As always, the best part of the year in his life was the summer vacations. As a child, to be away from the hustle bustle of school, having to get up early, doing your homeworks, memorizing the lessons……..was the toughest and painstaking activity in his life. Anything which will keep him away from all these agonizing moments was a godsend and the summer vacations was just right for that and fast approaching..
The school was to close within a week. Normally he would have his holidays for atleast two months which would be spent in playing, playing and playing. Even food was not a priority. His exams were finished, and the results were to be declared before the vacation. He as ever, never cared for it, not because he was audacious, but he just never knew the importance of the exams, to him it was just another day but with slightly more reading at home and writing at school to be done. But one thing interesting happened in this year’s ritual of exams.
The first exam was always English and this was his favourite subject, the reason was the book had lots of stories which he loved to read. His teacher was a tall slim lady, with a very casual attitude which was less didactic and more friendly to the kids. But one thing with which she always used to make her presence felt was a wooden foot ruler, which she used to rotate as she walked. It was used not for drawing lines as she was only an English teacher, but she was innovative to find various other uses and one of them was to wrap the naughty kids on their knuckles, and every sensible child was afraid of that but not this kid. She used to teach the Christmas songs for the school carol with her wooden guitar and had a voice which was not very melodious but still nice to hear. She loved this boy for the mix of sharpness, and quick wit and at the same time his restlessness to get going, never minding the fact that teachers have to cater to the other kids too.
During the English exams, on the first day, in the morning , one of the questions asked them to quote a poetry from memory, but a child as he was, mistook it to be an oral session. He waited thinking that one of the teachers would come and ask him to recite and since nobody came to him to check his recitation, he folded his papers , submitted and coolly walked off, finishing everything but that question. And he went home, caring the least about what he had done, eager to have his lunch, and come back for the second paper in English which was a grammar session. His boots were always muddied however well it was polished, he just couldn’t help dirtying himself. His mother , a very tough lady, and who also looked tough, not in size but very expressive, for her the first thing was to check the question paper, before providing lunch. So much was her anxiety that she probably felt that she was examined and not the child. Maybe , because she used to be the catalyst to make this fellow sit and read, impatient as he was always. When she found that he had missed to quote from memory, she was aghast. The face, conveying the highest level of disappointment, and at the same time pitiful as she looked at the boy and asked “why did you not answer the quote from memory question?”
This frail 8 year old was emphatic in saying ‘No amma this is not to be written but just oral, maybe they will ask me in the afternoon, don’t worry’….. in his soft kiddish voice with innocence all over his face. After all he was a child, who didn’t understand why exams were even conducted, leave alone understanding what it meant to quote.
She asked “ Did Chandran paul answer it? What about Govindan? Did he write?
The kid said “I don’t know, I didn’t talk to them”
OK Just wait, I will go downstairs and check with Suganti” and so saying she went one floor below to the neighbour’s house.
The girl staying one floor below, Suganti was the kid’s class mate and she said
‘No auntie, we are supposed to write and I wrote it, I didn’t miss anything”.
This only added to the mother’s fury and disappointment. She also knew that her son had always performed better than this girl, and a kid doesn’t know if these checks are being done out of mistrust or anxiety. And sure enough he was confused, but that attitude of never to care, helped him.
She always used to mix the rice with curd for lunch and the small child would squat on the floor with his mother in the kitchen floor.. The red oxide coated floor, with pock marks here and there was rough but still the time with the mother when the whole atmosphere is silent, people either napping or at office, no vendors crying their throats out in the afternoon heat, it was just he and his mother. He would extend his hands and the mother would place rolls of the curdrice on his small palm and he would gulp it in no time. The best days of lunch were those when they had ‘sambar’ with drumsticks. She used to peel the drum sticks and mix the soft inner portion of the vegetable in his curd rice and he would love that
Today it was not just the food, but along came , words of reprimand , telling him to pay attention and bursts of questions “How can you be so inattentive? Should you not check with your teacher?” She never remembered that she was talking to a child, she was addressing her own concern, not understanding that, children are like that. Do we ever teach our children to pay attention to the beauties of life, the colors of dead leaves, the beauty of the setting sun, the twinkling of stars in a dark night the small things which make him a human, which teach him to be a human throughout his life not just physiologically, but psychologically as well, a complete human?
