Autobiography : Going To School

Going To School

School was another place where there were fond and fun memories. Since we were originally from South Kanara in Karnataka, we had a school, St. Mary’s, with the Mangalore nuns teaching there, which led to easy admissions for us. The school was near to where we were staying about 30 minutes walking distance. First it was our elder sister then the two of us, brothers who went to St. Mary’s. All of us got admission easily partly because of the contacts and also because of the proficiency of our elder sister in the school. All of us were generally good in studies but not exceptionally so but always within the Top 10. The problem with St. Mary’s was two fold. First, it was a girl’s school and would take boys only upto Class 3, that was the primary level. Being a new school they had not been given permission for the high school that is beyond Class 7 and even our elder sister would have to change school once she reached that level. She eventually changed from the local board system to the ICSE system when she moved to St. Theresa’s for her high school. St. Theresa’s was quite far from where we were staying in Kidderpore and my sister would have to change two buses to reach there or take a slow tram to school. All this meant that she had to leave early and come back late. For both of us boys the issue was to change schools after Class 3.  

But there is a story to tell before that. St. Mary had an affiliated school for boys, St. Lawrence’s. So when I was taken for admission to St. Mary’s the Mother Superior told my mother that why do I not be taken directly to St. Lawrence since then I would have an unbroken tenure since the school went up to Class 11 which is when we appeared for the Higher Secondary Exam, an equivalent of matriculation. Mother Superior in fact gave a letter of recommendation to the Rector at St. Lawrence’s. Though my mother was not too keen to put me there because the school was far and I was too young, she still took me to meet the Rector. We went there and all that I remember was getting into a cavernous office where we were made to sit at a desk for quite a long time and then an apparition came before me. This tall apparition was wearing a white cloak from neck to toe and was topped by an oval, angular face with thin lips set sternly closed and a bluff-red complexion. One look at Fr Sassell, the Rector at St. Lawrence’s in his cassock was enough to scare me out of my wits and I jumped off my chair and hid behind the chair where my mother was sitting. Fr Sassell tried to rationalize with me by coming across and touching me on the shoulder but that sent me into shivers and I started sobbing. Even my mother was unable to control me and finally Fr. Sassell said that admission was not a problem into Class 1 as long as I was ready to enroll. He gave my mother a week until which time he would hold my admission and only after that release it to others. But my mother herself not convinced by the distance that I would have to go every day and also looking at my fear of the Jesuit father’s dress decided against it. I finally went to St. Mary’s along with my sister and later my younger brother joined us. Thus all of us had our preliminary schooling in St. Mary’s. It was not only that but our youngest sister followed in the same tradition and completed her matriculation (by then the West Bengal Board had reverted to the Class 10 matriculation system) from their high school which had been named Carmel Girl’s High School located at Jodhpur Park. 

Studies were no issue for us in school and we were involved in mischief more than anything else. Because both boys and girls were in the same class, we had our own fun and games of the age-old boy vs. girl rivalries. These did not extend to anything harmful but was limited to good, clean fun. In our class there were also a number of boys like me and one among them a Tamilian, T K G Shankar became close. We would sit on the same bench and get after the girls. The area, Deshapriya Park and Lake Market, where the school was located was full of South Indians mostly Tamilians. Hence that community comprised the majority in class. We had one Alamelu sitting in the bench just ahead of us and with whom a lot of ribbing happened in class and outside. One remembers her as a spirited, talkative girl. The top three ranks in class were rotated between the three of us, that is Alamelu, Shankar and myself for most of the exams including the finals. This generated a spirit of competition amongst us which lasted the three years that I spent in St. Mary’s. Shankar also had to leave after Class 3 with me to a regular boy’s school. If I recall correctly, he came to St. Lawrence’s with me but then left after a few years since his father was in a transferable job and they had to leave Calcutta. In any case, coming back to the action, one day in class my pencil had fallen to the floor. And when I bent down to pick it up, I saw a string hanging down to almost the floor level. This was from Alamelu’s seat. I could not control giggling and gestured to TKG to bend down and have a look. He also bent down and came up giggling. Both of us found it difficult to keep a straight face in class. In between the giggles, TKG and I were talking about what to do. We came to the common consensus that we should pull the string and see what happens. I was also the person that TKG nominated to pull the string. I had to muster up courage and finally halfway through the class I bent down and yanked at the string. What happened next was that Alamelu yelped like a puppy in surprise and jumped up like a Jack (actually Jane) – in – the – box. I bumped my head against the edge of the desk coming up and TKG was in splits of laughter. Alamelu’s yelp had attracted the lady teacher’s attention and she came down to Alamelu to find out what had happened. Alamelu by then with a sense of shame setting in was in tears and sobbing away. I was holding the side of my head to lessen the bump forming there and at the same time trying desperately to keep a straight face. TKG was rolling around in laughter by now. Looking at TKG the teacher sensed that something was wrong and that the two of us were responsible for whatever had happened. The teacher again asked Alamelu what had happened and Alamelu stood up on her toes and whispered into the teacher’s ears. The teacher looked at me angrily and asked me to come with her to Mother Superior. So there I was in front of Sr. Florita, Mother Superior dressed in her brown and black habit with a white cowling over her head looking appropriately stern. By that time Alamelu had joined us in the Mother Superior’s office after having visited the toilets and putting the delinquent string to where it belonged. Her eyes were red and tears were still trickling down. I had nothing much to say but to apologise for the incident both to Alamelu & Mother Superior. Sr Florita asked me to bring my mother next day to meet her and warned me to behave in class and not be a nuisance to the girls, By that time I was suitably cowed down and nodded my head mutely. The next day my mother came and but for a warning I was let off. But at home I got a hiding to make sure I never do such things again particularly to girls. Alamelu never spoke to me again after that incident. And considering that this happened in Class 3, both TKG and I were leaving the school by the end of that academic session, we would be not seeing Alamelu or any of the other girls again. TKG got off scot-free in this whole episode and enjoyed himself hugely at Alamelu’s and my expense.      

St. Mary’s was about 30 minutes walking distance from Pratapaditya Road. For the first year mother would come for a few days to drop me but then I would go along with my elder sister, she was in Class 3 by that time. This tradition continued when my brother joined school two years later when I would take him to school with me. Mother was always the person who handled all the interaction in school matters and our father, if I recall correctly, rarely came to school. He was more busy with his office and work and left the school matters to mother. Those were the days when we would carry tiffin from home to be eaten during the lunch recess. But on the days that mother did not have time to make anything she would give each one of us a four anna or 25 paisa coin. On the way to school neared our house there was a corner shop which catered to all the goodies that any young child could imagine, or that is what it appeared to us at that time. The bottom part of the frontage to the shop and on the other side of the corner were stacked big glass bottles with glass lids on them. Inside were all the delicacies like sweets of different kinds, chocolates, biscuits including the animal ones (you could eat a tiger or a giraffe, if you so fancied), cream biscuits and cream puffs, chana-choor, dalmot and what have you. The list was endless and one wondered how many days it would take to finish eating everything that was displayed at the shop. There were the lozenges which would come neatly packed in a stack about an inch high containing pink lozenges which were the rose-flavoured and the white which were the mint flavoured. My favourite was the rose flavoured. The cream puffs were out of this world and one bite would send you to heaven munching the crisp biscuit outside and when your mouth filled up with the sweet, gooey cream. There was another similar shop nearer to school at Lake Market near the junction of Rashbehari Avenue and Lake Road which formatted the same way as the other shop was designed to make children drool. This shop had a more extensive collection and also kept Cadbury’s. The four annas that we got for lunch went a long way, it seems today, and we got quite a few things for that money. The funny part was when mother gave us lunch we would always come back home from school very hungry. But when we got the money for lunch it seemed that we were not so hungry coming back. This was probably so because we wanted that the special treat of buying our own lunch would continue.  There are not many stories of St. Mary’s apart that the area where the school was would get flooded very easily and whenever it rained heavily we had to wade through the accumulated water. It was fun in a sense but then I was prone to tonsillitis and it would be another invitation to a running nose followed by fever.  

