Maximum City (72 page)

When the rain stops, the air is suddenly sweetened. The trees and the shrubs and the weeds have dispensed fragrance into the air. Hundreds of long brown earthworms are crawling out of the softened ground. Bombay will open its windows and the rain-sweetened air will come in and Bombay will sleep well tonight. And if the first rain is early, you will sleep especially well tonight, because you still have fifteen days left till the beginning of school.

The bell is still there. I am sitting in the principal’s office when a peon comes in, reaches out the window, and yanks at a thick white rope. There is a peal; I know that sound well. The rope leads across the yard to the other school building, to a thick brass bell whose ringing could be a glad sound, signifying release from a day of torment, or a dread sound, bringing on Mrs. Qureshi’s period. Period means “class,” but so cranky was the Hindi teacher that it could equally well have meant the other thing.

“We would like to felicitate you.” Cheroot, as we called the man who was my science teacher and is now the principal, is smiling. “On November fourteenth, we will be holding a function for you. Also for Salil Ankola, cricketer, Shweta Shetty, singing sensation, and Krishna Mehta, designer. All Mayur Mahal students,” he informs me happily. He has cut out a newspaper
article about me and put it up on the notice board. I am now a “distinguished alumnus.” The invitation that came in the mail said
We are proud of your outstanding performance in the field of Literature.
At last the institution that displayed no signs of pride in me while I was enrolled in it, that first beat me for having bad handwriting and then for not taking notes in class, wants to honor me for being a writer.

Mayur Mahal Multipurpose. Its full name is Mayur Mahal’s Shreemati Nandkunvar Ramniklal J. Parikh Multipurpose High School, and it is principally known for having its own street named after it. It imposed the title on one of the lanes that connect the sea with the top of Malabar Hill. The original name can still be seen on a faded
BEST
electricity box: Wilderness Road. When the wilderness disappeared, so, appropriately, did the name.

We lived in Bombay and we lived in Mumbai and sometimes we lived in both of them at the same time. Mayur Mahal was where the Gujarati and Marwari traders sent their offspring. Not for us the sophistication of the convent schools, Cathedral or Campion. Our parents were more likely to discuss grain prices than Gershwin; we ate fafda rather than foie gras. Mayur Mahal dispensed instruction in two languages, Gujarati and English, but the English medium tended to be nominal. The administration strove mightily to get us to speak in English at all times, but we jabbered away in Hindi and Gujarati. “Gadherao, English ma bolo ne!” a teacher famously screamed at us. “Donkeys, speak English!”

Mr. Maskawala, the gym teacher, had been standing by the gate when I returned to Mayur Mahal. He had clasped my hand with his sweaty one. He is still a buffoon, with his split lip; he’s probably still trying to romance the Catholic teachers. He led me past the stone elephant and past the little shrine to Saraswati. Past the cold-water taps under which we cupped our palms and drank and in the trough of which you could always discover, from the chewed debris that had slipped out of the mouths of previous drinkers, what everyone had been having for lunch. Past the little compound in the back where we made pav bhaji in our scouting class, up two flights, and into the principal’s office. Here, the same old scene is being played out. Two boys are standing by Cheroot’s desk. He calls in Verma Sir (the biology teacher, who scandalized the Jain trustees by bringing in a fish to dissect). “There have been three written complaints against these boys. Take them away, and tell them that they will have to leave school, and they won’t be able to continue SSC or anything.” The boys are led away to
their fate, the threat of not matriculating hanging over them. It comes back to me, how when I was fourteen, another teacher had slapped me hard on my face for shutting a classroom door during recess, then dragged me to this same principal’s office, and the vice principal had written out a leaving certificate, and I cried, thinking I would never be able to get into a school in the country I was about to move to. He let me sweat for a couple of days and then, after repeated apologies on my part, he rescinded the certificate. He was just having his sadistic little bit of fun.

