This blog is primarily for my former students; for friends I have lost contact with; and for my readers. If any of my students ever wonder, What’s Prof Acharya, who taught us English Literature in Bombay years ago, doing now?Where’s he? Well, here I am; at Koteshwar, a small village in Udupi District, on the West Coast of India; I’m busy writing, both in English and in Kannada.
I didn’t write much during my long teaching career. A paragraph from my first novel, The Suragi Tree, perhaps explains why. (Please note, though, that the thoughts expressed here are of Sudhakar Rao, the protagonist of the novel, not mine; the novel is not autobiographical. But I must have, myself, felt like this, at least occasionally.)
…Some years earlier Satish had brought me a typewriter from America. He had met one of my former students who thought I was one of the few genuinely creative persons she had come across. “God, the way he could bring a poem to life in the class, and set our nerves tingling!” she had said. “But why doesn’t he write? Why is he wasting his life, spending all his creative energies in lecturing to insensitive students?” So Satish had bought that typewriter. “I want you to write, Mawa,” he said. “Why are you wasting your creativity?” “I’m not wasting it,” I said, “Nothing is wasted that is used. What’s wrong if one’s lectures are creative?” “But lectures are just air,” he said, “impermanent.” “So is music,” I said, “specially Indian music, which is not written down. Why did all those great singers of the past devote their lives to music when there were no facilities even to record what they sang?” Satish shook his head. “Are you telling me” he said, “that you have, in the classroom, the kind of artistic freedom a musician has? Can you sing your song without bothering about the need to prepare your students for the exam and so on?” “Everything has its limitations,” I had said then. “All freedom is circumscribed. And I have my own limitations too. The fact that I put my heart and soul into my lectures – and achieve creativity sometimes – does not necessarily mean that I can write. No, Satish, I have tried writing and have failed. By my own standards. And another thing. When I lecture I only waste my breath, which is expendable. Why should I waste precious paper by writing and publishing something worthless?”
But that’s only a part of the reason, or an excuse perhaps. The real reason, I guess, was laziness. But after I retired and left Bombay, I missed my students - the captive audience I could talk literature with all through the years. So writing became a necessity.
About the genesis of my first novel: When I was 42, and staying alone at Borivli in Bombay, I had a severe attack of chicken pox. As the fever rose, my head started buzzing with words and images I couldn’t make sense of; reality began to merge with dreams and hallucinations. It was an eerie experience, scary but fascinating.
I wanted to write about that experience but found I couldn’t turn it into a story. You can’t clap with one hand. The experience, I realized, needed something else to set it off.
I found that ‘something else’ some years later, when I went down to Koteshwar. One of my cousins there wanted a suragi tree in his compound cut, to build a house on the spot. But his workers, who believed that a Yakshi, a deity they worshipped, lived in the tree, wouldn’t cut it. So two of my cousins cut the tree themselves. It made news, because educated Indians - that too Brahmins - are not supposed to do any physical labour, like cutting down trees.
As chicken pox and small pox are associated in Indian folk-lore with certain female deities, like Yakshis, I felt I had found the incident that could ‘connect’ with my chicken pox experience and produce a symbolic story of crime and punishment, of sin and expiation. I decided to make my protagonist a person who used to spend hours in his childhood sitting under the suragi tree, dreaming, reading and writing stories. Someone who loved that tree. Years later, when he is an English teacher in Bombay, he comes home for his mother’s funeral, and is persuaded to help his brother to cut the tree. When he comes home after another fourteen years, he gets an attack of chicken pox in his brother’s house, built on the spot where the Suragi once stood. His nurse, a mysterious woman newly appointed by his brother, disappears after he is cured. And he is left with astrange feeling that she was perhaps the Yakshi.
What I planned to write was a light-hearted story with symbolic overtones, a story that hovers between fantasy and realism; like one of Forster’s stories.
But once I started writing I realized that the symbolism gave me a framework for a long novel that could explore the predicament of many Indians of my generation: our rootless-ness, partly brought about by the fast-changing world we grew up in, and partly through our own anxiety to off-load the burden of our inheritance. So my ‘short story’ grew into a novel - of more than two hundred thousand words.