St. Lawrence was a bigger school and we spent a longer time there. So there were more stories here. St. Lawrence was huge compared to St. Mary’s. The main building and classrooms were housed in a 4-storied rectangular grey coloured edifice in a L-shaped format. The longer portion of the L had the classrooms while the shorter portion had the boarder’s dormitory and their refectory. Being a convent the school took in Christian boys as boarders for those who asked for it and for the weaker sections of their community who could not afford to send their children to school. For such children the schooling was free. Next to the L shaped building was a building housing the living quarters of the teachers and some priests. The Principal’s office was in this building while the Rector’s office was in the L-shaped building. The Rector was responsible for the day to day working of the school. Fr. Sassell, my devil incarnate three years earlier – if one could call him that, was very efficient and ran a tight ship and was a strict disciplinarian to boot. There was little that he would miss. If we had committed any mischief and got reported by the teacher to Fr. Sassell then depending on the offence there was a graded system of punishment ranging from one’s sideburns getting pulled upwards to get a couple of painful raps on the knuckles with a Bata pencil. The company that made Bata shoes used to give in those days a complimentary pencil which was about a foot long and about an inch in diameter. Both punishments hurt quite a lot and it was rare that there would be a second offence from anyone who had received the punishment. There were three mid-sized football grounds in the school. Two of them in front of the Father’s building would be merged to form a full fledged football field which would be when we had the Catholic Inter-school football tournaments for the Bishop’s Cup. For our normal play we would play in the mid-sized fields. During the winter season the full sized ground would double up as a cricket ground. Leading off from the boarder’s hostel along that side were the common toilets and beyond that a small lake. The boarders would go swimming in this on Sundays and holidays. There was a pathway which ran all along the perimeter of the grounds. It was a good school with lots of space for young boys like us to play and expend our energy. Just behind the main building, the longer portion of the L, inside was a grove of trees spaced out and in between them were the swings and the slides for us to play during lunch. There was also some open space in the grove for us to play marbles. On a mound inside the grove at lunch-time we would have two vendors who would come in with eats. This would be packed in trunks and as soon as the lunch bell rang they would open the lids of the tin trunks letting out the aroma of the hot food that they had brought. The aroma would by itself sharpen your hunger. A crowd of boys who had not brought lunch from home would throng both vendors. One of them served vegetarian snacks while the other brought puffs and patties filled with chicken and mutton. The four anna lunch allowance continued for us when mother could not give us lunch and again, to repeat oneself, it went a long way. The vegetarian fare would be mostly luchi and aloo-dum and other savouries like a chop or conical paper tubes filled with chana-choor. The aloo-dum tasted heavenly and still remains on my tongue to this day. The aroma of the spices that covered the small potato, with just the right amount of chili to make you draw your breath in and the potato just the right consistency to bite through and not mushy. The luchi was oily but then who cared. We were young. Along with the vendors was another person with a stand filled with glass bottles of different shapes and sizes filled with the most tasty, lip-smacking goodies that you could imagine. These were chooran or hojmi – salts, herbs and spices mixed together and made into bite size balls, black in colour, or dried and then powdered into a sand coloured powder. The black balls were a little sweet to sharpen the salty, tangy taste while the sand coloured powder served in a small paper wrap – pudiya was salty and sour. The moment you put either of these in your mouth, it would let loose your taste buds and a thousand sensations would crowd your tongue and the tanginess would automatically make you narrow your eyes. There were also pickled kul – the brown coloured berries with a pip inside candied in sugar or jiggery, one did not know what. Also similar curried raw mango slices. In season he would have raw mango that would be cut in slices and with rock-salt and red chili powder sprinkled on it. Also ambda – hogplums that were just ripening sliced and flavoured with the same salt and chili powder. The ambda would have a fibrous centre which you would suck upon getting alternate tastes of sweet from the ambda and then the tanginess from the other powders put on it. We ate from these vendors throughout school and you would never hear of someone having a stomach upset after eating their wares or become unwell. That used to be the quality of the stuff that was served those days. Vendors had not thought of starting to adulterate their goods with the intention to make more money. Moreover these vendors were chosen by the school authorities and one would believe that the principle of hygiene would have been drilled into them considering the clientele being small children. 

There was one incident in school almost as soon as I joined St. Lawrence. From what I remember it was when I was in Class 4. In the Catholic schools there was a system of constant review of the academic progress of the student. Thus we had weekly tests on almost all the subjects in the syllabus. And we would be given a report card for the month which would carry the marks that we had got in the tests in that month and also comments on our conduct, discipline, neatness in dress etc. These cards were colour coded: pink standing for very good, green standing for good and yellow for bad and also given if you had failed in any test. We would have to get these reports signed by our parent and return it to the school. The weekly tests were held in the afternoon mostly on Fridays, Thursday being our weekly off. The idea was that we would get some time to study for the test on Friday. The next week’s test was to be Hindi, one of my ‘favourite’ subjects where with great difficulty I would try and reach the pass mark of 40 but would always fall tantalizingly short by 1 or 2 marks. I do not know whether this incident happened because the test was for Hindi or what. I thought that the Hindi teacher told us that the test would be held as usual in the afternoon of the coming Friday but then the morning would be off for us since there was some committee of the Catholic School Board visiting the school in the morning on Friday and all teachers were expected to be available for that meeting. Confident in what I had heard, I stayed home that morning on Friday and even when my mother asked me I told her that the school was off in the morning but we would have the Hindi test in the afternoon for which I would go after lunch. Thus I reached the school a couple of minutes before lunch time and found that the Hindi test was going on in class! I was shocked to say the least. I did not really know what to do. I avoided the eye of the Hindi teacher in the class and managed to come down to the play ground. After some time when the gong for the lunch recess sounded my friends came down and asked me what happened? I had not turned up for the test! I mumbled something but was feeling really down in the dumps and confided to a close friend about my misunderstanding. He rganizedd with me and said that the test was scheduled for the morning and the afternoon was off for us because of the Committee’s visit. I must have been inattentive in class and also had not bothered to check with any of my friends. Those days were not when all of us had telephones at home and you could check at the last minute plus the intervening weekly off on Thursday had complicated matters. I did not go home immediately that day but dawdled in the school grounds until it was the regular time to return home after school. At home I did not say anything and when mother asked me about the Hindi test, I said it went off OK. She would worry about Hindi for me since she knew I was weak in the subject. Throughout the afternoon when I was alone in school and on the way back, I was thinking of how to get out of my predicament. The matter would get compounded when the monthly report card would come. As expected it was yellow and where the Hindi test marks should have been there was some marking, either a dash or DNA – Did Not Appear. I do not remember exactly now. The report card would be filled up with an ink pen. I remember mother asking about the report card and my saying that it had not come yet. Almost a week had gone by and it was time to return the card, the class teacher had also reminded me about it. I was trying to avoid giving it in since getting mother’s signature on the card would be difficult since I would have to explain the marking against Hindi in the card. From the school there was a second reminder to return the card. I realized now that I could not hold it back any longer. But what was I to do about the Hindi marks? Then an idea struck me. Rub off the school marking against Hindi and fill up 38 there in pencil. My thinking was that I would manage mother’s signature on the card with the penciled marks and then rub that off when I submit it later to the school. Brilliant, eh! But the problem was that first, it was difficult to rub off the ink marking next to Hindi and however much I tried it smudged and the report card paper was thin, it started to tear at that place. Without making a further mess of the card, I overwrote 38 in pencil on the existing writing next to Hindi and took it to mother. She was first perturbed as to why I should have got a yellow card because my normal was green with an occasional pink. She looked at the marks for the other subjects and found that they were my normal scores. The same were the comments about conduct etc. But then she asked what is this against Hindi? Why are the marks given in pencil and my you have failed again? I explained that the Hindi teacher had been rushed and had filled for everyone the marks in pencil. My mother looked at me quizzically and turning the report card looked at the back saying – It’s tearing here. Someone has tried to rub off something. I tried to reason with mother saying just sign it and get it over with. My mother smart woman that she was knew by then that something was wrong and said that she would not sign the report card. When I explained that I had to give it in the next day, she said I will come with you and meet Fr. Sassell, the Rector about this. When I heard that – it was almost as if the whole world crashed on my head and I broke down and told mother the truth, the whole truth. She was very upset with me and also started crying that mischief was something that she could tolerate but not lying and untruth. She was inconsolable. I felt very bad then and did not speak until the next morning while we were going to school. I told mother that I was sorry. She smiled at me and said – Now let’s go to school and see how we can sort this out. We went into Fr. Sassell’s office and waited for him. Once the school had started he came in. My mother showed him my report card and asked me to tell him what I had done to it and why. Fumbling my way through the story and controlling my sobs I related the whole thing to Fr. Sassell. The report card was in his hands, which he flipped and looked at the back, then he looked at the penciled 38 that I had put in next to Hindi. He again looked at me looking stern and implacable but then a smile creased the corners of his mouth and he said to mother – At least he did not give himself a pass mark. Thank God for that! Then turning to me he said – We have to punish you for what you have done. Wait a minute. Saying that he got up and went to the cupboard behind him. As for me the ground seemed to come up and hit me in the face. My mother later told me that my face had gone ashen and she thought I would collapse at any moment. In any case, I held my ground and Fr. Sassell came back with the huge Bata pencil in his hand. I had continued to stand to the right of Fr. Sassell’s desk. He asked me to extend my hand with the palm facing downwards, which I did. He raised the Bata pencil high and I kept my eyes closed and could almost feel the pain of it crashing on my knuckles. But nothing happened! Quite a long time passed I thought but the pencil still had not hit me. I could not understand why and opened my eyes slowly to see Fr. Sassell smiling at me. It was rare to see Fr. Sassell smile. He asked me – Did it hurt? I shook my head mutely. It could not have because Fr. Sassell had stopped the pencil just a little bit above my hand. Then looking at mother he said – How can I punish him? He has admitted his mistake and confessed to you. Not only that, he has told the truth. This will be a lesson for him not to ever do things like this again. Saying that he asked me to go to my class and mother went home. That incident remained with me for life and since that day I have never lied or spoken any untruth, however costly it would be to me. At home, mother had to tell father about the incident and I got the usual about 5 lashings of a belt on my back. The tears came but they were tears of relief that finally I had got what I had deserved. Later when my mother and I would be sitting alone talking about the incident, I would tell her that at least I did not give myself a 50 or something in Hindi. For which she said, that would be equally suspicious and she would apart for the reason that the marks had been put in pencil would have come and asked the Hindi teacher how this miracle had occurred! A small disadvantage from this incident was that Fr. Sassell came to know me and I lost the advantage of anonymity in school which is very important in school life – the maxim not to be too well known by your teachers.  