After lunch , the mother accompanied the child back to the school as it was within the quarters, a stone’s throw from the house. The corridor was crowded, kids moving here and there, so anxious, some of them reading , looking at those probably important things which they could forget, their faces so desperate as if their whole life depended on just one question or its answer, their small innocent minds, slowly getting to know the feel of corruption, competition , comparison, envy and jealousy as they begin to prepare their steps to enter the world which is filled with this filth , by and large.. And all parents teach the same thing – to compare yourself with a child in studies is not wrong, but a child doesn’t stop with that, he compares in every aspect. When that sense of comparison with another child or his living, affects or intrudes into the parents’ capability, that is taboo, which only adds to the confusion in the mind of that innocent child. To establish their attributes more strongly to prove to the society , that they are living upto the image which is acceptable to the society, and live that life of pseudo-security, and in a numb way pass it to the next generation.
And as she entered the building, the English teacher came out of the staff room. This child, completely indifferent, pitying his mother’s ignorance that it is not to be written but just an oral recitation was laughing to himself. Soon he was to realize that he was wrong. The English teacher came rushing out with an answer paper in her hand, and pulling the mother to one side, was murmuring something , in an extremely anxious tone. Her eyes wide open, her words spilling out faster than her mind could probably think, and the mother nodding her head, and adding something more….then they decided that the child could join the party. And here was this child, in his loose grey half pants and wrinkled white shirt, with just a pencil, rubber and pad, never reading or anxious, wondering at others. Calling him closer, the teacher gave a soft hit on his head with her knuckles. This came as a surprise to him. He starts thinking … “What do these people think? My mother asks me something, I answer her, she doesn’t understand the question, then she comes to school and talks to my teacher and after a while they call me just to give this knock? Why is this happening, of all people to me ?”
This is what happens when expectations run high. A small drop in performance, lets your spirit to such abysmal depths and you go down like a deflated balloon. Here it was the expectation and trust the teacher and the mother had in the child. The anxiety writ large on their faces when things didn’t happen their way. It seems, the English teacher who happened to be the supervisor in that hall where the kid wrote his exam in the morning, had been closely following him. It was a large room, the old fans with their whirring noise, small tables and chairs with their cute , yellow, light blue and green colors, as they wrote the exams. There was this lady attendant, a short dusky lady of about 5 feet, who moved around with a plastic tumbler of water if the kids or the teachers needed, and as she walked, her bare feet always scuffing the ground making that weird noise which left some of the kids with goosepimples on their skin.
As the kid was writing his answers, the teacher found that this was the only boy who would get a full hundred marks in a language exam. He was her favourite student. She was so thrilled that the first thing she did after the exam was to correct his sheet immediately. The teacher becomes a child for a moment here, her curiosity, gets the better of her, and this child begins to value the other child’s paper. Lo and behold, she finds that the answer to the question to quote from memory is not there. She must have probably read the paper again and again, to confirm if she had not missed it, but sure it was never there. Now her mood swings wildly…..from curiosity , to happiness as she was correcting it and then to disappointment on not finding it and then anger, as her expectations are not met, the transition steps are not so clearly defined in the mood swings unless time is spent on introspection. She hurriedly finished her meals and as soon as she saw the child and his mother, she gave vent to her emotions. The mother quickly, agreeing with the teacher, added her words of anger and disappointment, and they both parted ways, and the kid was asked to go to the class for his afternoon exams. The mother went home, and she looked happy and contented, but what had happened to bring about that change? The child never knew, but he was to know the reason very soon. In the meantime, the school bell rings in the distance, cutting sharply into the quietness of the summer afternoon, sending all the kids scattering back to their class rooms, and an ominous silence prevails again in the building.
In the afternoon , as he was writing his grammar paper, the English teacher walks in, tall and her face sweating in that humid afternoon in the poorly ventilated class room. As she was approaching the kid, he just looked up. He was really frightened, the teacher with her strong steady steps thudding as she came closer, with that look which could probably have burnt him to ashes, and she sat beside the boy for a moment and said….
“Look, I am giving you the morning’s paper again. Answer the quote from memory question here. Do this first and you can answer the grammar paper after that. Do you understand?”
