” Sunil asked him.
“Yeah! Now I am!” Ravi replied cryptically.
He thought what it would have been to hand in a paper with a serious essay on Viswamitra. Earlier, after the incident, Ravi had wondered – and regretted – about the stupid urge that had actuated him to perform a despicable act as hiding a test paper and how he had fallen to such depths of behavior. But now he felt content not having submitted his answer sheet with his account of his “favorite Rishi”. Radhakrishnan would have almost certainly dismissed him!
The next year, when he enrolled into a school in Madras, he chose his second language first – Tamil – and heaved a sigh of relief! Two other people possibly did along with him. Kala and Radhakrishnan.
The Principal’s office was right next to the entrance and Mr. Radhakrishnan was conversing with a deferential parent inside his cabin. A score of desperate parents unabashedly starred through the window trying to catch a glimpse of the celebrity principal.
“I heard he is very strict even with the parents!” a parent told her spouse in Tamil.
Ravi’s sister, Kala, glanced at him and parted with a nervous smile. Ravi reciprocated.
The security guard, in a ragamuffin uniform and a Hawaii slipper, rushed towards the crowd thronging the principal’s window and ordered it to clear the area, raising his home-made lathi, as if it were a crowd in a cinema theater. He closed the window, murmuring unpleasant epithets, and rushed to bolt the window from inside.
“Even the watchman is strict with the parents!” Ravi whispered to Kala. Kala gave a severe gawk at Ravi meaning to shut him up and then managed a surreptitious smile.
At around 9:50 am, they walked towards the Principal’s cabin for their ten O’ clock appointment.
“Don’t worry about it, Ravi! We will talk to him and see what he has to say! You have performed well in the previous year. The only thing is this is a CBSE school and there would be Hindi. You think you will cope up?” his sister asked him apprehensively.
“Yea, yea! That wouldn’t be a problem!” Ravi replied with an air of overconfidence.
Ravi had studied the last three years in Thanjavur and methodically topped his class of sixty, in St. Mark’s Higher Secondary School. It didn’t take much to do that because most of them were in the school because they were sportsmen or Catholics – or both. The few others from rich homes were there to witness the entertainment of the physical assailment that the students suffered in the hands of Arokyaswamy – the History teacher cum Catholic propagandist - who lifted people off their necks for mild transgressions and Nagaraj who realized vicarious pleasure caning students with freshly-cut bamboo sticks, which he made Dorairaj bring from his estate. The students nicknamed him Bambooraj.
Hardly thirty percent of the class passed all the subjects and that would mean a further bashing to the rest seventy percent from the principal – Father Susai – when the report cards were distributed every month.
“Those were the days!” Ravi thought deliberately not remembering the one occasion when Nagaraj caned him for not answering a question in elementary geometry.
Thanjavur was a stagnant little town with people who loved to spend the rest of their lives sitting in their garrulous “thinnais” discussing neighborhood politics. Ravi’s father was frequently transferred to various shantytowns in South India and Thanjavur was still better as it had a few renowned schools and a pedigree of producing educated people.
Ravi had spent the last seven years of his life bouncing off mediocre schools in Sri Vaigundam, Tirunelveli, Chennai and Thanjavur, but faring very well in spite of the frequent shifts. But Bangalore seemed an entirely different terrain.
Mr. Radhakrishnan called in Ravi and his sister after a half-hour delay. The other parents, waiting for their turn, looked furtively with jealousy as Ravi and Kala entered the Principal’s office. Mr. Radhakrishnan seated in a corner of his capacious office, which obviously had expansion plans, beckoned them to sit in chairs opposite him without looking up and studied Ravi’s report card from the previous year pokerfaced.
“Thanjavur!” he exclaimed with apparent sarcasm and glanced at Ravi and then at Kala.
“Your percentages are good, Mr. Ravikumar! But…” he paused.
Ravi and Kala looked at him expectantly. Radhakrishnan took a charitable pause and starred into the distance through the window, which revealed the scenic ambience on the rear side of the school.