All the teachers are old now, and they look not much different from the peons. Cheroot explains why the school has deteriorated. The school administration had embarked on a policy of deliberately taking in poor students, the residents of the slum colonies all around Malabar Hill that I had seen when I went campaigning with Jayawantiben Mehta, the “lower strata,” as Cheroot calls them. “We are a trust, after all.” It is a huge school now: eighteen hundred students in two shifts, tended to by some sixty teachers and staff. A blanket of melancholy, of sadness, of decay, hangs over the entire place. The children streaming from school in the late afternoon are now darker and worse dressed, their haircuts more unfashionable, than when I studied here. “It’s a school for the children of dhobis and drivers,” my cousin had told me. When I went there, “the aristocracy sent their children to Mayur Mahal. But now you wouldn’t send your son to this school. You sent him to New Era,” Cheroot points out. “You wouldn’t want your son and your driver’s son studying in the same class,” he concludes. He is presiding over the systematic deterioration and democratization of an institution.

I ask him what kinds of methods the school uses these days to discipline its students. “We have to use ‘threatening.’” He pronounces the word like a thunderclap—“
threatening!”
—shaking his hands as he does so. “Of course now we don’t do it so much. But we give a couple of slaps now and then,” he admits, chortling. “You know that I and Verma Sir were known as disciplinarians. We even slapped the students!” Yes, as you did me.

I have been reading reports in the newspaper, on two successive days, of children being brutalized in Bombay schools. Yesterday’s article was about an eighth-grader in J. B. Khot High School who didn’t hand in an assignment. The teacher stripped off his shirt in front of the class; then she wanted him to take off his shorts. She pulled at his zipper to take them off, yanked it, and his penis got caught. When he got home, he went to bed. He
can’t piss properly now. “His mind is disturbed,” his father stated. In the same school, a kindergartener was asked to produce his calendar. Some other children were playing with it. So the teacher stood him in front of an adjoining class and stripped him, amid a jeering chorus of his schoolmates yelling, “Shame, shame!” A counselor, interviewed in the paper, condemned the incidents and suggested that when teachers need to discipline students, “the whole class should participate in framing a punishment.” I think of a Mayur Mahal class collectively framing a punishment. What pleasant hours we would have passed! We would have come up with some good ones.

Then in today’s paper: A seven-year-old girl in Jogeshwari forgot to paste the picture of a train in her notebook for homework in her art class. To teach the little girl a lesson, her art teacher went at her hands, legs, and back with a wooden ruler and then slapped her hard on her face and arm. After the thrashing, the girl quietly walked to her grandmother’s house. The next day she started vomiting blood. Then bruises showed up on her arm and patches of blood coagulated on her face. Her liver is badly injured, and the doctors say the veins in her forehead may burst at any time. If she lives, her parents, who have three other children in the school, say they may send her back. Her art teacher was arrested and released on bail the next day. He teaches at, and the little girl attends, Mahatma Gandhi School.

The name is not an accident. What Gandhiji knew was that if the country were allowed to go, it would have been the most savage independence movement in world history. The violence begins early in life. When an adult Indian is hit, he is instantly reminded of his schooldays. The teachers at Mayur Mahal felt very free with their hands around the students; they assumed a familiarity with our bodies. “Do you know, to beat a child is actually against the law,” we whispered to each other. When a noise was heard in the back of the class, the entire class was punished, girls and boys both, with two thwacks of the foot ruler on the open palm. A good way to reduce the pain was to rub our hands on our oiled heads, and then hold the palm at an angle, so that the wood lightly glanced off the skin. The teachers often broke rulers across our hands in their fury.

The days I would be sure of getting a beating were those on which our notebooks were checked. We were supposed to write down every word of what the teachers said in class, which was mostly what they read out aloud from the state textbooks, and write it back for them in the examinations, so
that education became an exercise in repetition, “learning by heart.” The notebooks accounted for 20 percent of the marks. Something in me rebelled against the idea of taking notes to perpetuate this cycle of government-written facts. The previous day, the other students would have gone frantic copying each others’ notes. I would be woken up by my mother, and my first thought would be, I am going to get beaten today. I washed, put on a clean uniform, was given a glass of milk by my mother, and left home bright and shining so I could walk to the building where I would be beaten.

