And Then One Day: A Memoir (4 page)

My class teacher in Classes 4 and 5, after the pretty Miss Brendish and the kindly Miss D’Silva, who wore rimless glasses like my mother, was Miss Winnie Perry. If you were to ask any junior student of fifties Sem about Miss Perry it’s an even bet she still figures in his nightmares. I drove her to despair, she always said, but she never gave up on me. If I hadn’t been so petrified of figures and of her I might have become the world’s greatest mathematician, considering the time Ma Perry spent on me. She would gleefully play along with our whispered suspicions that she went home on a broomstick, and when in really severe mode she used the handle of a feather duster for chastisement.

In later life after having been roused to fury by something my own children did, I often, on calmer reflection, realized that it was my own insecurities and failings in something completely unrelated that had made me bully them thus, and I did it only because I could. When I’ve struck any of them or felt the urge to do so, my own frustrations have always been the cause. I sometimes wonder how many disappointments and failures poor Miss Perry or Brother Burke must have lived with to relish being so relentlessly cruel to the children in their care.

Shah Mamu had a dramatic face-off with Miss Perry one Sunday when he came to take us all ‘out’. Going out of school on Sunday was a big thing but Miss Perry would always keep some student or the other ‘in’ probably because she couldn’t bear to be alone, and on this and many another weekend I was the one chosen to get some maths drilled into my unwilling head. Shah Mamu the handsome dog’s grand arrival obviously made an impact on the old maid but he was told to wait. After standing around politely for a while, not his style at all, he barged straight into the drawing room where the extra class was on, and brazenly demanded that she let me off. Miss Perry held her ground until something sounding suspiciously like profanity to her ears was said. She blanched and weakly threatened to send him to the Principal. My hair stood on end when I heard him snarl, ‘What the damn Principal will do? He’ll hang me?’ And to my utter astonishment, instead of pulling his ears for his atrocious grammar and taking the ‘skin off his back’ with her feather duster after disabling him with one of her roundhouse forehands, or much worse, putting a hex on him and turning him to stone, she actually caved in and turned quite mild before letting me off the hook. Valiant valiant Shah Mamu! To Ma Perry’s credit, she did not hold the incident against me, I guess she didn’t need to, I gave her plenty of other reasons anyway and I didn’t dare defy her. But one day in the grip of a fit of insanity, which I suspect was inspired by Shah Mamu’s sparring session with Miss Perry, I started imitating Brother Burke’s nasal drawl right under his nose. I leave it to your imagination, dear reader, to visualize what happened to me. A real sight for the gods would have been a run-in between Brother Burke and Shah Mamu.

Old Burke, after continuing to terrorize (and according to many, also teach) students rather well for many more years, went back to Ireland in the mid nineties, and finally mingled with his own earth. My prayer for him is that in the big projection room in the sky he has the most comfortable seat and an unending store of his favourite movies for all eternity. That, and I also hope he keeps getting rapped on the head with a hard knuckle every now and then when he least expects it.

As for Miss Perry, sometime in the mid nineties I learnt she was in a home for the aged in Lucknow. I wrote her a letter, I don’t know why, and she replied saying she remembered me, but I doubt if she did. I heard later that she’d suffered a brutal death at the hands of an intruder. I don’t suspect it was one of her students.

M
y grades continued to slip, my tonsils were removed, my pubic hair began to grow, a hundred ‘naya paisa’ replaced the sixteen annas in a rupee, kilometres replaced miles and the unsatiated curiosity about the opposite sex began its torment, causing me to sink deeper and deeper into myself. I still never got a chance to act on the stage, and the gulf between my parents and me began to widen. Through my time in Sem I was befriended by two people, Karan Chand Raj (‘KC’) Singh who was the prince, not that I would ever have believed it then, and is now the raja of an estate called Kashipur, and Satvinder (‘Pearly’) Dhingra. Both from privileged homes, they were kind and generous and didn’t consider me inferior; both unselfish, undemanding friends who liked me for what I was and wanted to share their affection. I have had only fleeting contact with both over the succeeding years but can never forget how they made me feel.

Going home for the vacations was now drudgery worse than school. Most maternal uncles and aunts were long married, and the assemblages at Sardhana were for funerals rather than festivities. Habib Manzil was losing its grandeur, it looked kind of washed-up now. The old walls were starting to crumble and new walls were coming up with succeeding generations laying claim to their share of the houses and the lands. The divisions had begun. The antique Model-T Ford was sold and replaced by a tonga, which didn’t last long, a horse being more trouble to maintain than a car. Ammunition had become prohibitively expensive, and blackbucks were disappearing from the face of the earth, so that was more or less the end of shikar as well. Expensive luxuries were now being done without. The gramophone was catching rust with neither the stock of records nor the stock of needles being replenished. The cousins were all growing up and getting on with their lives. Sardhana was becoming a bore. No one even saw ghosts there any more.