“But…you don’t seem to have had Hindi as a language!” he said.
“Yes, sir!” Ravi said, almost beaming.
“OK…so…” he turned to Kala, “…how is your brother going to cope with Hindi as a second language?”
“Sir! He has learnt Hindi before and I know Hindi and I can teach him, sir!”
Mr. Radhakrishnan laughed.
“Miss Kala, don’t mean to discourage you! But you just cannot teach somebody a language! That too, Hindi as a second language at ninth standard!”
“He has also done ‘Prathmic’ and ‘Rashtrabhasha’ sir!”
“What are those?”
“Sir, those are the Hindi courses conducted by Dakshin Bharat…!” Kala rummaged around in her head searching for the name of the organization.
“Dakshin Bharat Hindi Prachar Sabha, sir!” Ravi completed.
The principal glanced at Ravi with his half-open, wary eyes and spurted out, what he would later understand, one of his rare chortles.
“No, no! Miss Kala!” he said between his sniggers, “I cannot accept some courses conducted by a Sabha and all that!”
“It is not a Sabha, sir! It…!”
“Miss Kala, did you try in one of the state board schools here?” Mr. Radhakrishnan asked gravely, to the siblings’ surprise.
“Sir…I wanted to let my brother have the best school! And I think he will perform well if given the chance, sir! He is a bright boy! He just needs the opportunity!”
The Principal listened to Kala and looked at the distance in grave introspection.
By now Kala and Ravi were used to these lingering pauses and they got into their routine of examining the furniture, the ceiling, and the view through the window and had another glance at the shields, cups and mementoes that the students had won for the school.
There were photographs of the principal with Pandit Nehru probably during his college days, with the Karnataka Governor during the opening of the current school complex and then with the students of “Classes of X” from the previous years, three large shields from the Rotary Club of Jai Nagar for a quiz competition the school had won – thrice in a row, and a life-size photograph of the Kanchi Sankaracharya.
“Wonder how good a student this guy was when he was in school!” Ravi thought. He felt a sudden inquisitiveness to look at the Principal’s report card.
Radhakrishnan broke the stillness by clearing his throat.
“Ok, Miss Kala, I wanted to ask you! Where is his father?”
“Sir, he is no more!” Ravi replied.
“Ah…!” Radhakrishnan expressed in anguish.
“ Sir, he expired last year!” Kala rushed to add with her eyes almost moist with tears.
“Come here, Ravi!” the Principal beckoned Ravi towards him.
“You are a young man! You should be brave!” Radhakrishnan said patting his back. Ravi, who was quite normal till then, somehow felt these words choking him. He shed tears profusely.
“I just said you should be brave and you have already started disobeying me like all my other students!” Radhakrishnan joked. Ravi smiled.
Another pause. “OK, Miss Kala! I am granting him admission now!”
“Thank you sir! Thank you…”
“Wait, wait…!” Radhakrishnan stopped with both hands outstretched.
“This is only a provisional admission! I am going to see how this young man here fairs…”, he gave another encouraging pat to Ravi, “Two months… three months… maybe!”
“OK Sir! Yes sir!” Kala said vigorously. Ravi shook his head in unison.
“…especially, how he fairs in Hindi… OK?”
“Yes sir!”
“I will fair really well, sir!” Ravi reiterated with earnestness.
“OK, Miss Kala! Pay the fees! And admit him!”
…
Ten days later Ravi stepped into the school for his first day at Modern Senior Secondary School, two minutes to eight. He was turned back by the security guard - he remembered from his first trip, to come into the school through the “Students’ Gate”.
Ravi ran across to the other side of the school and tried opening the “Students’ Gate”. The gate wouldn’t budge. He tried shaking it open. The watchman came out from his den and asked Ravi to wait till the assembly was over.