WHAT IT IS ABOUT:
The novel works at many levels. At one level it tells the story of Sudhakar Rao, born in an orthodox Brahmin family in a remote hamlet in Karnataka; of his early childhood spent in a sprawling ancestral house; of the way he grew up, listening to and telling stories; of his difficult relationship with his parents; of his attachment to his uncle, a childless widower; of his troubled student days; of the years spent in Bombay studying and teaching English literature; of his loves and heartbreaks, and his growing sadness and feelings of alienation. It’s a long journey, with breaches that are never properly bridged, from his infancy in the late Thirties to 1995, when, at the age of 58, he sits down in his flat in the crowded suburb of Bombay, reviewing his life and trying to turn it into a novel.
The novel traces Sudhakar’s growth in a fast-changing fragmented world, and explores the many worlds he grew up in: the old world of large joint families living in isolated villages; the market-town world of Kantheshwar; the provincial town of Udupi where Sudhakar went to College; the cosmopolitan whirl of Bombay, exciting at first but soon growing bewildering and nightmarish. The novel also explores Sudhakar’s inner world, shaped by his readings and experiences.
The novel is also about Novels: about reading novels and writing them, and the relationship between the fictional world and ours. Sudhakar was an avid novel-reader in his youth, feeling more at home in the world of fiction than in the complex world of everyday life. When he starts reviewing his life, his purpose is to turn his life into a novel and be the reader of his own life - so that self-pity can change into compassion and remorse cast out. He is trying to gain control over the events of his life, though only in retrospect.
The novel plays with perspective, and its perception of reality keeps changing. Sudhakar can distance himself from his childhood experiences – even the more painful ones – and look at them with an amused, indulgent detachment. This gives the early scenes a pristine quality. But the Bombay scenes are different. As Sudhakar is sucked into the whirl of events and loses his moorings, his perception of reality gets blurred. ‘The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated’. There is irony in the way these scenes juxtapose the comic and tragic trials of Bombay life; it’s there even in the depiction of Sudhakar’s love. He hates Hindi films but falls in love with a girl who looks like a Bollywood star, and is dragged by her to fifty Hindi films. His suffering at the end of the affair is real, but the pathos has, inevitably, a Bollywoodian flavour. The irony reveals that it’s not always art that imitates life; art – especially escapist art - can at times entice life into imitating it.
The perception of reality changes again in the ‘expiation’ part of the novel, when Sudhakar goes to his village and has a near-fatal attack of chickenpox. During those long nights when the fever rises, and he swims and sinks in the dark waters of hallucinosis, Sudhakar has an eerie feeling that his nurse is perhaps the Yakshi of the suragi tree. Reality merges with the phantasmagoric here. The supernatural is kept subterranean, but only just.
After the fever there is another change. The fever burns away Sudhakar’s sense of guilt. Coincidences turn into correspondences and the world becomes coherent and meaningful again. The Hindu Literary Review is eloquent - a bit too poetic perhaps - about this change: “Though not rapturously happy he has achieved an inner poise, and has learnt at last, as all of us must learn, to move in measure like a dancer.”
A good novel must create a world – or worlds - its readers can enter and breathe in. The world of The Suragi Tree, I hope, is a convincing one with living characters. Shama Futehally, poet and novelist, describing her experience of entering the world of this novel, wrote, “people say the same thing happens when you read R.K.Narayan, but Narayan reduces everything to a toy-world. This world is life-size, and it is so very real…”
About my central symbol, suragi. When I started writing this novel I had not seen a suragi tree. I had only a vague memory of garlands of suragi flowers seen in my childhood and of their very feminine fragrance. The flowers don’t lose their fragrance when they dry up. The fragrance changes, mellows, and becomes more delicate. I came to know later that garlands of suragi flowers, even dried ones, were considered auspicious, and were used in marriages as garlands. I felt that I had received a symbol – from Spiritus Mundi, perhaps? – that was rich with suggestiveness. After shifting to Koteshwar, I started looking for the tree and found one. In mid-February, when I was writing the chapter ‘The Suragi Tree’, that tree started flowering. Clusters of tiny buds erupted all over the tree, glowing like red pearls. The way these buds appeared, not at the ends of twigs and stems like in other flowering trees, but all over the trunk and branches, shook me, because it strikingly resembled the eruption of chicken pox.