And Ajmer and vacations only meant Baba’s gimlet eyes boring through me from over his reading glasses, questions on whether or not I’d given any thought to the future, me weakly justifying an even shabbier academic performance this year, and having to endure unending tuition classes, which he decided I needed. So apart from the Maulvi saheb who tried to teach us Arabic and Urdu, there was a procession of tutors on whom my poor misguided father spent another good portion of his salary, and who I hoped would be devoured by Zulu, our crossbred German shepherd, on their way in. (One almost was, but got away with ripped trousers and a sprained wrist, but no blood. ) Holidays, in fact life, had become a monumental drag. The cricket field, the scene of so much gloriously sweaty laughter, lay abandoned. Now there was only the occasional tonga ride, the cricket commentary on the radio, and Zulu to play with and, of course, the Sunday morning English movie at Prabhat Talkies.

Back at Sem, Miss Perry was succeeded as class teacher by John Lefevre, a dapper, affable bachelor who had a rumbling baritone, rolled his cigarettes and always smelt of tobacco. Certainly not intending to stay celibate like the Brothers, he’d often have lengthy consultations with various lady teachers who’d go giggling by while he was in our class. He’d also often, during class hours, put his head on his desk after admonishing us to ‘do anything, but don’t make a noise’ and stay oblivious to us through the hour. He was kind and much loved. But though my association with him did not help me learn any more than Miss Perry’s cruelty had, it did help my collection of cricket pictures.

Cricket was trying to force itself to the forefront of my awareness, and was grappling with movies for the honour. Apart from the literature stories and the odd poem worth memorizing, I found nothing of the slightest interest in any of the books I was made to read in class. Cricket was interesting. I was up on the details of every score of every Test match being played; there weren’t one-hundredth the number of matches being played then as there are now. I played too and briefly dreamt of a career in cricket, but gave it up as no one ever told me whether or not I was any good, and I couldn’t figure it out on my own. The last-straw thing happened when I was the third victim bowled round my legs in a hat-trick pulled by one Prabhat Kapil. I continue however to sustain a passion for the game, which at that time was aflame. I had a vast collection of pictures of cricketers past and present which, when I left school, I just left behind. Those pictures would be priceless today. Half my weekly pocket money of one rupee went religiously into buying
Sport & Pastime,
a fabulous magazine, now defunct, which I’d read from cover to cover, then cut up and stick the cricketers’ pictures in my physics practicals notebook. What useful purpose I hoped that’d serve I don’t know and didn’t know then, but I did become known as the guy with the most cricket pictures.

I didn’t linger long on the horns of the cricket-versus- movies dilemma. Cricketers were godlike creatures blessed with special gifts; besides, there were so few. There were many more actors, so I plumped for the easier alternative. Cricket is a heartless mistress and much tougher than acting. It’s not as if I’d always watch a film instead of a cricket match but cricket, though it comes pretty close, didn’t for me compare then, and does not now, with the magic of what appears on the screen, which is probably why it has become such a TV- friendly game. The actors in those exclusively American or British films we saw then didn’t look like real people to me but this world looked safe. In cricket one mistake could be the difference between humiliation and glory. In the movies, everything always turned out all right. You could put your faith in a superhero and rest your own head on your pillow and sleep. This magical world didn’t exist yet you could escape into it whenever you wished.

The few Hindi movies I saw as a child, however, didn’t grab me. They seemed silly and have never stopped seeming so. The actors didn’t seem so much unreal as fake. The back- projections looked like back-projections. I actually remember an actor wearing a wristwatch in some period costume drama. Everything in those movies seemed tatty and in poor taste; watching one I never felt convinced that this was actually happening. Sometimes decades later, at work on the sets of a Hindi movie or while listening to the script narration of one, this same thought has recurred, ‘This cannot actually be happening!’ Yet Hindi movies continue to enthral (and generate) billions every day all over the world. So I guess there is something the matter with my perception. Be that as it may, Hindi movies and their actors have never held much fascination for me; a role model in the Hindi film industry has been hard to find except perhaps for the eccentric Mr Raaj Kumar, and he not for his acting which was dreadful but for the way he safeguarded his interests, prolonged his career, and sent all Follywood on a flying fuck to the moon whenever he felt like it.

Nazrul Haque, a classmate, introduced me to cigarettes and found a willing pupil, a fascination for the smell of burning tobacco and the manner of people who smoked it being not uncommon among young boys. The remains of a cigarette were actually found by the dorm matron once in the pocket of one of my shirts going to the laundry. The punishment for smoking was expulsion and no questions asked. While I vigorously protested my innocence in the face of undeniable proof, it did seem for a while that my trunk would emerge shortly from the box room on its own. But on pondering the question, the matrons decided not to bring the matter to the Principal’s notice, the common consensus among them being that I was too much of an idiot to pull off something like this. It was common knowledge that many senior boys smoked, and it was concluded that the cigarettes had been planted in my pocket; some senior was shifting evidence that might have damned him.