When the gate opened, all the latecomers entered the sprawling campus. The headmistress, Ms. Joseph, was waiting for them, clad in an unexceptional sari teeming with sobriety – “due to her Pentecostal roots”, Mahesh a know-all briefed Ravi later – and clasped tightly around both her uptight shoulders.
“This is not expected of you! This is going to be taken seriously…” she looked around and spotted Ms. Jose the Physical Training teacher.
“Ah! Miss Jose! Let their names be noted down!” In later dates, Ravi would observe that the headmistress had a penchant for the passive voice. Nothing was “you do it”, “I will do it” for her. It would have to be “that would be done” and “it has to be done”.
It was not a great beginning for Ravi. Ms. Jose, with her inimitable Malayalam accent, chastised the students for their lethargy, using quotable quotes, fit enough to find a place in the comical school moments of any school.
“Why didn’t you polish your leg?” she asked once.
“Childraen! Domorrow, ve hawe adheletic prectize!” she would instruct to the giggling students.
By the time, Ravi entered into his class, it was the second period.
Mrs. Sharma, the Hindi teacher, waved at him, asking him to approach her.
“You are a new student?” she asked in her Delhi accent.
“Yes, Miss!” Ravi replied nervously. There was a mild laughter. Ravi learned later that it was because the students were used to referring to their teachers as Ma’am rather than ‘Miss’.
“OK. Go be seated”, Mrs. Sharma said.
Ravi browsed around the class for an appropriate seat. There were none in the last few rows, which he preferred. The second bench had a seat where he seated himself next to a guy named Sunil, whom he would learn later had topped the class since his kindergarten years.
Sunil was immediately inquisitive to find out the whereabouts of Ravi.
Mrs. Sharma wasn’t so interested and intervened.
‘Na, na! Abhi Nahin! Baad mein kar lena!” The class giggled in approval. Ravi smiled as well. See, Hindi is not tough at all, he thought.
That was about the only thing he understood for the next fifty minutes when Ms. Sharma dwelt in detail on the “kehne ka taatparya” of “Kabir ke dohe”.
Ravi was relieved when the class ended but only to be subject to the abrasive teaching style of Ida Rajkumar, who taught History and English. Ida made the environment in the class gloomy and the subjects she taught gloomier and targeted everybody in the class for punishment and reproof. Ravi would come to hate Ida and her him, so much that when he left Bangalore a year later, Ravi cited Ida as a major reason for it.
By the afternoon Ravi was doing admirably well acclimating to the new environs. He liked his classmates in cosmopolitan Bangalore who had no qualms walking up to him and introducing themselves, which would have never happened in Thanjavur for sure and probably not in Chennai either.
As if intuiting that Ravi is getting too comfortable for his first day, the Physics teacher absented herself and Mrs. Sharma sprinted into the class, as a substitute, in glee of having acquired an extra period to teach Kabir’s Khadi boli. Ravi was distraught by the end of the class and had to leave school in a somber mood.
“What Hindi is this? So different from the one spoken in movies?” Ravi thought.
“Jaan se maar daloonga”, “Khoon pee jaaonga”, and “Mujhko tumse pyaar hai”, that he was used to in Hindi movies or the “Mej par kalam hai” and “Kowa kaala hai” from the Prathmic classes, never figured in Mrs. Sharma interpretations of Hindi poetry.
He was perplexed that he was not even able to make out the context of what the Mrs. Sharma was uttering in fifty minutes. What is it that Kabir had written about, Ravi thought? Were his couplets about life, God, morality, science, religion? How could he write a couple of lines which required so much explanation deliberately forgetting Thiruvalluvar’s 1310 couplets which probably is the subject of the most treatises and analyses in Tamil?
Ravi reached home and hurled his new military bag into a corner.
“What happened? How was Hindi?” Kala asked probably sensing his anxiety.
“What ‘Hindi’?” Ravi asked in exasperation as if that was the last thing on his mind.
“How is the standard of the school?”
“OK!” Ravi replied avoiding Kala’s eyes.