We had the usual range of sicknesses that would visit Calcutta depending on what season you were in. I was a sickly child when I was small and would give no end of trouble to my mother particularly. I had inflamed tonsils bordering on being septic and as soon as the first showers after the Durga Puja in October would announce the onset of winter, I would have a running nose which would be with me until the end of spring in late March. During this period if I was exposed to the weather without the usual precautions the cold would convert into a fever and drive me into bed for a few days. Our family doctor at that time was one Dr Sundar Rao, an elderly man. Fair with a bald head, a bit short and of middling physique. I did not like to too much to go to his clinic for fear of injections of which I had been a recipient a number of times. Along with him in his clinic he had a compounder who on a table set against a wall had large crucibles filled with red, blue and pink liquids. The compounder’s job was to give us the medicine looking at the doctor’s prescription. What I felt was that the compounder at random picked up the liquid with a pipette from any one of the crucibles and put it into flat, pint sized bottles which on one of the flat side had a label with the doctor’s name, address of the clinic, your name and the dosage to be taken. On the other flat side of the bottle was a graduated scale running from the top of the bottle to the bottom which indicated to you the dosage that was to be taken. The compounder would expertly write out the label first then stick it to the bottle, flip the bottle over and stick the graduated scale and then fill the bottle.    There was nothing much that could be done about it and I had been taken to a number of doctors who were in the majority of the opinion that I should have the tonsils removed. This would entail a surgical procedure done under local anaesthesia where the surgeon would reach out through your open mouth and snip the two tonsils, on either side of your throat standing there as guardians against disease. But then when the guardians were themselves, how would they be able to protect you was the point made by the doctors. But I stood steadfast and staunchly refused for having any organ to be removed from my body. Actually it was more the fear of being sedated losing consciousness, that is if the local anesthesia did not work, and having the doctors snip around inside my throat and then someone had told me that sometimes people bloat up, that is become fat, after the operation. And thin as a rail that I was I did not quite relish the fact of going around looking fat. The tonsils therefore remained and are still with me as on date. My problem with their getting infected with the onset of winter was sorted out by our family doctor, Dr Lily Pai to whom we would go to after Dr Sundar Rao. She was from our community, a hefty lady, tall as much as she was broad and with a booming, hearty manly voice. I used to like her and would love to go and visit her. On one of the visits during winter when I was already seized of my annual affliction, she told mother that we need to find a permanent solution to this problem. I must have been 10 or 11 at that time. So she recommended me Septilin from this new company called Himalaya Drug Co. which had brought out ayurvedic formulations. The medicine was in the form of pills which I would have to take over six months actually, spanning the winter. She said let’s see, after the first year if we require it we will continue next year. I became cured after the first year and since that time except for an occasional cold not necessarily in the winter I have not suffered because of my tonsils in a chronic manner. In those days it was unusual for an allopathic doctor to recommend ayurveda medicines and that too from a fledgling company. Though today Himalaya Drug Co. is a large company offering a range of ayurvedic formulations. Visiting an ayurvedic doctor in Mysore where we stay recently I was pleasantly surprised that even now after close to 70 years I could spot Septilin on the doctor’s shelf. Considering that I still have the sore throat problem and with the irregular weather in Mysore I decided to take a course of Septilin much to the amusement of the doctor who said - Just looking at the Septilin bottle you will get cured.

Dr Lily Pai was the daughter-in-law of Gopal Pai, one of the first or at least the second, memory lets me down, Patent General of India. The Patent Office was in Calcutta then and maybe still continues there. Gopal Pai was also one of the first Konkani person to come and settle down in Calcutta. There being another Pai who had come more or less at the same time and working with Imperial Bank which was to later become State Bank of India. Both families were large and having come down very early to Calcutta used to help others from the community to come and settle down in the city. Thus Mr Pai who was in a senior position with Imperial Bank arranged for many a job for those from the Konkani community in the bank. In those days employers preferred to take people with references from their senior employees since that helped the establishment to have known people and they could also ensure loyalty and a honest approach to work. Going back to Gopal Pai at the Patent Office, he also did the same and one of his sons Shrikar Pai also rose to become the Patent General of India. Gopal Pai had three sons – Shekhar, Shrikar and the third, one forgets the name. Shekhar was the oldest and was involved in some kind of business and his wife was Dr Lily Pai, our family doctor who had the magic healing touch. Shekhar and Lily Pai had two sons, about the same age as us, one of whom became a doctor and the other an engineer. We did not have much contact with Shrikar Pai. Both Gopal Pai and the other Pai at Imperial Bank maybe because of the length of their stay at Calcutta found some of their children becoming more Bengali than Konkani in their mannerisms and behavior down to usage of language. In fact the Pai of Imperial Bank had one of his daughters marry a Bengali which was quite the ‘forward’ thing to do in those days.  

But then inoculations for pox and cholera were regularly given each year at school by the municipal health authorities free of charge. The pox inoculation was just scribing three scratches on your arm but for cholera it was an injection. One remembers in the lower classes that the injection looked massive considering that all of us were afraid of injections. Then also the senior boys would go around saying that you should keep your muscle on the upper arm near your left shoulder tight while taking the injection so that it would hurt less while actually it was the opposite! That was their idea of fun! Even keeping the muscle loose the injection would still hurt and one would come out trying to control your tears so that you did not get called ‘sissy’ and massaging the point at which the injection was given so that the hurt would subside quickly. After the cholera injection sometimes one developed a fever the next day as a reaction. Nothing to worry about but this was normal. The cholera incidence during the rains was regular in Calcutta those days sometimes reaching epidemic proportions but we were relieved that with the injections we would be protected and even if we contracted the disease it would not become very acute. Jaundice was also very common those days in Calcutta and would also visit during the rains or just before that. I had once contracted it when I was in Class 6. The attack was severe and I was told that my whole body had become yellow and I was almost at death’s door. Those days there was really no cure for jaundice and all you could do was to wait for the disease to run its course. At the same time one had to be careful about food and not eat anything oily. To support the diseased liver and allow it to get normal quickly rossogolla, sugar-cane juice and bottle gourd was recommended as part of the diet. Since I was down with jaundice for about 3 – 4 months I became tired of that diet and in later life tended to shun these three things, even the rossogolla. The disease had caught me at a wrong time and though my mother used to tell me that at some moments she thought I would be gone, it came at a time when the annual exams were due. I was very weak and there was no question of my being able to give the exams. This left mother distraught and even me since we thought that I would lose one year at school. But in the form of a Good Samaritan our Jesuit father and class-teacher Fr. Siluvai visited me at home. Looking at my condition he promised mother to see what he could do since she had expressed concern that I may have to remain in the same class again. A few days after Fr. Siluvai’s visit we got a letter from him sent through my brother who was in the same school, St. Lawrence with me but two classes below. The letter said that he had spoken to the Rector and Principal about my case and that I would be promoted to Class 7 without giving the final exams and this was being done because of my proficiency in the earlier terminal exams in the current academic year. This news was like manna from Heaven and both I and my mother were overjoyed. Fr. Siluvai had helped save a year for me at school. God bless him wherever he may be now!  

Somewhere around that time I recall once returning from school alone in the afternoon, I do not know for what. Maybe there was a special class, I think. It was also a public holiday. I was then in Class 7 or 8 walking back to the Hazra Road junction to take the bus or tram back home. There was a fork in the road and if you took the left road you would land up at the Hazra Road junction which was the one we normally took. And if you took the right road you landed up at the previous stop to the Hazra Road junction from where the fare back home on the bus or tram was not the minimum lie it was from Hazra Road but a wee bit higher. That is why we always got into the tram or bus at the Hazra Road junction. On the fateful afternoon I took the right road and after some time that road takes a left turn past the Beltola Girls High School. It was just past three in the afternoon and being a public holiday the school was closed. There was also no one on the streets being afternoon. I had hardly gone past the turn when I found two or three dogs until then lying down on the side of the road get up upon seeing me and start barking. I crossed the road and went on the other side but that did not seem to help since hearing the dogs barking some two other dogs on this side of the road also came out. They were right in front of me and I was caught in a dilemma. Three dogs on the left of me barking and moving menacingly towards me and two dogs right in front of me barking and moving straight at me. I did what any sensible boy would have done, took the angular left got into the middle of the road and ran. I had my satchel bag slung around my shoulders and that was really an impediment to speed since it kept moving one side to another while my feet were flying on the road surface. At that time I did not know that dogs were always faster than a teenage boy. The dogs seeing me take to my heels gave chase and there I was in the heat of the afternoon in Calcutta city being chased by a pack of five dogs. I do not know whether I ran really fast or the fear of the dogs behind me made me run faster but I surely beat the dogs in the race that day. I must have raced some five hundred yards when the main S P Mukherjee was in sight and there were one or two people on the road now. The dogs whatever gives them good sense or my good luck, made them stop.  By then I was physically exhausted, sweating profusely and wide-eyed with fear and another ten yards the dogs would have been upon me since I could not run any longer. I then stopped and sat down on the corner of the road trying to get my breath back which was coming in rasping, wracking bouts through my heaving chest. Many years later while relating this story to a dog lover, he told me that I should not have run. A dog, he said is equally afraid of man, and the moment you stop the dog will also stop maintaining a reasonable distance. All you have to do then, I believe, look the dog in the eye and show him that you are not afraid. After a while the dog will move away. Try telling that to a twelve year old boy who has just been through an experience like I had been and he was bound to call you mad. But now whenever I am near a dog I follow that principle and I am glad to say that it works. But after that incident I have this dislike for dogs and prefer them to be as far as possible. In fact two of my very close friends, one in Calcutta and the other in Delhi, had these huge Alsatian dogs and I would always tell them that if I had to come to their place then the dogs would have to be locked up in a room elsewhere or they should make sure they would not come near me at all. In fact there was many a situation when invited to their homes I would ask if we could not meet somewhere outside. It is not that I hate dogs but I prefer them to be at a safe distance from me.  