In class I would watch the clock on the wall as if it were my greatest friend, as if it were a lover, and will the hands to speed toward the close of the period. Sometimes the teacher would forget to check the notes that day; when the bell rang, ending the period, there would be the relief of the condemned spared his execution. The next few hours were happy; then slowly, toward evening, the dread would descend once again like a heavy fog. The punishment had not been evaded; it had only been postponed.

There was one ingenious punishment in which the teachers excelled. It was a simple piece of white cardboard, with a string around it, bearing the inscription, in large letters readable across a room, I
HAVE NOT DONE MY HOMEWORK
. When this was the case, you had to wear it for public display. One day I did not do my homework, and the teacher garlanded me with the board. As she did so, I wondered why there were black streaks running down the white cardboard. I soon found out. Wearing the sign, I was instructed to stand not only in front of my own class but also all the other classrooms on the floor. The door of the next room would be opened and I would walk in unsteadily and go to the head of the class. There I would turn, face forty of my fellow students, and stand silently. Children love nothing so much as to see other children in pain, especially at Mayur Mahal, where pain was so prevalent it formed part of the masonry. My humiliation was a relief from their own, so the room erupted in a chorus of mocking laughter, hooting, and jokes. In the beginning I tried smiling—as if I got the joke too and wasn’t it hilarious—but I quickly discovered what the black streaks were. They were the tears of all previous wearers of the board, and I added my own to them. When I had finished my performance in one classroom I would have to go the next, and the next, and after I’d finished all of them, I would have to stand in the passage outside the classrooms, standing and shifting against the wall, desperately trying to keep my advertised shame from the eyes of those who passed by.

The way we dealt with all this was through laughter. Not kind laughter, indulgent laughter, but mocking, profane, evil laughter. We laughed at the teachers and reduced the female teachers to sex objects; big-titted Miss Easo got dubbed—what else?—Petrol Pump. We laughed at other children when they got beaten, and after a while they laughed about it too. When I meet people from Mayur Mahal now, we recall the stinging slaps we were given and laugh about them; we remember the beatings we got in the way that children in other schools remember the school plays or the prizes they won.

O
N
C
HILDREN’S
D
AY
, I go with my wife and son to be honored by the school that tormented me for nine years.

“This is Suketu Mehta.” Cheroot introduces me to the other felicitees as soon as I walk onstage. “He was given a literary award by Bill Clinton.”

“No, I wasn’t.”

“By President Bill Clinton.”

“No, I wasn’t,” I say, more emphatically this time and shaking my head as well.

“You were not given an award by Bill Clinton?” he asks, a trifle suspiciously.

“No.”

“Then
who
gave you the award?” asks Cheroot, a darkness coming over his face as if he’s caught me cheating on an exam.

I think. What would the name Mrs. Giles Whiting mean to him? “A . . . literary academy.”

Fifteen minutes later, I hear the emcee, a boy in jeans, a white shirt, and tie, introducing me to the audience. “And we are proud to have Suketu Mehta, the laureate of literature, who was given an award by Bill Clinton.”

The poetic license of the introductions is not restricted only to me. Another outstanding ex-student is a karate instructor, whom the announcer introduces as a “sixteenth-degree black belt in karate.” There are titters in the audience, many of whom have sent their sons to this instructor to learn survival in the Bombay streets, and a teacher rushes up to the boy. He corrects himself. “Sorry, sixth-degree.” The school, which grudged a single complimentary word when we were its students, is now exaggerating our achievements beyond credibility, as if in compensation. It is not enough to
have gone to Cornell for an MBA, as one of my fellow felicitees did; he was “a topper of all the Cornell MBAs.” There is a lawn-tennis champion who has accumulated twenty-one points in the lawn-tennis contests. “After one hundred points he will reach Wimbledon.” There is a “ball-bearing tycoon” and assorted diamond merchants, builders, and doctors, all lords of their profession. There is only one lady, “the Best Designer in Asia,” whom I sit next to and trade memories with while the speakers go on at length about the ills of modern education. The craft teacher comes in late, her hair glowing red with henna, in a semitransparent sari. She had us build tanks out of matchboxes glued together and plant shrubs in pots; mine all died. “She told me I can’t stitch and sew,” the Best Designer in Asia whispers to me. “I feel like telling her that’s what I do for a living now.”