“How is the standard of Hindi? You will manage?”
“How many times you will ask me? I already told you!” Ravi said in anger.
“What did they teach you?”
Ravi gnashed his teeth. He just couldn’t take his sister questioning the worst time of his first day. Ravi decided to ignore her sister’s question.
“What? I am asking you something. How is the standard?”
“I TOLD YOU” Ravi shouted trembling with anger.
The next day was a bigger torture for Ravi as there were two consecutive Hindi periods. Mrs. Sharma, loved Khadi Boli and was in no mood to move on to other dialects, it seemed. The students seemed to enjoy Kabir’s metaphysical musings and had no objection attending Mrs. Sharma’s class for two hours.
At the end of the period, Mrs. Sharma spoke in English after her first words to Ravi the previous day.
“Day after tomorrow, we have the first unit test on ‘Vyakaran’!” People reacted predictably twisting their faces in despondence.
“OK! These guys are normal…sometimes!” Ravi thought.
“I understand, I understand! But I am giving you a concession!” she said
All the students looked at her in anticipation.
“Students who have joined two days back need not write the exam… for the rest of the year!” Ravi expected her to say.
“We will have only essay writing for this unit test!”
The class yowled in jubilation.
“Ssshhh! Principal is expected on rounds!” Mrs. Sharma whispered.
Sunil was extremely excited though he could have taken the “Vyakaran” exam for the whole year right that instant and scored ninety percent. Ravi tried to act excited as well and smiled at Sunil and Mahesh who was seated to his left.
How could essay writing in Hindi excite so many people, he thought!
“You have to write only one of the two topics – ‘Bus Durghatna’ or ‘Ek Adbhud Rishi”. Mrs. Sharma, leveraging on the excitement of the class, also gave the course for the second unit test. Ravi understood not a word of it and scribbled some baloney into his notebook. Sunil glanced at Ravi’s notebook; Ravi hid it casually by holding up the right side of the notebook and closed it down after a few seconds.
Ravi didn’t understand what ‘Bus Durghatna’ meant. So he thought he would take the other topic. Writing about an exceptional Rishi shouldn’t be that hard, after all. Maybe not. In his insipid Hindi classes of yesteryears, nobody had asked him to right about a Rishi. In fact, even his Tamil lessons never had him writing essays on ‘Agasthiyar’ and ‘Veerama muni’. These North Indian guys surely teach language differently.
He remembered his favorite Rishis. He didn’t have one. He remembered a movie called “Brahmarishi Viswamitrar” which had Shivaji Ganesan starring as the Brahmarishi. Shivaji’s waning popularity and his failing health and interest in cinema made for one of his worst cinema. But now, Ravi remembered some of the scenes from the movie and tried to transport his thoughts to an essay in Hindi. It was unbelievably difficult. He remembered the structure of some of the essays he had written in Hindi. ‘Mera Priya Neta’, ‘Mera Priya Shehar’, ‘Mere Pitaji’. He would normally begin the essays by mentioning dates, places and persons, which he would list out without any grammar. But now he wouldn’t be able to do that for ‘Viswamitra’!
Ravi remembered his life in Thanjavur and how tranquil and predictable it was. He topped his class without much ado and enjoyed his time in school with his friends KK and Sivaraman. His father’s untimely demise had uprooted his family and scattered them into different towns in South India. His younger sister was in his uncle’s house in Erode, he was now in Bangalore with his elder sister, Kala, and his mother in Chennai with her sister.
When he was in Thanjavur he had always wanted to leave the place, as the stagnant little town had nothing to offer him, he felt. Now, barely a couple weeks in Bangalore and he was already nostalgic about Arogyasamy’s History class ignoring the physical retribution that students had to endure and all the missionary talk that he would frequently engage in, denigrating Hindu Gods. At least, he wouldn’t have to learn this appalling language of Kabir’s dohas and Surdas’ kavitas and Mrs. Sharma’s lectures.