A similar experience of fright – stage fright – occurred to me round about the same time. Considering I was good at English our class teacher was keen that I should go for the Inter-School debate and the topic was on astronomy, something that I liked and which the class teacher knew. So he gave my name in and I prepared my speech and practiced it in front of my mother. I was to speak for five minutes. The venue of the debate was the St. Xavier’s school auditorium. I reached there well in time and sat down. I did not know anybody around. I went up to the coordinating teacher and gave in my name which he checked against a sheet and then asked me to sit down. Some of the fathers at St. Xaviers and the debate started at the appointed time. This was my first exposure to a debate and I had not found out after whom I was supposed to speak. This left me all the more in suspense when the coordinating teacher called out the name of the next speaker since I always expected it would be me. So before going on stage I was a bundle of nerves and more so when my name was called out as the next speaker. My legs felt wobbly and suddenly seemed unable to support me. But I managed to go up on stage and under the encouraging gaze of the coordinating teacher reached up for the microphone and adjusted it to near my mouth. But then after that nothing happened. Looking out now over the vast auditorium, darkened towards the back and with only the first three rows of seats filled with a sprinkling of students and their escorts, some seemed like parents, some their teachers, I had nothing to say. My tongue was locked in my mouth and no words were coming out. As the seconds ticked by panic increased over the fact that I was unable to speak and the auditorium seemed to become like a huge cave in front of which I was standing. I must have stood there in front of the microphone for maybe a couple of minutes, silently and dumbly, when the coordinating teacher relieved me of the torture and coming on stage escorted me down. I was very grateful to him and expressed that with my eyes. I sat through the debate watching the other speakers make their sprightly presentations. At the end of the debate all the participants were given a paperback book on astronomy which had colour plate photographs of some of the planets. It was a very definitive and detailed book on the planets constituting our universes and I had it for a long time. That was my first experience at debate and that fear of the stage has stayed with me. In the sales and marketing field that was my profession it was required to make a lot of presentations and in the first minute or so I would always stumble but only to recover and put up a flawless show. Looking back at that fiasco I still think that if a teacher had accompanied me for the debate keeping me at ease by chatting with me before I went up on stage, I would have probably been able to speak. In any case there is no need to cry over spilt milk and we need to move on.   

Considering that from Class 4 I would go to school alone and that too changing two buses sometimes and also familiar with the local language – Bengali, I was considered an expert in getting around Calcutta within the family. Thus whenever any infrequent visitor would come home like a relative or any other acquaintance and it was their first visit to Calcutta, it would fall upon me to take them out and show them the sights. To places like the zoo if they had come with family and had children, we would all go together but to other places like Victoria Memorial, the New Market – Chowringhee area and the must-see Belur and Dakshineshwar temples along with the then 300 year old banyan tree in the Botanical Garden at Sibpur. I used to enjoy these outings since it helped me see more of the city and I would sometimes find out newer routes to reach the places of interest. Like the Dakshineshwar temple you could reach by just taking a boat from Belur since it was just across the river Hooghly. This saved a lot of time of getting caught up in traffic apart from the novelty of the boat actually a launch trip. These innovative methods had got me into trouble once. My maternal uncle, my mother’s youngest brother had come and he wanted to see the Marble Palace and Rabindranath Tagore’s house in Jorasanko. I did not actually know where they were but from the guide that my maternal uncle, we got the address. Looking at the address I thought it was somewhere off Central Avenue. So we took off and reaching Central Avenue and after asking around for the poet laureate’s house got into the bye-lanes leading off Central Avenue. And surprisingly we landed up in Sonagachi, Calcutta’s red-light district. I was deeply embarrassed since I was hardly twelve years old and more so my uncle. We hurriedly beat a retreat from that area and came straight home forgetting about the Marble Palace and Rabindranath Tagore’s house in Jorasanko. Other than that the visitors would always indulge me with cold drinks, ice-cream or snacks depending on what time of the day it was and what urged me at that point in time. So all in all on a holiday it was a good thing to do. 

Fr. Siluvai, who had helped promote me as related earlier, was a lean, dark man with a squarish face and with the priest’s cassock seeming to overwhelm him, one felt in the manner he handled it. Mother and I suspected that he was a Tamilian. He was an energetic young man involving himself in all student activities but was a hard task-master at the same time. I still remember both him and Fr. Carlson, our class teacher in Class 11 wrapping the bottom of the cassock around their waists and joining us for a game of football. Wonder of wonders! Under the cassock the fathers wore trousers! That ever-present doubt of ours was then resolved. Fr. Carlson was particularly good at football and would give us youngsters a run for our money. Dribbling was his forte and unleashing a cannon-ball shot once he came near goal. We later found that he was Belgian which explained the blue eyes. Talking about football, our school had a good football team but not exceptional. There were two football teams – the juniors and seniors. For both the standard was the same and we did not make much of a mark in the inter-school tournaments that used to happen then. The tournaments were rganized among all schools and there was another one for only the Catholic schools. For the first category we did not stand a chance since the Bengali schools had teams which were far superior to us. We would be middling in performance in the Catholic schools tournament which for the seniors was the Bishop’s Cup. Here again one remembers that the eight years that I spent at St. Lawrence’s, it was only once that we got into the semi-finals of the Bishop’s Cup but never into the finals. Schools like St. Paul’s, Don Bosco. La Martiniere’s even St. Xavier’s were much better than us. Some of the Central Calcutta school teams had some of the Azerbaijani boys in their team. These fellows were double the size of our players and one wondered whether they met the age criteria looking at their trimmed facial hair. Our team was made up mostly of the boarders who got more time to practice. They were good. One remembers Lucas on the left wing who would dart down and send in immaculate centres to the goal mouth. Michael who again had a wonderful left foot and in one match sent in a dream free kick what we used to call a ‘rainbow’ from beyond the centre line which went over the opposing goal-keeper’s head and just dipping under the cross-bar into goal. In my life I have not seen a better free-kick. Beckham and Maradona would do for the curling free-kicks but you needed Michael for a rainbow free-kick. Then we had Paul, again a boarder, who had such fantastic dribbling skills that we would take the ball at the centre-line dribble past six or seven defenders from the opposing team and then finally dribble past the goalie and put the ball slowly into goal. Paul was a great guy but prone to showing off which cost us a couple of the important matches. One does not know why but our school, St. Lawrence had always a grudge relationship with St. Xavier’s and the matches between us got an extra bit of emotion going. St. Xaviers were not better than us in football but in cricket they had actually a very good team and were champions consistently in the inter- Catholic school tournaments.    

As we got into Class 10 and then 11 the pressure of studies took over since all of us were keen to do well and go into engineering and medical courses for those of us in the science stream. Our school had a tradition of 100% pass results consistently in the Higher Secondary exam and also a very high % of first class and it was drilled into us that we should not let the school down. It was rare that we would have any of our students in the merit list across the State but then getting more than 80% in any subject which distinction was called a ‘letter’ was quite common for our boys. It was rumoured that the reason for even our best boys not figuring in the State’s merit list was because our answer papers were distributed to teachers from the non-English medium schools particularly for the languages, English and Bengali or Hindi for the vernacular. There was always a relationship bordering on the jealous between the Bengali-medium and English-medium schools. It was also said that for the English paper these Bengali-medium school teachers could not understand what our boys write in their answer-papers. This jealousy and maybe lack of comprehension led to our school boys getting abysmally low marks in the languages mostly in English. This was true since some of our boys who went on to becoming poets and also journalists in the English newspapers like Kalyan Roy and Arindam Basu scored below 50% in English in their H.S. exam. Thus while the Bengali medium schoolboys could score even in the language papers our schoolboys were handicapped. Thus the ranks in those tears on the State merit list would go to Hindu School and Ballygunge Government High Scool, the latter located a stone’s throw from our school. But in the competitive exams for engineering and medical seats we would score better than these other schools. Even for me at the H.S. where I got through with 4 ‘letters’ in the Science subjects – Physics, Chemistry, Mathematics and Mechanics. In the language papers for English I scored below 50% and my English was considered good and wonder of wonders in Hindi, with which  I shared a hate relationship starting from Class 4 and getting the pass mark of 40%  was insurmountable most of the time, I got more than 50%.  My mother was very much surprised that in the Higher Secondary exam I got more marks in Hindi than in English, having struggled all the way in school to just get the pass marks in Hindi.  