*
Here are some excerpts from the novel. First, from the opening chapters: Deivas and Devatas
I admit that the knowledge I flaunt is often shallow. I can hold forth, quite impressively, on a variety of subjects but there is no depth in my knowledge. Perhaps I am not really interested in many of the subjects I talk on. What interests me is the talk itself, the act of communication, the flow and clash of ideas.
So I found myself talking, one evening, to Mr. Fahme, an officer of the Iranian Consulate, on something I knew very little about - Hinduism as an evolved religion. That was way back in the early seventies when the Shah ruled over Iran, and hordes of Iranian students came to Bombay for higher studies, and spent their time chasing girls or playing soccer; and officials of the Iranian Consulate moved about in air-conditioned cars, and gave parties where good Scotch flowed like water.
The party was at the house of another officer of the Iranian Consulate. There were a dozen people around, including four Indians, three of us college teachers. The Iranians, apart from the two Vice Consuls and their wives, were all doing some study or research at the University - which perhaps explained the choice of the Indian guests. I was sitting with Mr. Fahme in a corner. People came and joined us, said a few words and then moved away. Ms Shums, a tall graceful woman with graying hair, who was trying to wheedle a Ph.D. in history from the University of Bombay after failing to do so in Bonn and Paris, joined us for a while...
Then the talk veered to monotheism and so on, and Ms Shums got up and joined another group. And I found myself talking to Mr. Fahme on the way Hinduism had grown and evolved over the milleniums, and its absorption of primitive Pantheism.
I told him about deities and spirits that lived in stones and trees, and were worshipped by the common people. Hinduism, when it started spreading, did not try to sweep aside these existing pantheistic beliefs and practices like Christianity did Centuries later. At the core of Hinduism, I told Fahme, was the conviction that there were more ways than one of worshipping God. Devotion of all kind was valuable and Nature worship could be a way of worshipping the God of Nature. So Hinduism accepted pantheism, with the proviso that the pantheistic deities were subservient to God.
“This pantheism,” I said, “meets and satisfies some of the deep-felt social and psychological needs of the people. The deivas act as links between man and nature. The villager who believes in them does not feel that he is all alone in an indifferent or hostile world. He is surrounded by spirits, and can turn to them for help or guidance.”
“You seem to have read and thought a lot on this subject,” said Mr. Fahme, and before I could protest, added, rather hesitantly: “But two questions, please: do you really believe in these - deivas? Do they really exist? And - doesn’t this belief in deivas come into conflict with the belief in One God?”
“The second question is easily answered,” I said. “No, it doesn’t. These deivas are subservient to God. If they have any power, it’s only because God has permitted them to have that power. Even the illiterate deiva worshippers are convinced of that. The first question is difficult to answer. You know, Mr. Fahme, some of these spirits are quite fascinating. There is a Suragi – a lush green flowering tree - behind our house in our village. People believe that there is a Yakshi – a dryad-like spirit – living in that tree. When I was a kid I used to go and sit under that tree and read for hours. And I had this funny feeling that there was some Presence in that tree – someone – or something – that liked my sitting there quietly and reading. As if the tree had a soul. But if someone had asked me then the question you asked, I would have said, what nonsense, I don't believe in any deivas – I was awfully anti-superstitious then. I am not so sure today. Belief is a funny thing. You think you believe in something, but suddenly you find that your belief has no strength. You think you don't believe, that it's all irrational, and then you find, in the deep recesses of your mind, seeds of that belief sown God knows when."
We had left the party, and I was in Mr. Fahme's car when I said this. He dropped me at my bus stop. As I got out of the car I said, "Do the deivas exist? I don't know. Perhaps I should say, yes, they exist, because people believe in them.”
Amma and mariamma
Good Scotch, they say, does not give you a hangover. Not true. I woke up the next morning with a splitting headache, which worsened as I thought of my previous evening's performance. What right had I to bore poor Mr. Fahme all through the evening? When the other guests were enjoying themselves with the usual light-hearted party banter, what stupidity made me go on and on, on a subject which was of no interest to those Iranians and of very little interest to myself? A real gasbag, that was what I was.