Ravi felt tears in his eyes. He drank a glass of water and looked out through the living room window at the ruthless Bangalore night. There was nobody walking on the streets and the posh houses in the distance seem set for a comfortable night’s sleep.
Two days later, when he got up, he wished fervently that he had a high fever. He touched himself with the back of his palms. His body was cold. He tried to titillate his other body parts to make them succumb to some ailment or the other. He wished he would fall down in the bathroom and get his leg fractured or cut his right hand so that he would not be able to write anything for the next one month.
When he finally made it to school not able to find an adequate excuse, he wished Mrs. Sharma would absent herself due to a fractured leg or a cut right hand. But after offering mild hope, she arrived half an hour late and in her usual style rushed into the class with her bob-cut hair swinging and surplus makeup struggling to hold to her face.
Ravi wrote about two lines in the next one hour of the unit test. Sunil took permission twice to tear off more papers from his rough notebook as he filled page after page about his “Adbhud Rishi”. Twice, he glanced at Ravi curious to find out why the pen was not progressing beyond the first few lines. Ravi closed it with another book and scribbled some more gibberish.
When the bell struck, there were students who were fervently trying to fill off a few more last lines on their favorite Rishi or their favorite bus. “Losers”, said Ravi to himself. Mrs. Sharma called out to the students to return the papers. After five more minutes, she snatched the papers from Sunil, mock-scolding him for writing so much.
Sunil had filled out five additional sheets. He was a Malayalee. Ravi’s Grandfather had once said “All Malayalees are communists! Don’t trust them!” When exactly did Malayalees become exponents in Hindi and Rishis, Ravi thought?
When Mrs. Sharma walked out of the class, profusely apologizing to Mrs. Chari for usurping some of her fifty minutes’ time, she did not notice that she had one paper less. Ravi felt sick in his stomach. He wanted to run away to Chennai. He shammed a stomachache to his classmates and left for the rest of the day.
Kala was surprised to see Ravi return so early from School. She inquired about the Hindi Exam, to which Ravi responded evasively. Kala did not press for an answer as she had her in-laws visiting from Delhi and didn’t want to have a showdown in front of them.
Ravi was tense about the outcome of his misdemeanor but did not care much for it. What graver physical abuse could Mrs. Sharma inflict on him compared to Nagaraj’s bamboo stick or Arogyasamy’s neck twirling, he thought.
The next day, when he reached school, the normally friendly guys were very uncomfortable around him. Sunil asked him about the “missing Hindi paper” and told him that Mrs. Sharma was fuming in the class the previous day. Ravi swore casually that he had already handed in the paper and even tried to haul Sunil to his side by trying to brainwash him to accept that he had seen Ravi hand in the paper to Mrs. Sharma. “I am not sure!” Sunil said.
When Mrs. Sharma came into the class on the third period, she was in a very foul mood and it didn’t take more than a few seconds to understand that it was because of Ravi.
“Where is your test paper?” she asked indignantly even as she entered the class.
Ravi tried to let out an expression of surprise, “I gave it to you, Ma’am!”
“Shut up!” Mrs. Sharma said trembling, “I gave it to you” she parroted Ravi’s words in contempt.
“This has never happened in my class! What will I tell the people?”
“Ma’am… but I gave it to you, Ma’am!”
“Come here! Come here!” Mrs. Sharma called out. She raised her hand to hit him. Ravi closed his eyes.
When Ravi was returning home the previous day claiming a stomachache, he took the single sheet of paper which he had crumpled into his pocket where he had scribbled a few words on Viswamitra before he suffered from “writer’s block”, had one glance at it, tore it to pieces and dumped it into a drain on the way home. Somehow, by discarding the only piece of evidence for his crime, he felt an unfathomable redemption and sinless. The Dravida Kazhagam and the Hindi opposition brigade of Tamilnadu would have been proud.
But right then, there were different things in store for him.