That was more or less the end of school. St Lawrence was far from Pratapaditya Road and we would have normally to take two buses to reach there. One was to take the bus or tram upto Hazra Park on S P Mookherjee Road and then take another bus from there. The other way was to take a bus No. 9 up to Golepark and then from there take another bus No. 16 up to the school. Initially the Golepark route was preferred since the No. 9 would be plying opposite to the traffic in the morning and would be going up to its terminus at Golepark. Thus it would be more or less empty or empty itself by the time it reached the terminus. Thus you would more often than not get a place to sit on this bus. The added attraction was that the No. 9’s were all double-decker buses and you could go up to the top deck and sit on front almost above the driver’s head and have the early morning breeze in your face apart from the better view from that height. The No. 16 was Golepark to Shibpur and would start from Golepark thus allowing you there again a chance to get a seat as long you reached in time. If the No. 9 reached just before the No. 16 was readying to go then it would be full up and you would have to stand. The No. 16 dropped us right in front of St. Lawrence. The conductors in both the buses were by now familiar with us since our school uniforms were then somewhat close to theirs in drabness. While they wore khaki, we would wear steel gray trousers or shorts (for the lower classes) and above that a lighter steel gray bush-shirt. The makers of the famous Kwality ice-cream at that time had their vendors riding their cycle-based trolleys with the same colour uniforms as ours. So we would be ribbed out of school as Kwality ice-cream sellers. In any case, it was a hectic day. I thought I was late. I had somehow managed to jump on to the floorboard of the No. 9 as it was leaving the stop where I normally got in. The conductor who was known to me, remonstrated me. The No. 9 reached Golepark and there was the No. 16 readying to go. So I rushed and got in. No seat for me in No. 16. So I stood. The conductor came after some time and asked for the ticket. I reached in my pocket for the money but my pocket was empty! I looked into the other pocket of the trouser, the hip-pocket too and the pocket of the bush-shirt. But there was no money anywhere. I clearly remembered having a 25 paisa coin. The conductor understood my predicament and since he again knew me by face, he told me not to worry but pay me tomorrow. I sheepishly nodded my head. The school stop came and I got off. Even after getting off I was furiously looking for the missing 25 paisa coin. It was nowhere to be seen. I kept running through my mind the sequence of events since morning. I had already 10 pisa from yesterday and mother gave me the 25 paisa coin for the day’s bus fare. It was 10 paisa for the No. 9 and 15 paisa for the No. 16. I had put both coins in my pocket giving the 10 paisa to the No. 9 conductor. The 25 paisa coin should have been there but where would it have gone? I had nothing in my pockets. The mystery remained. I came back home with a frown on my face. Mother sensed something was wrong the moment she saw me. I told her what happened and her advice was to forget about it and to be more careful in future with money. She asked to to go in change, wash up and come for tea. I went in still upset, removed my bush-shirt, put it on the hanger. Then removed my trouser and to fold it properly, inverted it so that I could align the creases properly. Something fell out, something silvery which made a tinkle when it fell on the ground and rolled under the cot. I hurriedly put the trousers on its hanger and hung it up and then dived under the cot. What do I see but a 25 paisa coin looking up at me! I was sure that it was smiling! My heart jumped and I was delighted no end! Clutching the coin in my fingers I rushed to mother telling her that I had found it. She asked me from where. I said – It fell out of the trousers. My mind flew back to the morning. The 10 paisa coin I had given the No. 9 conductor and had put the 25 paisa coin in my bush-shirt pocket. In the hurry it must have fallen down and got stuck in the fold of the trousers at the bottom. Those days the trousers would have a one inch fold at the bottom. The coin had remained in the fold through the day, through all my running around and other activities in school and not got dislodged. And then it had surprised me in the evening! This was a surprise that heartened me very much and I was very thankful for having found the coin. Nobody could call me – negligent and careless! The next day getting up into the No. 16 bus the same conductor was there from the day before and with a wide grin I paid double fare. But then in his graciousness he gave me back one fare saying the day’s accounts are settled for that day. Today is a new day. I had thus 15 paisa to spend on a luchi- aloo-dum or a chooran at lunch time. I exclaimed – God is great!        

In school the second half of Class 11 there was a lot of pressure from the school to brush up for the Higher Secondary exam. The reason for this was that the school prided itself on the 100% pass result along with the maximum number of first classes. This meant our getting the question papers of pass years which were fat books having more than a thousand pages filled with question papers answer to the numerical questions relating to mathematics and the science subjects. Life passed through the papers of the book with talk in the class moving to which year question papers you were solving at that moment. The idea behind all this was to get practice and be familiar with the kind of questions likely. This would help us not get surprised when we got the actual final exam papers in our hands and also to build up speed while solving the numerical questions. The system worked not only for the Higher Secondary exam but also for the competitive engineering exams that most of us were planning to appear for.  

As I was going to Class 10 we had in our para a new arrival who modified an existing house and made it somewhat palatial. This was one Dr S K Dutta who had a son also named S K Dutta who was in my class. Initially Dutta would go to school in his father’s black Ambassador car but after some time he proposed that we walk to school. Looking at it the idea was not bad and considering that it would take about 40 – 45 minutes and avoid the hassle of changing two buses and the rush in the buses I readily agreed. So for almost two years Dutta and I walked to school together. With the bus fare that mother gave me, saved, I used it to have some goodies from the vendors at the school during lunch. Dutta had taken Biology as his fourth Science subject to follow in his father’s footsteps and become a doctor. He was not a very communicative type, dressed very prim and proper always and was good at studies. We got on reasonably well and if you had someone to talk to on the long walk, the tedium was surely reduced.  

We would cross S P Mukherjee Road and go past the Children’s Park and the small lake – Choto Lake. This road was wide and curved to the left before it straightened out after a kilometer or so and joined Southern Avenue. On the left of the road were palatial building mostly of rich Bengalis and stinking new-money Marwaris in huge buildings with joint families. Most of these houses had large verandahs overlooking the lakes for the view. On the right side of the road was a small pavement segregated by an iron railing which separated the small patch of open space and the internal road of the Lakes before it reached the bank of the lake after another patch of open space. There were lots of trees on both sides of the internal paved road on which traffic was not allowed except on special occasions. This internal road went all around the Choto Lake and beyond another open stretch on the opposite bank you had the train tracks leading back to Budge Budge and up ahead to Lake Gardens and beyond. There were benches at select places right along the bank of the lake which were used by dating couples mostly late afternoon and evening. The pavement on the left of the road was wider and Dutta and I preferred to walk on it since there was less of a chance to get ‘bombed’ by the birds sitting on the branches of the trees which overhung the right pavement. Two-thirds of the way down on this road was the cinema theater – Menaka, which used to get all the Hindi films. We would see very exciting posters pasted on the walls of the theater while we passed it. Almost opposite the theater was the main athletics stadium of Calcutta – the Rabindra Sarobar Stadium.The stadium stood on the corner of this road and Southern Avenue. At this junction we would take a right and follow the periphery of the stadium until it reached the Lake Gardens road and then take a left at the petrol pump on that corner to ultimately reach Lansdowne Road. Southern Avenue was relatively posh and at this junction there were a number of high rises even then about 6-8 stories high. We were about 20 minutes out of our houses by then on the walk. Another 5 minutes later we would reach the corner of Lansdowne Road and Rashbehari Avenue. This corner or should one say junction would figure prominently in my life once I finished engineering. Diagonally opposite us was Deshapriya Park, a rectangular park with one side of it adjoining Lansdowne Road taking up almost half the pavement with hawkers selling mostly cloth and cloth items and other knick-knacks ranging from novelty and gift items to stationery etc. The park was enclosed by a three foot cement wall on top of which were iron railings that you could see into the park. And just opposite the hawker shops inside the park were tennis courts. There were two of them enclosed with wire netting up to almost twelve feet high. They were hard court with red mud covering the expanse of the court with the white lines marked on them for the outlines of the court and with the three foot high net strung across the court bisecting the length into half. Beyond this court after allowing for some space in between you had another wire netting rise up and then you had the other court. When we passed in the morning the hawker shops were hardly open and this pavement was almost empty. If we were lucky we would see some of the boys in their white shorts and T shirts and white keds – canvas shoes playing tennis. They were maybe late risers, sliding on the red hard court to reach out for the ball with the heavy tennis racquet. One would watch with envy these boys playing tennis since it was an expensive game and beyond what we could afford. The first time that I stepped onto a tennis court was during engineering when I had gone to see an inter-hostel match at our IIT campus in Kharagpur. Later I tried my hand at it with a borrowed racquet, the balls the IIT Gymkhana would provide, but the racquet was heavy and the ball coming at speed would almost blow the racquet from my hands since I was slightly built with thin wrists. The court was also huge and the ball on the hard court would zip past you before you a chance to move. I then knew that tennis was not for me and I stuck to table-tennis where you needed quick reflexes and supple wrists, which I reasonably had.   

In any case coming back to our walk, on the other side of Deshapriya Park opposite to the side where the hawkers shops were, there was another smaller road parallel to Lansdowne Road. On the corner of this road and Rashbehari Avenue was the Priya cinema theater which would again show mostly Hindi movies except for the occasional English movie for the morning show on Sundays. This smaller road led past some run down neighbourhoods and would ultimately intersect Hazra Road.  Beyond this junction and staying on the road as it went further, about half a kilometer, would be the start of the grey eight foot walls of our school. We would take this smaller road considering that it led straight to our school though you could take the Lansdowne Road and then after a while take the right leading you to Maddox Square, another park with a central pond which once upon a time had a fountain. The pond was then dry and the fountain was non-functional. At the corner of this park you could take a left and you would see the beginning of the school walls. At almost this corner one of our schoolmates, Amitava Ganguli stayed in a two storied house whose life was unfortunately and sadly cut short, but more about that later. Along the school walls almost before reaching Ballygunge Circular Road where this road met was a steel gate, one side of which would be opened and we were into our school about 40 -45 minutes since we left home. It was good exercise and in the winters particularly bracing. Summer was tolerable because we would reach school before it became really hot but rainy season we had to contend with flooding at the corner of the Menaka cinema road and Southern Avenue, on Southern Avenue as such, then during heavy rain at the Deshapriya Park Road corner. The smaller road past the Priya cinema rarely flooded but Lansdowne Road was pretty bad after a heavy shower of rain. Near the school we very rarely had any flooding.    