The child was totally confused, never had this ever happened in his life, but again that didn’t matter, for he had the whole English book by heart, so what was it to just write a small poetry of 8 lines. It must have been two or three minutes, after the teacher gave him the morning’s paper and went to the back of the hall to wait. In his unique tone tinged with urgency there was a voice in that silent room that afternoon “miss…miss….miss”as he called the teacher. She looked back . Thinking that he was going to ask for something else, with her morning’s anger and disappointment not yet gone, she came hurriedly to him and almost shouting …
“Now what?”
“I finished the quote from memory miss”, the soft innocence speaking out as the thin tender hands extend to give the paper back.
She read through the paper, and that look on the teacher’s face is one which nobody can forget. It was like a lotus bud which was rapidly blooming into full glory , as if ready to meet the sun, displaying all her colors and splendor in the otherwise dirty pond and finally beaming.
She read through the answer, not a punctuation was missed, not a hyphen. It was as if she was reading the text book. Her face beaming with joy and wonder at this kid, who could be the most notorious and yet produce an answer sheet in English which scored a full hundred. Every child has its toy to fascinate itself. At that moment her toy was the child’s English paper, fascinated and deeply impressed, she gave a slight peck on this boy’s cheek, who was nonplussed and never understood anything of what was happening and went back to her room leaving the boy to continue with his work. She died to the morning only in the afternoon and hence lived with her conflicts and desperation for a short time in that afternoon.
But to the kid, nothing mattered, it was just another question to be answered which he did with the same ease and nonchalance as he did with any other question or subject. He didn’t care about the grades and never compared himself with others. Till then, he was dying to everything, which sustained the innocence which was his essential nature and thus he really lived. But not for long , as that was the time when he learnt to compare, and learnt all the aspects of life which corrupted the young mind – to compare, to be ambitious and to fight, and in the process losing touch with that beautiful flower of innocence, which was never to come back again. Never to be a human with that humaneness but just another assemblage of organs with the spirit of life to fight and survive. Sure enough he grew up, with all those qualities taking strong root in him and growing to be a well manured tree, all those traits which he acquired, were well fertilized and maintained by the system of society and family and lost those which was never to be lost. He will grow up to be a successful man in his career, but is that success in life?
The school was to close within a week. Normally he would have his holidays for atleast two months which would be spent in playing, playing and playing. Even food was not a priority. His exams were finished, and the results were to be declared before the vacation. He as ever, never cared for it, not because he was audacious, but he just never knew the importance of the exams, to him it was just another day but with slightly more reading at home and writing at school to be done. But one thing interesting happened in this year’s ritual of exams.
The first exam was always English and this was his favourite subject, the reason was the book had lots of stories which he loved to read. His teacher was a tall slim lady, with a very casual attitude which was less didactic and more friendly to the kids. But one thing with which she always used to make her presence felt was a wooden foot ruler, which she used to rotate as she walked. It was used not for drawing lines as she was only an English teacher, but she was innovative to find various other uses and one of them was to wrap the naughty kids on their knuckles, and every sensible child was afraid of that but not this kid. She used to teach the Christmas songs for the school carol with her wooden guitar and had a voice which was not very melodious but still nice to hear. She loved this boy for the mix of sharpness, and quick wit and at the same time his restlessness to get going, never minding the fact that teachers have to cater to the other kids too.
During the English exams, on the first day, in the morning , one of the questions asked them to quote a poetry from memory, but a child as he was, mistook it to be an oral session. He waited thinking that one of the teachers would come and ask him to recite and since nobody came to him to check his recitation, he folded his papers , submitted and coolly walked off, finishing everything but that question. And he went home, caring the least about what he had done, eager to have his lunch, and come back for the second paper in English which was a grammar session. His boots were always muddied however well it was polished, he just couldn’t help dirtying himself. His mother , a very tough lady, and who also looked tough, not in size but very expressive, for her the first thing was to check the question paper, before providing lunch. So much was her anxiety that she probably felt that she was examined and not the child. Maybe , because she used to be the catalyst to make this fellow sit and read, impatient as he was always. When she found that he had missed to quote from memory, she was aghast. The face, conveying the highest level of disappointment, and at the same time pitiful as she looked at the boy and asked “why did you not answer the quote from memory question?”
This frail 8 year old was emphatic in saying ‘No amma this is not to be written but just oral, maybe they will ask me in the afternoon, don’t worry’….. in his soft kiddish voice with innocence all over his face. After all he was a child, who didn’t understand why exams were even conducted, leave alone understanding what it meant to quote.