I wondered about that perversity, that quirk in my nature, which made me, so often, expose my ignorance and shallowness by talking on things I knew very little about. Hinduism and Pantheism! God, there were at least a dozen subjects I could have talked more intelligently on. And yet there I was, making a fool of myself...
I realize now that I did not understand the situation fully then. You don’t really understand your own mind. You might know, at best, what is on display but you have no clear idea of what you have stocked in its dark cellars, or carelessly dropped in its remote corners. Quite a bit of one’s knowledge comes incidentally, unsought, through random readings, by hearing what one did not listen to and seeing what one did not look for, by merely living one’s life with a mind open to impressions and experiences. When you talk about things you haven't thought much about, and feel an excitement disproportionate to your known interest in the subject, you are perhaps on a voyage of discovery: an exploration of the cob-webbed corners of your mind where these bits of knowledge lie, waiting to be picked up; an exploration of what you did not know you knew.
Some more snippets, from Sudhakar’s childhood:
Telling stories
Lakshmi, Savitri and Aditi started going to school when I was four. The school was a mile and a half away at a village called Kone. They went in the morning, came back for a hurried lunch at noon, and then went to school again, returning only late in the afternoon.
I was the only boy in that large house, and when my three cousins were away, the only child. Sita was just a baby, and though she could walk and even run about, with five women around she was always air borne. She was so light that people did not even notice they were carrying her. Gangamma, who made 108 pradakshinas of the inner temple every Tuesday to pray for the welfare of her husband whom she had left, once carried her all the way - more than two miles, surely - and then said, “God, she is so light, this child! She perches like a moth on your arm and you don’t even realize you have been carrying her.” Even when she was occasionally grounded, Sita would be in the kitchen holding on to mother’s sari, which she needed because she had a perpetually running nose; whereas I raided the kitchen only when I felt like eating those salty or sweet delicacies grandmother specialized in preparing and kept in soot-covered tins on a shelf.
I roamed that large sprawling house alone, often holding a stick aloft, muttering to myself. I was in a world of my own, a world of imagination which I could seal off, after entering, from inside. From within that glass-bubble of a world I could perceive what happened outside, but I would not let those perceptions penetrate the bubble and impinge on my private world of imagination. When Varijamma giggled and said, “Look at this boy, he’s going mad! Look at the way he holds that stick and talks to himself,” I heard it, but heard it as if her voice came from another world. I laughed to myself because what Varijamma in her ignorance called a stick was in fact a mighty sword with which I was going to cleave a huge rock blocking the entrance to a cave, in which a pretty princess was held captive. Then it became a magic wand I had procured by tricking two stupid demons, who were quarrelling over it and wanted me to mediate; I had asked them to give it to me and show me how it worked. I had used the stick against them then, by chanting the mantra they had foolishly taught me: Ya - ra - la - va - sa - ha - loo/ Beat the demons black and blue, and the stick had chased them out of sight and saved our village.
.....
My head was full of stories. Stories told by grandmother mingled with those I heard from my uncle, and with ghost stories Gangamma sometimes narrated. Mingled, mutated, and multiplied; and I had an insatiable urge to narrate them to people. I don’t know when I started telling stories. Soon after I learnt to speak, I guess. Varijamma still mimics how, as a child of two, I used to force people to listen to my stories: “Thum, thum,” I used to say, “Lithen thu my tholy”. When I went to see her last she could not recognize me for some time - she was past eighty, and her eyesight was weak - but when she finally did, her face creased with the broadest of smiles. Covering her mouth with the end of her sari, because she had lost most of her teeth and was sensitive about it - a gesture of virgin coyness which I found touching - she said, “Thum, thum, Babu, lithen thu my tholy.” “Ah, Varijamma,” I said, “You have lost your teeth and started lisping.” She laughed so heartily then that she forgot to cover her mouth. My heart warmed to this woman, for whom I had only contempt in my childhood. She was silly and hysterical; she was a gossip and was nosy. But she had a heart, and a memory where I still lived as a child.
.....