One must digress here a bit to relate some of our family economic issues. By the time I was going to Class 7 my father who was then working as a sales manager in a paper distribution company felt that as I was growing up I should get a feel for the office atmosphere. For this reason most of the weekly offs at school, that is Thursdays, I would be asked to report after lunch to his office. I would reach there about 2pm and sit across at his desk whether he was there or not there, having gone out for some official work. I was allowed to bring my school books and study but not any story books. If I had not brought anything with me father would give me some work of his, like copying out some papers or making out a table of some data or whatever. The whole process of visiting father’s office was rather boring and then doing some work that he would give, that is why I would take some textbook and make as if I was reading. I would, however, get an exemption from these office visits if the next day’s exam was a major one. This meant before the Hindi exam, where I struggled to get the pass mark, I would not have to visit his office on the Thursday preceding. On vacation, both summer and the October Puja vacation, the demands of my father that I report at his office every afternoon used to become rather overbearing. I would fret a lot about it to mother but neither I or she had much choice in the matter. My brother was spared this torture and when I questioned father on this once, he said the elder son has to carry the parent’s tradition. At that time I did not really understand what he said but the first seeds of my becoming a rebel, at least to father’s dictates, was sown. Going to his office was embarrassing to say the least. Firstly, at that age I would be wearing shorts and then go into the office where for a few days I would be questioned by almost everyone as to who I was, what I was doing and why I had come to the office? I had answers to most of the questions except the last one and when confronted with it would helplessly look at my father or point at him if his head was bent down at some paper on his desk. The office was a large hall lit by tube-lights hung from the ceiling interspersed with ceiling fans and strewn with desks of all shapes and sizes. Some of these would have typewriters on them which would be clattering away all the while. Thus there was no privacy or a place where I could hide. This led me to have frequent visits to the bathroom and spend a long time there. The bathrooms were not too great. They stank but at least I was away from those dozen or more eyes boring into my back. At around four o’clock they would serve tea at the office and I would get a cup. The tea was good and sweet providing the highlight of my visit. After a few days the people in the office would get used to me and I was ignored. In the evening just after having the tea I would start pestering father to let me go home since after that the office-hour rush on the buses or trams would begin. Father’s office was near Brabourne Road which was just off Dalhousie Square (since renamed as Binoy Badal Dinesh Bagh or B.B.D. Bagh), the central part of the office area of Calcutta then, The trams from our house would ply upto Dalhousie square from where father’s office was just a five minutes walk. Otherwise you could take a bus and get off almost opposite father’s office by taking bus no. 6 which would go further to Howrah Station which was not too far away from Brabourne Road. Father would let me go sometimes but at other times he would insist that I return with him which meant it could be anywhere between 6 – 7pm. He would also insist that we go back by the second class carriage of the tram where the ticket was cheaper. The tram had two coaches, the first one was first class with cushioned seats and the rear coach was second class with wooden seats, held together by a vacuum brake arrangement and a bellow like spring holding the two coaches together. I would not like going second class, because given the mind-set then among my friends and at school, I wanted nothing to do with second class. We would at these times reach home closer to 8pm. Apart from being ravenously hungry by that time, it would be dark and whatever chance I could get at snatching a game in between with my friends in the locality was well and truly gone. If I hurried after leaving father’s office, after having the tea I would at least in summer gat some time to play with my friends but I would have to skip the snacks mother would have made since the choice would be either game or snack, and the game always won. I do not really know whether father realized that he was not getting anywhere on his objective but was in fact increasing my antagonism to this exercise. Frankly, father had his own problems, what with having to bring home money to support a family of a wife and three kids, and he probably never gave my coming to the office a second thought after my accepting to reach there. Mother also kept advising me that after a few days father would stop calling me over. But that never happened. In between he changed jobs after some time and I would again meet another set of his office colleagues. This office was crummier than the earlier one which now looking back I should have realized that things were not going too well with father at work. My father was a matriculate and he believed that matriculation was enough to make do in life. He did not give any great importance to education and would tell me often that after matriculation, that is the Higher Secondary exam, he would get me a job. I did not like the idea since I wanted to pursue higher studies. I did not know what but I wanted to go to college. As is usual at that age when having to handle something that you did not like to do, I started to dawdle reaching the office, reach late maybe arrive just before the tea was served and then pester father that I wanted to go back before the rush-hour started. When questioned my late arrival, I would make stories that there was no tram or the bus wheel had burst leading to delays. At such time if I was allowed to go back after the tea, then essentially I was spending more time on the transport having a joyride up to the office and back and doing nothing else. That was my way of getting back at father for spoiling my games and generally my happiness. This going to his office schedule persisted until Class 8 but then in Class 9 I put my foot down and said that I would not come anymore. The reason I gave was that I needed to concentrate on my studies and Class 9 was when we were segregated in school to the science and commerce streams for the remaining three years before appearing for the Higher Secondary exam. Actually it was more the games that I was missing with my friends in the locality. Father was upset and blew his top but I remained firm. Mother supported me that since I was in the higher it was better that I concentrated on my studies. Father ultimately relented and after that I did not have to visit his office in the afternoons. My guess was that father had his own problems by then of having a steady income and had already changed a couple of jobs in a short span of time and at that time was working as a commission agent for a paper distribution house. He probably did not want to have another issue on his hands and stopped calling me over. I had won my freedom was my thought then. Things with father’s job became worse and he was without a job by the time I was in Class 10 or so. He would make do with whatever money could be made as an agent supplying paper and stationery items to banks where there were senior officers from our community. The connection with the banks led him to borrow and invest in a semi-automatic German printing press so that he could supply the printed forms to the banks. It was a nice machine called Heidelberg, if I remember correctly, which would pick up through its pneumatic arms the blank paper from one tray and after printing it drop it off on another tray. The speed of the machine was also pretty good. He would ask me to come to the press during my vacations knowing full well the importance of the senior classes and that I had to prepare for my finals and the competitive exams. One can also understand his problem since one worker familiar with the printing press that he employed was irregular and finally left. Then he had to do both – work inside the press as well as the outside work visiting the banks, buying paper and all that. So he needed someone to be at the press when he went out. He also had said – What was the point of doing higher studies when I could as well after my Higher Secondary look after the press. This set my alarm bells ringing as also my mother got quite concerned since she wanted me to study. This brought out the rebel in me again and there were many a confrontation between my father on one side and me and my other on the other. At this time or in fact quite earlier we would visit the home of the Mallyas in Gole Park. B M Mallya was the Chief Engineer of M N Dastur & Co, the leading Indian consulting company for steel in the country and a leading light of our community then in Calcutta particularly in matters of education. So one fine day I found myself at his house with mother for company, Bappa (as we called him) was ailing with some passing cold and fever. Though I used to visit the Mallyas quite often it was more in the daytime so it was rare to meet Bappa. In fact you could say that I had not seen him at all but for that day. What I recall is this bald, dark oval shaped bed propped up in a large bed and with a quilt covering him. Mother explained the purpose of our visit and after asking me my name and how I liked science, he told mother that if I was good in studies and if I got through the competitive exams to take Electronics as first choice and them Mechanical Engineering. As it turned out I took his advice in both letter and spirit. You could also say that I had no hand in what kind of an engineer I wanted to be and it was actually chosen for me by Bappa. The actual fact was that at that time we children would know nothing of what engineering discipline was best and we depended on advisors like Bappa. I had the bigger problem of wanting to leave Calcutta for fear that father would dump me into the press. Later in college I would regret that I did not take up a B.A. in English at St. Xavier’s College in Calcutta because the engineering course at 5 years was just too long but anyway that was not to be. Here I need to digress a bit and relate more about the Mallyas. Bappa means uncle for us in Konkani and is the paternal uncle. His wife was Pachi automatically, which means aunt for us. Pachi was a frail, slight woman but the most lovable lady in my life. Bappa and Pachi had a daughter as the only child, Vijju. She was older by a couple of years to our elder sister and we called her Vijju Akka. They also had Pachi’s mother, Mamama, staying with them, who would be dressed in the old world fashion of a sari tucked in between the legs. She was a very fair woman, short and slightly stocky but with the kindliest face in the world. My mother, I think knew of Pachi’s family from back in Mangalore but then the kind of person Pachi was that hardly made any difference because she was the same with everyone, warm and friendly. We were aware that Bappa and Vijju both liked books and during vacations Pachi would encourage mother to send us children to their place and spend time. I made the most of this invitation among the three of us. So most vacation days mostly in the afternoon after having an early lunch I would leave for Pachi’s house and spend the afternoon there looking up the books and reading them curled up in a corner undisturbed.  This was in their main bedroom where there was a huge bookrack running almost from floor to ceiling. After selecting a book I would just sit on the floor or sometimes go out on the circular verandah they had and sit on one of those plastic deck-chairs. Pachi would hardly ever come and bother me except for coming in or Mamama coming with a plate of sweets or some savoury crunchies to keep me busy while I was reading. Pach had just one rule and that was you could not take the books home but come here and read whatever you want. That suited me just fine. The books ranged from children’s books to really adult books. The children’s books were mainly girl oriented since they had been bought for Vijju. But even then I started on the Enid Blyton series at that house along with many of the children’s book titles. I then graduated to what Bappa read and was introduced to the world of Perry Mason, the lawyer with his detective friend Paul Drake and Stella Evans (if I remember correctly) was Perry Mason’s secretary. Bappa was fond of the writer Erle Stanley Gardner who created the Perry Mason character and I must have read the whole lot of them. They were interesting in the form of adult mystery stories. There were similar detective mysteries and action thrillers which I had my fill of but I do not remember the names of the authors or the main characters now except for Mickey Spillane. And then one day at the bottom of one of the shelves I found the Carter Brown series which was more in the nature of action thrillers with aliberal dose of sex in them. For a schoolboy to discover this is like Alibaba finding his secret cave of treasures. I nurtured my treasure well and was particularly careful that Pachi would not see what I was reading when I was going through the Carter Brown series. Bappa again had possibly the full Carter Brown series and I managed to read most of them. Pachi was particularly fond of me and I continued going to their house until maybe the end of Class 9 when pressures of study stopped my visits. I was also getting older and felt shy with any visitors who would be there at Pachi’s place though with Pachi I had no problem at all. I kept in touch with Pachi until a few years ago and she passed away in 2013 possibly close to a ripe old century. They had moved to Bangalore and had a large house in Indranagar an upmarket suburb of Bangalore and when we moved to Bangalore from Delhi in 1990 and until 2002 when we left Bangalore for Goa to settle down, I regularly visited her. She was the same as always, gushing in her hospitality, Vijju had married by that time and had two sons, the elder was in the US and the younger was living with them in Bangalore. Vijju’s husband Devdas was in one of the furnace companies based out of Calcutta and after retirement moved to the house in Bangalore though Pachi had moved there a long while ago looking after the education and the day-to-day needs of her grandsons and looking after Mamama, her mother. Mamama had passed away before we moved to Bangalore and suffered towards the end being bedridden for a long time. Pachi would take care of her without any grumble at all. She liked to be busy and seemed to thrive on being given responsibility and all delivered with a warm, winning smile. That is how I remember Pachi even to this day.  