Mrs. Sharma reeled off innuendo about Ravi’s lack of culture and threatened severe action if he did not come out with the truth and said she would ensure that he is dismissed from the school.
“I am not sure where you are coming from; and maybe it is OK doing such an abominable act there! But here you cannot do such things!”
Ravi kept quiet and stared at Mrs. Sharma with incipient tears.
“If you keep quiet like this, like a rock, I am going to see to it that you don’t even get a TC!” Mrs. Sharma shouted between her tense teeth.
Ravi cried.
“Tell me, now! What did you do to that paper?”
“Eh? Where did you put the paper? Did you throw it away? Do you have it here?” Mrs. Sharma kept asking.
Ravi, by now, had started crying. He shook his head in denial.
“Then…where is it? You destroyed it?”
Ravi nodded, looking down in disgrace.
“Where?” Mrs. Sharma asked, not quite knowing how to continue her line of questioning now that she had forced a confession.
Ravi looked at her with tearful eyes. In the corner of his eyes he could see the class staring at him with despondence and Sunil shaking his head in disbelief.
“At your home?”
“No, Ma’am!”
“Then…in the road?”
“Yes. I am sorry, Ma’am.”
Mrs. Sharma seemed to soften a bit after that. Ravi repeated his apology to her and Mrs. Sharma looked at him with a certain empathy, he thought. I will see what I can do, she said when she left the class.
Mrs. Joseph interrupted Mrs. Chari’s Physics class, called Ravi out and walked briskly towards the Principal’s office. The class was abuzz with expectation of gossip from a deed, which they felt would beget the severest of punishments – dismissal from the school.
She shook her head in hopelessness and told her favorite dialog which she would repeat to Ravi several times over the year.
“This is not expected of you!” Ravi did not comprehend how “this” was not expected of him even after he had reached the nadir by the end of the academic year. It was expected of an errant student that he is caught and reprimanded several times a week, right?
Mrs. Joseph asked Ravi about why he did not take permission for leaving in the afternoon the previous day. Oh! This was not about the Hindi test? He spun a yarn around the severe stomachache and showed testimony of it in the leave letter that he had procured from his sister by emotionally blackmailing her.
Mrs. Joseph was not convinced.
“No, no, Ravi! That cannot be done! One cannot just walk out of the school at their will! Proper permission must be taken!”
“I am sorry, Ma’am! I didn’t know the rules! In my previous school this was Ok! I will not do this again, Ma’am!”
Mrs. Joseph did not find any use dwelling on that topic.
“What about your Hindi Test, Ravi?” Ms. Joseph queried knowingly.
“Ma’am…”
“The paper was not submitted after the test, I heard? In your previous school this was OK as well?” she smiled sardonically.
Ravi did not find it fit to weave one deception after another, as the punishment was not going to be any less severe either way. He knew Mrs. Joseph would continue to question him till he told the truth and then she would do exactly what she had set out to.
“I am sorry, Ma’am! I was not prepared! It was only my third day at school!”
“I cannot believe such an act can be performed on somebody’s third day, Ravi!” Mrs. Joseph said in her affected soft voice.
The Principal was busy with some important guests. Ms. Joseph made Ravi wait outside and excused herself into the Principal’s cabin and talked about Ravi to him.
She came out to a group of inquisitive teachers who wanted to know what happened.
“This boy…just joined three days back! Threw off his Hindi unit test paper!”
“Oh!” Mrs. Tickoo laughed, nudging her colleague, exhorting her to join in the laughter. The colleague half-obliged with a minimal chuckle. More people from the staff room and the office room joined to watch the spectacle of a student being punished.
“Give me your Diary!” Ms. Joseph asked Ravi.
“Ma’am! I am sorry, Ma’am!” Ravi begged.
“So am I, Mr. Ravi! So am I! But I cannot do anything about this. This is serious. You should have thought twice before such a despicable act was done!”