Even physically I was closer to my uncle in my childhood than to my parents. My father used to come back from Koteshwar late at night. After his supper he used to go and rest in the upstairs room on the other side of the outer courtyard, the airiest and quietest room in the house. My mother could join him only after ten, after finishing her chores in the kitchen, and by that time all the children would be asleep - I in uncle’s bed. To carry or drag me across that large outer courtyard and then up the steep staircase, simultaneously carrying a glass of milk for father, was beyond my mother’s strength. So I was allowed to sleep on in uncle’s bed, whereas my lighter and more docile sisters, when they arrived, were carried upstairs and slept with my parents.
Uncle used to sit cross-legged on the ground in front of our temple for about an hour every evening, reading the Scriptures and the Puranas. The ritual is called Parayana. When I was seven or eight months old and had just learnt to crawl, I used to crawl to him and scramble on to his lap when he was reading. That was where I used to fall asleep, to the rhythmic chanting of Sanskrit slokas. “You came to me like the Lord in His different avataras,” Uncle told me some years later, his eyes becoming misty. “Like Matsya, the fish, at first, swimming on the ground; then as Koorma, the slow moving tortoise; then you learnt to move fast on all fours, and came as Varaha, the wild boar. And I thought, Lord, your response to my Parayana - can it be so immediate? Am I blessed even as I am reading?”....
I felt both flattered and embarrassed by what Uncle said, and the way he said it. So to tease him I said, “What about Narasimha?” That made him smile, because Narasimha was his name. “Oh who can ever forget your Narasimha avatara?” he said.
He must be right, because those who heard me narrate the story of Prahlada and Narasimha to a large audience, including the Swami of our Matha, when I was just five, still remember it....
I was pretty good at dramatizing. I turned the story into a kind of one-man theatre and acted out the story. I became Prahlada, who pleaded with his father to worship Lord Vishnu and give up his evil ways; then I became his father, the Rakshasa king Hiranyakashyipu, who treated his son with cruelty. Then finally I became Narasimha, the angriest and most terrifying of God’s incarnations. The Swami, taken aback by the fury he saw, placed before me the plate of fruits - plantains and oranges - some devotee had brought for him. I tore into the fruits the way Narasimha tore into the entrails of the Rakshasa king. It was, they all agreed, a memorable performance.
I was carried away from there in triumph and grandmother, worried by the large number of envious and evil eyes I must have been the target of, placed a plate full of live coals in front of me and dropped some dried gum on to it. The pellets crackled and burnt, producing an enormous amount of pungent smoke, which made me cough and grandmother exclaim, “Good God! I have never seen so much of evil eyes before. May God protect this child!” She wanted to repeat the ritual but I ran away coughing.
That night I developed high fever. I was bed-ridden for three months, and was close to death several times. I vaguely remember waking up once and finding myself not on my uncle’s bed but in his lap, with my grandmother, mother and others sitting around crying, father walking up and down, and Uncle deep in prayer. Even my non-believing father had lost hope in the efficacy of his medicine and placed me in the protection of his brother’s love and prayer. They did not fail. I survived.
I fell ill near the end of May, and in June the schools reopened. I was to join school that year but by the time I recovered, towards the end of August, it was too late.
.....
During that long period of sickness I was indoors all the time. It was like I was asleep. The waking hours were like dreams. And then the fever left. I woke up one morning at dawn, feeling weak but light and fresh, after a good night's sleep. It had rained all through the night, and there is no sound more soothing and soporific than that of steady rain on a tiled roof. I woke to the sound of Gangamma churning butter in Chikkajjayya's kitchen, quietly singing to herself. She was too timid and self-conscious to sing well in front of others, but while churning butter she sang with feeling and without inhibitions, her voice rising and falling to the rhythm of churning. The song, an age-old one about Krishna's childhood - of Gopis, the milkmaids of Nanda Gokula, churning butter, and little Krishna, the divine child, angering and delighting them by stealing it - gushed like a spring, joyous and spontaneous:
In the morning, while the Gopis
Were busy churning butter,
Little Krishna in his cradle
Called out to his mother…
I listened, spellbound, for some time, to the sound of vigorous churning drowning the song, and then the song rising like newly churned butter over the gurgling buttermilk. Then I got up and slowly walked to the open door. Fascinated by the colourful scene the open doorway framed, I stepped out and sat on the verandah.