She asked “ Did Chandran paul answer it? What about Govindan? Did he write?
The kid said “I don’t know, I didn’t talk to them”
OK Just wait, I will go downstairs and check with Suganti” and so saying she went one floor below to the neighbour’s house.
The girl staying one floor below, Suganti was the kid’s class mate and she said
‘No auntie, we are supposed to write and I wrote it, I didn’t miss anything”.
This only added to the mother’s fury and disappointment. She also knew that her son had always performed better than this girl, and a kid doesn’t know if these checks are being done out of mistrust or anxiety. And sure enough he was confused, but that attitude of never to care, helped him.
She always used to mix the rice with curd for lunch and the small child would squat on the floor with his mother in the kitchen floor.. The red oxide coated floor, with pock marks here and there was rough but still the time with the mother when the whole atmosphere is silent, people either napping or at office, no vendors crying their throats out in the afternoon heat, it was just he and his mother. He would extend his hands and the mother would place rolls of the curdrice on his small palm and he would gulp it in no time. The best days of lunch were those when they had ‘sambar’ with drumsticks. She used to peel the drum sticks and mix the soft inner portion of the vegetable in his curd rice and he would love that
Today it was not just the food, but along came , words of reprimand , telling him to pay attention and bursts of questions “How can you be so inattentive? Should you not check with your teacher?” She never remembered that she was talking to a child, she was addressing her own concern, not understanding that, children are like that. Do we ever teach our children to pay attention to the beauties of life, the colors of dead leaves, the beauty of the setting sun, the twinkling of stars in a dark night the small things which make him a human, which teach him to be a human throughout his life not just physiologically, but psychologically as well, a complete human?
After lunch , the mother accompanied the child back to the school as it was within the quarters, a stone’s throw from the house. The corridor was crowded, kids moving here and there, so anxious, some of them reading , looking at those probably important things which they could forget, their faces so desperate as if their whole life depended on just one question or its answer, their small innocent minds, slowly getting to know the feel of corruption, competition , comparison, envy and jealousy as they begin to prepare their steps to enter the world which is filled with this filth , by and large.. And all parents teach the same thing – to compare yourself with a child in studies is not wrong, but a child doesn’t stop with that, he compares in every aspect. When that sense of comparison with another child or his living, affects or intrudes into the parents’ capability, that is taboo, which only adds to the confusion in the mind of that innocent child. To establish their attributes more strongly to prove to the society , that they are living upto the image which is acceptable to the society, and live that life of pseudo-security, and in a numb way pass it to the next generation.
And as she entered the building, the English teacher came out of the staff room. This child, completely indifferent, pitying his mother’s ignorance that it is not to be written but just an oral recitation was laughing to himself. Soon he was to realize that he was wrong. The English teacher came rushing out with an answer paper in her hand, and pulling the mother to one side, was murmuring something , in an extremely anxious tone. Her eyes wide open, her words spilling out faster than her mind could probably think, and the mother nodding her head, and adding something more….then they decided that the child could join the party. And here was this child, in his loose grey half pants and wrinkled white shirt, with just a pencil, rubber and pad, never reading or anxious, wondering at others. Calling him closer, the teacher gave a soft hit on his head with her knuckles. This came as a surprise to him. He starts thinking … “What do these people think? My mother asks me something, I answer her, she doesn’t understand the question, then she comes to school and talks to my teacher and after a while they call me just to give this knock? Why is this happening, of all people to me ?”
This is what happens when expectations run high. A small drop in performance, lets your spirit to such abysmal depths and you go down like a deflated balloon. Here it was the expectation and trust the teacher and the mother had in the child. The anxiety writ large on their faces when things didn’t happen their way. It seems, the English teacher who happened to be the supervisor in that hall where the kid wrote his exam in the morning, had been closely following him. It was a large room, the old fans with their whirring noise, small tables and chairs with their cute , yellow, light blue and green colors, as they wrote the exams. There was this lady attendant, a short dusky lady of about 5 feet, who moved around with a plastic tumbler of water if the kids or the teachers needed, and as she walked, her bare feet always scuffing the ground making that weird noise which left some of the kids with goosepimples on their skin.