Ravi handed the Diary not quite sure what she was asking that for. She found a place in the office room and wrote in beautiful handwriting
Dear Parent,
Your ward has been indefinitely suspended from school with immediate effect. It is expected that the parent would meet the Principal or the Head Mistress within the next day.
By Order
The Head Mistress
Ravi did not expect such severe punishment for what he thought was a trivial misconduct. He begged with Ms. Joseph to slim down the punishment to something that was more palatable to his Thanjavur sensibilities. Ms. Joseph was unrelenting.
“Can I attend class now, Ma’am?”
“I have written with immediate effect, Mr. Ravi”, Ravi noticed Ms. Joseph referring to him with a new appellation.
Ravi returned home, again to the surprise of Kala and her in-laws.
“What happened? Stomach ache again?” Kala joked.
Ravi sat down on the sofa somberly and held out the Diary to her sister.
“What happened?” Kala asked seriously this time.
She flipped the pages of the Diary and hit on the only inked page in it. She was flabbergasted.
“What is this? “Suspended”? What for?” Kala’s in-laws got the diary from her panicky hands and read it within themselves with a lot of enthusiasm.
Thankfully, the Head Mistress, in her indulgence to get her passive voice right, did not mention the reason for the suspension.
“What happened, Ravi? Why are you suspended?”
“For taking leave yesterday afternoon!”
“For half a day leave, they cannot suspend you? What happened, tell me?”
“I told you! I showed the leave letter, but she is not agreeable to it and asked me to go fetch the parent!”
“Are you sure? I mean, however strict the school…nobody will suspend somebody for just being absent for half a day!”
“Some public schools are like that” Kala’s in-laws’ son, Saketh, commented.
“Arre! Tum bhi Public School mein hai! Have they punished you like that?” The probing irritated Ravi. His suspension had now become National news, thanks to these Delhi folks who would definitely feel apt to fill this sensational scoop to their illustrious family of overachievers with footprint across the globe.
“Come, let’s go and meet the Head Mistress!” Kala started off.
“No! She will not see you today! She has asked you to come tomorrow!” Ravi protested as if he is a stickler to rules.
“What about tomorrow? Let’s go and meet today before it becomes serious?” Kala wore her slippers and headed out. Ravi followed her helplessly.
Kala could not believe that after having obtained admission in a prestigious school in Bangalore, her brother would be suspended on the third day.
“How can they question you for a half-a-day leave?”
“I know…” Ravi replied.
“Did you show them the leave letter?”, she asked again, suspicious.
“Yes, but she is not agreeable to it?”
“That is OK, but we will tell her we will not do it from next time. That’s all!” Kala said confidently.
“Also, Kala, there is one more thing!” Ravi said.
“What?” Kala asked in fear.
“See, there was a Hindi exam yesterday!”
“Yeah! I know,” she paused, “Oh! You failed in it? I asked you yesterday how you did it?”
“Wait, wait! I didn’t know what to write! So I did not submit the paper!” Ravi said casually with a nervous smile.
Kala stopped walking and starred agape at Ravi in petrifaction.
“What do you mean you ‘did not submit’ the paper?”
Ravi looked at her in shame.
“What is this da? Why did you do that?”
“What can I do? I didn’t know what to write! I didn’t even understand the topic!”
“You could have asked the teacher, right?”
“How can I ask the teacher? I was…I was…”
“Ashamed? Is this something to be ashamed of? If you had not been ashamed of asking her what it is, you need not be ashamed of this!” she beckoned at the School Diary.
”What will I tell the Principal? Already, he had said I am giving admission on a ‘provisional basis’ or something?”
Kala and Ravi entered into the school to peering eyes, as by now, most of the school had heard about the incident then. Mrs. Tickoo rushed out of the staff room to catch a glimpse of Kala and smiled. She called her other passive partner and insisted her not to miss on the fun.
Kala entered the Principal’s office. Ravi was made to stand outside. She was already in tears when she entered the Principal’s office.
“Ms. Kala! What happened? I never knew we would meet so soon and under such terrible circumstances!”