I had fallen ill in May when the earth was parched dry. Now, after two months of heavy rain, what I saw was a sea of green - fresh green grass everywhere and the dappled paddy fields, with different hues of green, rippling under the morning breeze. The rains had stopped, the eastern sky was clear except for fluffy gray-and-white clouds stacked on the horizon, and when the sun broke through them, the drenched grass glistened and the rain drops on the tiny leaves of the gooseberry tree turned to pearls; and little streams, produced by the night's heavy downpour, ran friskily over pebbles, bending and submerging the grass, their dimpled surface reflecting light and glittering like glass. Snatches of Gangamma's song came drifting from inside, and I felt that I heard it not just with my ears but my whole skin. I sat entranced, shivering in delight, goose pimples all over my body, till Varijamma came out and dragged me inside, saying, "Look at the child, he's shivering with cold, he'll catch the fever again."
.....
The year was not lost completely, however. Even Amma had to admit that. A few months after my recovery it was discovered that I could do something that Lakshmi, after a year and a half of schooling, could not, and Savitri and Aditi could do only falteringly: I could read.
I was sitting, one afternoon, with my face buried in Lakshmi's school textbook - which I had quietly taken from her bag - when my father came home for lunch. I was so immersed in the book that I did not look up when he walked in.
He threw the toffee he had brought at my feet and said, "What's my boy doing?"
"I'm reading," I said.
"But I can't hear you reading anything," he said. "I don't even see your lips moving".
"I am reading silently."
Father laughed aloud. He turned to Uncle, who was reading a Sanskrit book, and said, "Look at this nephew of yours. He has his head in the clouds always. When will he come down to earth? Look at him, pretending he's reading silently."
"He always does that", said Lakshmi, complaining. If my father and uncle were not there she would have snatched the book away. "He always takes my book. I try to keep my book clean and nice, but he handles it so roughly".
"Your book is clean because you don't read it", I said, "and you don't read because you don't know how to".
"This is how he teases me," Lakshmi said, whimpering. "He doesn't let me read in peace. He laughs at me and says I make mistakes." Tears started coursing down her fat cheeks and she added, "Ask Aditi or Savitri how much he teases me when I am reading."
Savitri agreed that I did laugh at them but only when they made mistakes while reading. "But how does he know that?" said father. "He can't read; he doesn't even know his alphabet".
It was true that mother's efforts to teach me the alphabet had come to nothing. Her method was the age old one of writing the letters on a slate and asking the child to go over them with a slate pencil several times, till the letters grew in girth. I did that once or twice and then was fed up. The next time she asked me to do it, I broke the slate pencil, took a small piece and used it length-wise so that the letters got the necessary girth with only one attempt.
"I think he does know how to read", said Aditi, but Lakshmi did not agree. "He is a parrot, Mawa. He knows all the lessons by heart, because he listens when we read. He waits for us to make mistakes and that makes us nervous."
"What are you reading, Babu?" asked Uncle, who was quietly listening. I told him what I was reading. It was the seventeenth lesson in the book and was about an old woman who lived in an isolated village with a rooster. The whole village woke up in the mornings when her cock crowed and that made her feel she was very important. She felt that the villagers did not respect her enough, and to teach them a lesson she hid herself in the jungle with her cock. The entire village, she thought, would sleep on forever.
“But he can't read that,” said Lakshmi. "None of us can, because the teacher hasn't taught us the lesson. He is bluffing again".
"Will you read the lesson aloud, Babu", asked Uncle, and I began to do so, a bit hesitantly at first because I was not sure whether I knew how to read. All that I knew was that the book spoke to me. Then I warmed up and read on, because I liked the story. When I looked up at the end and found Lakshmi's mouth open in astonishment, I burst out laughing. "Close your mouth, fatso," I said, "or a fly will enter it".
There was such widespread excitement at my performance that my ragging of Lakshmi went unnoticed. How, and when, did I learn to read? I could not, myself, answer that question. All that I knew was that I used to pore over the book with a great deal of fascinated curiosity and then gradually the words began to have meanings and the book began to speak to me.