The summer of 1966 went by in a haze of exams. First the Higher Secondary exam, then the engineering entrance exams in quick succession – IIT, Jadavpur University and Bengal Engineering College, Sibpur (B.E. Sibpur – the oldest engineering college in West Bengal). The Higher Secondary exam was never held in your own school but the centre of your exam would be given in another school. Our centre fell on Tirthapati School on Rashbehari Avenue near Deshapriya Park. This centre was close to our house about half the distance to St. Lawrence. It was considered a rowdy school and was Bengali medium. I for one had never gone into another school in Calcutta to even look around except the Catholic schools. The Tirthapati School was quite acceptable but for the fact that the benches that we sat upon were wider than the tables that we we were writing our exam on. Resultant effect was the other side of the answer sheet booklet would flop over the other side of the narrow table and through the mostly three hour exam paper, we would have to juggle and balance the answer sheet on the narrow table. The question papers for our science stream were all quite what was expected except chemistry which was a bit dicey. All of us came out with a great degree of comfort that we had done well. We were a group of some 8 -10 in our class who had set our hearts on IIT. The IIT exam was considered very tough since the questions were mostly fundamental and tested your concepts particularly in physics. Also there were no earlier question papers available since IIT never published their past question papers. So all we had was to go on the basis of what the seniors at our school who were now IIT would tell us. Enjoying the fact that they were being consulted, these seniors would send us up a wrong path. But it was all in the nature of good fun. The IIT exam day dawned. I do not remember now where the exam centre was. But the IIT question paper particularly for the science stream was enough to blind you. The paper was tough. You came out of the exam hall squeezed out of all your science knowledge and with the realization that you did not know a thing in science. For some of us the situation was akin to what some will tell you that for an objective test paper, when you are not sure of the answer, toss a coin and mark the answers. This will work as long as there is no negative marking. The IIT question paper was an objective paper. But it would be completely stupid to use a coin to answer the paper. I remember going home after the IIT entrance test and mother and I were standing on the verandah in the evening and my breaking down and crying that I would not possibly get in. When over the next few days I confided the situation to my friends at school, they also admitted that they also found the question paper tough. So all of us are in the same boat along with everyone else who appeared the test. This was their reading. It was quite a consoling thought. After that it was the Jadavpur University entrance test and the last was the B.E. Sibpur test. These latter tests were based on the Higher Secondary exam format with B.E. Sibpur being the easiest. The IIT entrance test results were the first to come even before the Higher Secondary exam. I did not want to go to see the results. But my friends persuaded me by coming home and taking me along with them. The IIT office in Calcutta was in a crummy old government building in Esplanade East. We landed up there in the morning and found another 4-5 of our school classmates already there. On a table kept in one corner of a room were 4 booklets, about 4” x 6” in size, and each containing some 20 – 30 pages. They were marked I to IV. The results were in these booklets codified by our roll numbers. My closest friend picked up the booklet I and excitedly thumbed through the pages. He was the topper of our class and was the only person who had said he had done well in the test. Within a couple of minutes he found his roll number and he got an All India rank of 72. That fellow was disappointed with that!  My other friends had picked one or the other booklets and were finding their roll numbers there. I had been absent-mindedly touching booklet IV which no one wanted. I did not have the courage to open it. Then my friend (Rank 72) came and asking me for my roll number opened the booklet and started searching. I stood next to him with my heart in my hands. He scanned the booklet but my number was not there. He looked up at me and seeing my face becoming more and more longer picked up in succession the other booklets. He had gone through booklet 3 and had not found my number. I knew by then that I had not made it. Everyone else of my classmates who had come there had got through. Then my friend exclaimed – Maybe your number is in the first booklet. He picked it up and started thumbing from the back upon my insistence and somewhere as he was reaching the first pages of the booklet he found my roll number at all India rank number – 189! He dropped the booklet and hugged me, slapping me on the back all the while. I had made it! I was too numbed to even speak. Clearly this was too much for me now. I felt as if the ground was coming up and hitting me in the face. By that time the other classmates became aware that I had also made it and a round of congratulations started. In that mood all of us came out of the IIT office in a hurry to reach home and tell our people at home the good news. Those were not the days when all of us had phones at home and you could call up and tell. I also rushed home and told mother that I had made it through the IIT test. And shameless that I was I cried again! Clearing the entrance test got you the personal interview which was normally at the IIT nearest your city. For us therefore it was Kharagpur and all of us actually wanted to go to Kharagpur IIT because of its proximity to our homes. The interview was only nominal. A good rank got you the ‘hot’ courses like Electronics Engineering and Mechanical while a lower rank meant that you had to choose some of the other disciplines since the ‘hot’ courses would get filled up quickly. Though the IIT authorities gave you the chance to get your first choice of course at any of the other IIT’s. At that time there were IIT’s at Delhi, Bombay, Kanpur and Chennai in addition to Kharagpur. So all of us trooped out to Kharagpur on the nominated day of the interview and I got a seat at Kharagpur in Electronics & Electrical Communication Engineering. Quite a high sounding name to wear around your neck for someone who had cried that he would not make it to the IIT.  

The Guy & The Moron

There are times when there is little you can do about things in the past. The die would have been cast and the events would have happened as determined by what you had decided earlier or based on what position you had taken earlier. Many a time we wish that we could go back in time and reset a decision or a position or an event and see if anything would have been changed if you had taken an alternate path. This would be to see if the new scenarios would have benefited you more or affected you more than what had actually transpired. But unfortunately you cannot fiddle with time and what is past has to remain as the past. We all have to live in the present and make-do, as they say. But this does not mean that you cannot have any feelings or emotion about what happened in the past. It is important to have these sensibilities since that is what we call experience. That is how we develop opinions about things living and non-living, intangible and tangible, living or dead. These are the opinions then that govern our relationships with the people around us and those with whom we have to necessarily interact with. About places and things a similar relationship exists and we deal with these in the manner that they have dealt with us in the past and create our own fads, biases, petty prejudices and what not. A large part of experience is regret. This is because man is a thinking animal. He continually obsesses with what could have been better. And the majority of the residue of this thought process is regret. There could be individuals who are the pessimistic sort and they happen to carry a larger load of regret. This story is of one such event which one would like to correct but sadly, that is not possible. It carries its share of regret otherwise it would not have been written here. There is little or practically no chance of apologizing to the victim since our lives driven by the deliberate winds of education, training, profession and buffeted by the gusty storms of chance and fate have probably moved us far away. Now, why should one think of this now? That is a good question. But then those matters with which you carry a larger dose of regret or which prick your conscience through your lives need to be exorcised by getting it out in some manner or other.  

This is actually about cricket. Cricket played at its absolute first and primary level. It is cricket played by young children in the formative periods of their lives. It is cricket played with adaptations to place and circumstance. Apart from cricket, this is about school rivalries. Childish and petty they may seem now but back then that was the most important part of our lives. And if we did behave or react in a particular manner it was because we felt right about it then. Though with the passage of time it may seem that we did have alternate choices. It was also about getting back at each other with whatever methods that were available to us. So now let us get down to it and see whether it is at all worth talking about so late in one’s life. 