As the kid was writing his answers, the teacher found that this was the only boy who would get a full hundred marks in a language exam. He was her favourite student. She was so thrilled that the first thing she did after the exam was to correct his sheet immediately. The teacher becomes a child for a moment here, her curiosity, gets the better of her, and this child begins to value the other child’s paper. Lo and behold, she finds that the answer to the question to quote from memory is not there. She must have probably read the paper again and again, to confirm if she had not missed it, but sure it was never there. Now her mood swings wildly…..from curiosity , to happiness as she was correcting it and then to disappointment on not finding it and then anger, as her expectations are not met, the transition steps are not so clearly defined in the mood swings unless time is spent on introspection. She hurriedly finished her meals and as soon as she saw the child and his mother, she gave vent to her emotions. The mother quickly, agreeing with the teacher, added her words of anger and disappointment, and they both parted ways, and the kid was asked to go to the class for his afternoon exams. The mother went home, and she looked happy and contented, but what had happened to bring about that change? The child never knew, but he was to know the reason very soon. In the meantime, the school bell rings in the distance, cutting sharply into the quietness of the summer afternoon, sending all the kids scattering back to their class rooms, and an ominous silence prevails again in the building.
In the afternoon , as he was writing his grammar paper, the English teacher walks in, tall and her face sweating in that humid afternoon in the poorly ventilated class room. As she was approaching the kid, he just looked up. He was really frightened, the teacher with her strong steady steps thudding as she came closer, with that look which could probably have burnt him to ashes, and she sat beside the boy for a moment and said….
“Look, I am giving you the morning’s paper again. Answer the quote from memory question here. Do this first and you can answer the grammar paper after that. Do you understand?”
The child was totally confused, never had this ever happened in his life, but again that didn’t matter, for he had the whole English book by heart, so what was it to just write a small poetry of 8 lines. It must have been two or three minutes, after the teacher gave him the morning’s paper and went to the back of the hall to wait. In his unique tone tinged with urgency there was a voice in that silent room that afternoon “miss…miss….miss”as he called the teacher. She looked back . Thinking that he was going to ask for something else, with her morning’s anger and disappointment not yet gone, she came hurriedly to him and almost shouting …
“Now what?”
“I finished the quote from memory miss”, the soft innocence speaking out as the thin tender hands extend to give the paper back.
She read through the paper, and that look on the teacher’s face is one which nobody can forget. It was like a lotus bud which was rapidly blooming into full glory , as if ready to meet the sun, displaying all her colors and splendor in the otherwise dirty pond and finally beaming.
She read through the answer, not a punctuation was missed, not a hyphen. It was as if she was reading the text book. Her face beaming with joy and wonder at this kid, who could be the most notorious and yet produce an answer sheet in English which scored a full hundred. Every child has its toy to fascinate itself. At that moment her toy was the child’s English paper, fascinated and deeply impressed, she gave a slight peck on this boy’s cheek, who was nonplussed and never understood anything of what was happening and went back to her room leaving the boy to continue with his work. She died to the morning only in the afternoon and hence lived with her conflicts and desperation for a short time in that afternoon.
But to the kid, nothing mattered, it was just another question to be answered which he did with the same ease and nonchalance as he did with any other question or subject. He didn’t care about the grades and never compared himself with others. Till then, he was dying to everything, which sustained the innocence which was his essential nature and thus he really lived. But not for long , as that was the time when he learnt to compare, and learnt all the aspects of life which corrupted the young mind – to compare, to be ambitious and to fight, and in the process losing touch with that beautiful flower of innocence, which was never to come back again. Never to be a human with that humaneness but just another assemblage of organs with the spirit of life to fight and survive. Sure enough he grew up, with all those qualities taking strong root in him and growing to be a well manured tree, all those traits which he acquired, were well fertilized and maintained by the system of society and family and lost those which was never to be lost. He will grow up to be a successful man in his career, but is that success in life?
1 comment:
This is a good piece but somewhere not as impactful as some of your other works.
Would like to have your thoughts on "What is True Happiness - Is it living a life without worry or being satisfied with what u have or chasing ones dreams and achieving them or ... the list can go on ". A lot of times we get caught in the web of not being happy with what we do but still continue doing it out of necessity... & sometime not even knowing what we truly want. Would like to have ur views on this if possible.
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