I think I learnt to read easily because to me it was all play, and not work. My cousins tried to piece the letters together to form words. I wasn't interested in the letters, though I could recognize most of them. I wanted to get at the words, because words had meaning, stood for things and told stories. Quite often it was the words that told me what some of the letters were, not the other way round.
.....
I said that my recovery was slow. Perhaps I was reluctant to get well because I dreaded going to school. Everyone, except my father, made some contribution to increase my dread. Even my uncle added to my fear by telling me about the ingenious punishments his teacher used to mete out to his students, and his teacher happened to be the father of the Head Master I was going to study under! Lakshmi and others told me stories - and they were horror stories - of this man walking about the school with a cane in hand, tall and slim and ramrod straight, looking like a cane himself. He was my uncle's student but I feared that he wouldn't remember that when he was incensed.
They all wanted, I think, to instill some fear in me. 'Fear' was a good word then, and a child who feared no one was thought to be in imminent danger of falling into evil ways. Some of them perhaps wanted to get even with me. You are acting like this now, wait till you go to school, and Mr. Holla the Head Master catches hold of you. How often did I hear that remark, from almost everyone in the house, except uncle and father.
The monsoon broke a week before the schools were to reopen. It rained heavily for four or five days, with occasional thunder and lightning. I prayed that the rains would continue so that I could have a few more days of freedom. Thousands of children must have prayed with me but Indra, the god of rains, did not listen to us. There was only a light drizzle on the day the school reopened. My uncle came with us to get me admitted to the First Standard. Ours was a long procession because there were eleven of us - four boys and two girls from the other houses of the hamlet, the three girls from our house, myself, and my uncle bringing up the rear - all walking in single file because we had to walk on the narrow rims of raised earth that separated the paddy fields.
I wanted to talk to my uncle desperately, but could not. One had to shout to be heard above the pattering of rain on our palm-leaf umbrellas, and the need to walk in single file made it impossible to say anything close to his ear. I wanted to know whether he had caned Mr. Holla when he was his student. I wanted him to tell Mr. Holla, "Look, I didn't punish you when you were my student, so don't cane my nephew now".
We reached school, Aditi and others went to their classes, Mr. Holla received my uncle with great respect; and I was sent to one of the noisiest rooms I had ever been in. There was no teacher in the class. Half the students were crying and the other half shouting themselves hoarse. I found a boy climbing a bench and jumping down. I followed his example and soon there were five or six of us jumping about. I decided that the bench was too low, and climbed on the teacher's chair and from there scrambled on to the table. I was standing there ready to jump, when I saw that the whole class had suddenly become silent. Even the crying kids had stopped their whimpering. I turned and saw, at the door, Mr. Holla, tall and thin and ramrod straight, brandishing a cane.
I panicked and burst out crying. On the way to school I had felt a strong urge to pee but was too anxious and nervous to realize how pressing the need was. Now the panic button was pressed and the floodgates opened.....
I don't know who put me down from the table and took me to the Third Standard, where I was made to sit between Lakshmi and Aditi. There I sat, all through the morning session, ignored by the class teacher but not by the students.
On the way back from school I was asked by the other kids from our hamlet what exactly had happened. I don't know what I told them, but the women of the hamlet were saying to one another in the evening: "Do you know what the boy from the house of the Matha did today in School? He stood on the table and peed at the Head Master!"
At home I was the laughing stock. By evening I had had enough. I firmly said to mother, "I don't mind being a cowherd or whatever, but I am not going to school again."
It took all Uncle's persuasive powers to make me change my mind but I still refused to go to the class from where I had made such an ignominious exit. Uncle had to accompany me to the school again, to ask the Head Master to allow me to sit in the Third Standard with my cousins for a few days till I got used to school.
The Head Master readily agreed. So I began to sit in the Third Standard, between Lakshmi and Aditi. The class teacher ignored me and never asked me any questions. So I had an easy time and could sit there in the class and dream, or when I felt like it, listen to what the teacher said; whereas the other students were under constant pressure. They had to answer a barrage of questions and when they could not answer them, they were made to stand up on the benches and sometimes even caned. Months passed, but there was no talk of my going back to First Standard.