Cricket back then at its primary level was played on the streets. This was circa the 1960’s in Calcutta (now Kolkata). It was played on the footpaths, pavements to some of us, which were wide then compared to what we see now. It was also played in some of the alleys that snaked away from the main street. It had an area demarcation aspect to it since the game would be played in a locality or para perspective. Though again it was not unusual to have multiple teams in each para. The segregation of these teams would be either related to age groups, seniors and juniors. And sometimes even within the same age groups divided by personal likes and dislikes which necessitated different teams. This one would believe  is common enough with everyone’s childhood. This street cricket then was played with rubber or tennis balls. The latter for some reason were called ‘cambdis’ balls. All the matches would be played with ‘cambdis’ balls. The bats were the regular cricket bats but the softer variety, not oiled and cured. Bats for playing with the hard cricket balls were at that time oiled and cured which would be a typically two week regimen. Considering that street cricket would be restricted or constrained by the area in which we played the boundaries of 4’s and 6’s would be supplemented with the 2’s if the ball hit a wall without bouncing on the ground and many such made-up rules. It was all a matter of adapting the rules to suit our needs. Sometimes the players playing at a particular street would become very proficient at harvesting these special boundaries on their home matches. The opposing team from another locality or para would be at a disadvantage while playing here. But then they would wait for their match on home ground to score prolifically since they would have similar ‘special’ boundaries. Thus home and away matches became sometimes crucial and made all the difference between winning and losing. Matches had to finish in a couple of hours in the morning or the afternoon. Most matches were played on a holiday. Almost the entire para would be watching these matches from the balconies, windows, terraces and whichever place of vantage provided a view of the goings-on. Any space that was available and not defined as the playing area would be filled up by those watching the match. For such matches this was the common rule since everybody in the para was involved and interested to know the progress and the final result. 

We had traditional rivalries in cricket with the adjoining locality or para which was for some reason called ‘Lal para’ or Red locality. There was no particular reason to call it thus. But then the accepted logic was that since most of the houses in that para were painted red, the naming was apt. They had a good team and most of the time we would lose. Their key to winning was Amal. He was their star batsman. He represented their school, St. Xavier’s and it was rumoured that he was tipped to be the captain of the school team. Whenever we played it was difficult to get him out. Most of our bowlers would be slammed for boundary after boundary, special or otherwise. He had never got a century and that was not for any fault of his but that our playing times were short. If you had to win then the batting team had to declare their innings and put the other team in to bat. This left Amal many a time  not out but tantalizingly close to a fifty or a hundred. I happened to be the opening bowler of our team and would have to take the brunt of Amal’s bat. Watching ball after ball of your bowling dispatched to the boundary sometimes for a 4, sometimes for a 6 was disappointing to say the least. On top of it I was captain of our team which carried the added stigma of losing the match under my watch. The matches would also not be devoid of the customary fights mostly for ‘lbw’ and ‘run-out’ decisions by the umpires. Actually the umpires would be someone from the opposing team when we would bat while we would have our men when they batted. This mechanism though intended to ensure neutrality ended up sometimes with rank bad decisions which were the reason for many a fight. 

It was one such day when Amal was batting. He was in tremendous form on that day. He had cruised past 50 and had had his share of contested decisions by the umpires. All of them had gone in his favour and though we had been desperately looking at ‘our’ umpires, we were met with stony silence and angry stares. When tempers flared we had also reminded the umpires that they were from our side which though unfair, was fact. However, the umpire’s heart did not melt and they continued to be ‘fair’. I suspected, particularly for one of them, that since being umpire he could not play. That was the reason why he was possibly angry with us for not making him part of our playing team. Nothing could be done about it now. Amal also had joined in sometimes in the angry exchange of words that would follow a contested umpiring decision. The language of play in those days happened to be Bengali. Amol had been heard lapsing into English sometimes and saying, ‘What is it with you guys? Can’t you see that the ball missed my bat by a mile?’ This English was not understood by the majority of the players. More often than not they had a lesser exposure to English particularly the spoken version. They had let such comments pass in the past ignoring them just as much as they would let abuses hurled in the heat of the moment slide off their prickly personalities. But they would remember all this the next time a fracas occurred and then take it out as another insult to neutralize, combat and destroy.  

The other thing that happened on that day was Amal was close to reaching a coveted century. One of our faster bowlers was in action. And the ‘cambdis’ ball thudded into Amal’s legs while he was aiming to lift the ball over where mid-on might have been. The bowler went up in appeal and with him the wicket-keeper and the rest of the fielders. In fact all those watching the match from the sidelines let out a collective howl. All eyes particularly of those of our players turned towards the umpire. The collective thinking was after all the umpire was from our side and he should favour us, at least now. What with having given almost all the decisions against us during this entire match. But it was not to be. We all saw the umpire negative the appeal. The players from our side were immediately in uproar. A sigh had gone around all through those who were watching. The decision seemed to be close. But I had personally felt that it was missing the stumps. But what happened after that could never be really put down as to who was responsible for the fight that started.  

The sequence of events was that the bowler in disgust had thrown the ball at the stumps and threw them down. Our wicket-keeper took of his cap and hurled it at Amal, spinning it out as you would a Frisbee. The cap hit Amal on the lip and hurt him. He went after the wicket-keeper with his bat raised and at that moment all hell broke loose. Our players ganged up and took on Amal. Their players who were until now sitting on the sidelines, joined in to defend Amal. A regular melee was on. Amal was in the thick of it surrounded by some ten guys. He was fending off those hitting him with his bat. Fists were flying; kicks were being exchanged in the middle of the throng. I could not keep away any longer and waded into the centre of the action. In the process I caught some of the blows and the kicks. I really did not want a fight. Confronting Amal I saw that his lip and been cut and he had some welts across his cheek. Someone had snatched the bat away from his hand. Seeing me Amal seemed to be a little relieved. He angrily exclaimed in English, ‘What are these morons up to?’ This comment was heard by our players who were in the thick of the throng. Something in that comment sent them aflame. Comments started flying around that – ‘This fellow is again showing off in English!’ ‘He is again cursing us!’ ‘He is wishing that we were dead!’ The last comment was because of a misunderstanding. In the Bengali the similar sounding word to ‘moron’ meant death. And the common exclamation in Bengali families when referring negatively about someone was ‘Moron Aamar!’ meaning ‘He or she will be the death of me!’ I tried to pacify them but it was difficult. Things had gone too far. On top of it the players from Amal’s team were jeering at us that we did not know English! This was natural since most of the Bengali children at that time would go to the Bengali-medium schools. Though English was one of the languages that they had to study, speaking English or understanding it when spoken was something that was not yet their forte. One of our players turned around to me saying, ‘You go to a convent school. Tell us what this fellow means when he calls us guys and morons! Are these not abuses! We will not let him go from here without breaking his arms and legs!’ He was shouting all this while brandishing one of the stumps in his hand. It was also true that this fellow was a hot-head and difficult to control once he took off.  

I sized up the situation quickly. True I went to St. Lawrence, a convent school. But for the life of me I then did not know the meaning of the two words – guy and moron. Call it my ignorance or whatever. Given the situation I could not back out by saying that I did not know the meaning. It would be a loss of face for our team. Because it would mean that apart from cricket they were also better at English than us. This was all child psychology mixed up with mob behavior at that time and in that context. A lot of things were going around in my mind. St. Lawrence and St. Xaviers though schools from the same fraternity had a tradition of competition which was bordering on animosity. This enmity would peak in the Bishop’s Cup football tournament played among the Christian schools where the match between St. Lawrence and St. Xaviers was considered to be better than even the final of the tournament. This was an opportunity to get back at St. Xaviers. Moreover this fellow, Amal had been hitting me all over the park as they would say and plundering huge runs off my bowling. It was not only my bowling career but my captaincy of our team that was at stake, thanks to Amal. And then there was the other thing that if I defended Amal at this point of time, it was also possible that my team would consider me a traitor and thrash me along with Amal. After weighing all these options, in that instant of time, which I felt had expanded to eternity, I looked at Amal and said in English, ‘This time I will not be able to save you.’ Turning around to my team I said, ‘Yes! This fellow has been abusing us all along. The words – guy and moron, in English are abuses. Come on, let us give it to him and his team!’ With that I raised my fist and punched Amal squarely on the lips. Seeing blood spurt out was a satisfaction that released me from the ghosts of my bowling which Amal had smashed all over the ground whenever we had played.  

Thereafter Amal was beaten up so badly along with some of the members of his team. Amal spent the next ten days in the nursing home recovering from a broken head, badly bruised arms and legs. His lips required eight stitches. Our team members were also injured but none so badly as Amal. I got off lightly with a bruised right hand and some cuts and scratches on my legs. With that incident we had solved the problem of losing cricket matches to Lal para.  This was not because we had become better at the game or that Amal was not playing for them anymore but because after that there were no more matches between our paras. As for me, I kept on bowling after that and also retained the captaincy of my para team. I also had through this incident cast a blow for our school against our traditional rivals. Amal became better and we passed on the streets sometimes but we never spoke after that. 

Looking back one feels sorry for Amal. But one fact remains and that I was then all of twelve years and I really did not know the meaning of the words – guy and moron. But what hurts is that I should have admitted my ignorance and not let that incident precipitate into a full blown fight. Childhood is something that carries with it memories, some good and some bad. This remains a bad memory. In later life as I went through college the word guy apart from its regular meaning was used to signify someone who was smart and worldly in his ways. The opposite of guy was in slang – ‘pap’, which meant what we call today ‘dehati’ or a ‘rustic simpleton’ who is yet to learn the ways of the world. But recollecting the Amal incident, one wonders who was the ‘guy’ and who was the ‘moron’ there!