“Yes sir!” Kala replied managing a smile between her tears.
“I am not sure Ms. Kala. All my staff has insisted that Ravi should be dismissed from School!”
“Sir, please don’t do that sir! He is a young boy who has been through a lot in the past one year! He is from a very small town and didn’t know what he was doing!”
“Ms. Kala, there are people his age who are in a more pitiable state than him! I have NOT set out to do that kind of social service by running a school for ineligible pupils!”
“Sir, just excuse him this time, sir! I promise this will not happen again!”
“I told you Ms. Kala! Remember, he will not be able to manage Hindi here!”
“Sir, the problem was not Hindi this time. These are new environs. New times for him. Even I am not able to predict his behavior, Sir! He has always topped in School! Somehow, advising him on his studies has been the last thing on our minds as he never had to be urged to study! Now this is a surprise and a lesson to me…”
Mr. Radhakrishnan paused and looked out of the window in grave thought.
“What do I do with him Ms. Kala?”
“I understand you have a school to run sir! And one of very high reputation! But please consider this as an exception sir! He is from a small town. Half his problem seems to be only that. He is right now in a shell. He is afraid to communicate with people! He will definitely improve, sir! I have trust in him!”
“Ms. Kala, you are a very mature woman for your age! I am going to give him another chance just for you! It is up to you take that chance. Next time he does something, I will not ask him, I will ask you!”
Ms. Kala left the Principal, profusely thanking him for his generosity. She explained the problem to Ms. Joseph who was not as easy to convince. She lectured Kala on the School’s reputation and the standards they have strived to set and about Ravi setting a bad example. Mrs. Tickoo came out of the staff room to give her opinion on the matter and made Kala feel totally desolate.
Ravi was asked to go back to class. His classmates rushed around him wanting to know what had transpired. Ravi exaggerated the encounters peppering them with dramatic turns, enjoying the limelight of his classmates though he knew there was nothing to be proud of. He would never recover the rest of the year and would be the laughing stock of his class. Mrs. Sharma never quite excused him for what he did and made veiled references to “hidden papers” to laughter from the class, which Ravi swallowed with resignation. He never passed in Hindi even once the entire academic year, in spite of earnestly trying hard to achieve that.
…
A month after the incident, as Ravi was walking alone with Sunil, who had taken a liking for Ravi, he swallowed his pride and asked Sunil what the heck “Bus Durghatna” meant.
“Bugger! You didn’t know it all this time?” Sunil laughed with gentle derision.
“It means ‘Bus accident’! But again I had written on ‘Adbhud Dhrushya’!” Sunil noted.
“Me too…er…”, Ravi said not ignoring the funny way Sunil pronounced the topic, “what did you write?”
“You mean for ‘Adbhud Dhrushya’? I wrote about a great vacation that I had in Kerala last year and the excellent scenery there!”
“But which ‘Rishi’ did you write about?” Ravi asked perplexed.
“What ‘Rishi’? What bugger? Gone nuts or something?” Sunil laughed. Ravi joined him, puzzled for a moment. So this topic was not on a ‘Rishi’? It was all the time about a ‘Dhrushya’?
Ravi laughed out loud.
“What happened?” Sunil asked.
“Nothing…!” Ravi laughed again.
“Hey! Are you alright?” Sunil asked him.
“Yeah! Now I am!” Ravi replied cryptically.
He thought what it would have been to hand in a paper with a serious essay on Viswamitra. Earlier, after the incident, Ravi had wondered – and regretted – about the stupid urge that had actuated him to perform a despicable act as hiding a test paper and how he had fallen to such depths of behavior. But now he felt content not having submitted his answer sheet with his account of his “favorite Rishi”. Radhakrishnan would have almost certainly dismissed him!
The next year, when he enrolled into a school in Madras, he chose his second language first – Tamil – and heaved a sigh of relief! Two other people possibly did along with him. Kala and Radhakrishnan.
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