The suspicion that I was a complete idiot began to grow into a conviction, and I had not a clue what to do about it. In spite of my falling grades my father continued to remind me that I was ‘basically an intelligent boy’. This belief must have made it even tougher for him to swallow my increasingly dismal performance. I think he did believe it, and wanted me to believe it too, but it was a little while before that happened, and in the most unexpected way. My utter disinterest in learning anything except cricket scores and the speeches in
Julius Caesar
had now reached the proportions of an ailment. Zaheer, the brains of the family, was deputed by Baba to coach me in maths, and he valiantly tried, sacrificing his own precious study hours trying to drill some mathematical sense into me. In vain, I’m afraid. My mind would not sit still long enough to assimilate the solution of one problem, and then it would be time to move on to the next! I’d pretend to understand, and I guess I didn’t do a convincing enough job, because Zaheer would sigh and move on. Sometimes he’d grind his teeth. I could hear them go ‘Grinnnd! Grriiind!! Grrriiiiinnnnnnnd!!!’

I think I know what the ability to lie convincingly as a child is symptomatic of: children who were convincing liars become good actors, but to what I owe the complete inability to concentrate on anything that doesn’t interest me I have no idea. It is a tendency I’ve always had. If a conversation doesn’t interest me I can go so far away as to actually not hear what is being said. It has often been a boon too in later life while having to sit through the narration of a script one has given up on in the first five minutes. Anyway, academic rock-bottom was hit when in the final exams of Class 9 I fared abysmally and actually gave in my trigonometry paper empty, with an inscription that I hoped would amuse the examiner: ‘If you know the answers, why ask me? And if you don’t, how do you expect me to?’ The old stiff obviously had no sense of humour and awarded me a zero for my wit. I averaged about 30 per cent, not enough to get me through. But when we went home, I told the parents I’d done all right, and the vacations that year started to go past as usual, with complete amnesia on my part about the exams—until the results arrived.

Baba went to work on his gleaming Hercules bicycle kept in tip-top condition always, not like the orderlies’ rickety cycles on which we all learnt to ride. We’d hear the bell when he returned and there’d be a race to grab and park the cycle, because whoever got to it got to ride it round the house once, otherwise we were forbidden to touch it except maybe to clean it. That day I got to it first. When I saw Baba, steam seemed to be coming out of his ears, but then he often looked like that. He handed me the cycle without a word and entered the house. Completely unaware of what was coming, I merrily rode the bike around to the back of the house to find Baba, face black with rage, standing there like the wrath of God. He flung at me a folded piece of very official-looking paper which got me bang in the chest and, just like in the movies, fell right into my hand. I didn’t need a second glance to recognize the report card; the words ‘has failed the examination’ jumped out and hit me between the eyes. I knew how I’d fared in the exams so it shouldn’t have been a shock but it was. I couldn’t hide my head in the sand any longer. However, instead of the remorse and regret that should have been flooding my heart, I began to have visions of all the movies that would be screened at Sem that year and that I’d now miss.

Preparations to admit me into a school in Ajmer began, the only hitch being that all schools in Ajmer were almost at the end of their own academic terms, with barely three months to go before final exams. Even though term-end was close, Baba managed to prevail upon the Principal of a Jesuit school called St Anselm’s to admit me into Class 9 and to let me appear for the exams. In those days the term ‘capitation fee’ hadn’t been coined but doing favours for schools was appreciated, and Baba was not without influence in Ajmer. It was a brilliant plan, designed to see that I lost only a few months, and not a whole year. But I managed to foil it as well. Even with the additional three months of attention, tuitions and the very same curriculum I’d had the year before, I failed again. Though the teachers at St Anselm’s were angels compared to those at Sem, their kindness did no more for me than the Christian Brothers’ cruelty had done. And as I write this, the disquieting thought creeps into my mind that, for younger actors who may be reading this, I am hardly an example worthy of emulation, and I begin to wonder why I am writing it at all. Is this a story worth telling?

No matter. I invoke the venerated music critic and cricket lover Neville Cardus who in his wonderful book titled simply
Autobiography
puckishly observes that no one was ‘under any compulsion to read it and is under no compulsion to read further’. For me it’s an exorcism of sorts, and it’s for my children if they wish to understand me better. But whatever they do, I doubt if they can (rather, I pray that they don’t) ever match the complete apathy I displayed towards just about everything in my life at this stage, but I daresay they have inherited some of my qualities.

Having received my second ‘failed’ report card for Class 9, I went for as long a bicycle ride as I could to avoid going home and breaking the news. I wasn’t terribly distressed, didn’t contemplate suicide or anything, I just rode and rode and rode, with a completely empty head, until I couldn’t put off the inevitable any longer. But I had managed to delay it. Turning my cycle homeward at last, I frantically searched my mind for what lie I could possibly tell this time. It still gives me a twinge when I recall Baba’s worried but hopeful face when I returned, a good three hours or so after I should have, and the way it crumpled when he got the news accompanied by my weak protestations about how the marks for the half-yearly exams which I hadn’t appeared for at this school, naturally, had been included in our aggregates and that’s why I had failed. He didn’t say anything. Just quietly told me to go eat. I must confess that on this day I actually felt sorry for him.