Then one day there was panic in the school. News had come that the Inspector would visit the school the next day. Those were days when teachers did not have the kind of job security they have now, and the School Inspector was a dreaded figure. The students were asked to go home early so that they could wash their shorts and shirts and come spick and span to school the next day.
In all that hustle and bustle it was forgotten that I belonged to the First Standard, not to the Third. So when the Inspector, a smiling young man, came to our class, I was sitting at my usual place between Lakshmi and Aditi.
I don't think I have ever seen a man so frightened as our class teacher was on that day. He was a tall thin man and we could almost hear his bones rattling. The fear he so plainly showed spread in the class. So when the Inspector started throwing questions at the class, there was no one with courage enough to raise his or her hand.
After two or three questions went unanswered, the smile began to fade from the Inspector's face and the teacher started trembling like the patri in a darshana. I was the only one left untouched by the fear that enveloped the whole class, a fear that was almost palpable. So when the fourth question, a simple one, was asked, I raised my hand.
The next few minutes were plain crazy. Every time a question was asked, my hand shot up. They were mostly simple questions, and there were perhaps five or six students - including Aditi - who could have answered them, but they had all lost their nerves. Every time I answered a question, I looked at our teacher's face and saw there, writ large, relief, disbelief and awe. He just could not believe that I could answer all those questions. In fact I did not myself know that I could; apparently, when I was dreaming my time away in the class I had one of my ears open to what was being taught.
The Inspector next wanted to see how we read aloud. His patience by then was beginning to wear thin, and whenever a student mispronounced or stumbled at a word, he promptly said, "Next". When Lakshmi's turn came, she was allowed to mumble through only half a line.
I was next. I knew I could read well but the teacher did not. He cleared his throat and made an effort to speak - perhaps he wanted to say that I was from the First Standard and did not know how to read - but the words got stuck in his throat. The Inspector looked at him; then turned to me and smiled encouragingly. I began to read.
I read, not just with fluency but with a near-perfect accent; something I had picked up as I grew up on my uncle's lap, listening to his enunciation of Sanskrit, the mother of all Indian languages. The Inspector forgot to say "Next" and I continued till the bell rang. The expression on the teacher's face was not much different from the one I had seen on Lakshmi's face when I read aloud the seventeenth lesson of her Second Standard book.
If what I have written sounds conceited, I can only say that conceit or pride is the last thing I feel when I think of that bright little boy. What I feel is humility, and a sense of waste. I see very little in common between that child and myself. And if that child were to see the man he fathered, I’m afraid he would be quite disappointed. Old Wordsworth would have understood what went wrong: there was a breach, a loss of continuity, a severance of roots; a failure to ensure that one's days were bound each to each with natural piety. When did that happen and how - that is what I must explore.
That evening both the Head Master and the Class Teacher visited our house. Mr. Dhanya, the Class Teacher, bowed down to my uncle, and said, "Your nephew saved my job today. How well he read! And I did not even know he could read. We must thank you - for where else could he have learnt that pure accent but from you?"
Uncle was quite embarrassed. So he changed the topic and said, "Sudhakar has got used to the school now. When do you want to send him back to the First Standard?"
“Oh, no, no,” said the Head Master, lifting his hands to his ears in that typical Indian gesture of protest; "if he is not fit to be in the Third Standard, who is? He will stay in the Third. No question of sending him down."
When they were about to leave, Mr. Dhanya said, with folded hands, "I am afraid I ignored your nephew all these days. I made no efforts to teach him. Here onwards I shall make amends. I shall pay special attention to his education".
I was quite pleased with that remark. It was only gradually that I realized what a terrible mess I had got myself into. I lost my freedom to dream in the class, and to pick up things as they came to me. The teacher directed most of his questions at me and expected me to answer all of them. I felt harassed and lost all interest in studies. Though I somehow managed to scrape through the exams and get promoted, I think I learned very little in the three years I spent in that school. In my final year - in the Fifth Standard - the Head Master was himself our class teacher. In my 'Progress Report', which he wanted me to show to my uncle, he wrote down the well-known Kannada proverb:
With the passage of time, the Royal horse became a donkey.
