A Reverse Roll Call

 

When we were promoted to Class VI, the half-sleeve white shirt remained the same, but the colour of our school shorts changed from white to khaki. We also moved to the secondary section of the school which began in the same premises at 11 in the morning. (The primary school got over at 10.30.) 

     I have just narrated the story of an extra-ordinary human being and teacher we met in the secondary school: Umapati Kumar. We had a number of other wonderful teachers. For example, Big Sunil Babu, who taught us English beautifully, together with dollops of affection. The qualifier Big was used as there was a Small Sunil Babu too, who was much shorter. Big Sunil Babu was always in Dhoti, Kurta, and covered shoes with socks, for which reason he was also referred to as Socks-wearing Sunil Babu.  

     However, as Horace said: nihil est ab omni parte beatum, there are no unmixed blessings. Unlike in the primary section, not all the teachers of our senior school commanded respect, naturally, or otherwise. I was in two minds whether to write about them because there is a saying in Bangla: Criticising a teacher is the worst possible sin. (গুরু নিন্দা মহা পাপ।) On the other hand, the brilliant Bengali writer, Syed Mujtaba Ali shared this doggerel:

যদ্যপি আমার গুরু শুঁড়ি বাড়ী যায়, / তদ্যপি আমার গুরু নিত্যানন্দ রায়।

My guru might drink bootlegged liquor / But Nityananda Ray is my teacher.

So, after some hesitation, I have decided to describe the darker side too. For example, our first history teacher in the secondary school was the opposite of Big Sunil Babu as far as energy was concerned. He would ask us to study a chapter at home and in the next class, we would have to reel out – one student after the other – whatever we had managed to memorise, beginning at one end of the first bench. By the time the first speaker finished, the teacher would be snoring peacefully; the second student would pick up the baton. Every one of us would eagerly wait for Sudipto’s turn to come, because he would speak from memory – on whatever the topic was, and sometimes beyond it – the chapter(s) from Kiran Chowdhury’s undergraduate history textbook, every word of it. Sudipto would continue until the bell rang and so, we could indulge in whatever pastime we enjoyed, reading storybooks being a primary one. (We would graduate to pornography in due course, but that would be much later.)

Sudipto had a memory that could be compared to the magnetic tape of the Grundig tape-recorder that I was fortunate to see in action. His other intellectual faculties too matched his memory. He left the school two years later, when his father, a renowned economist, took up a teaching job at a New Zealand university. Much later, thanks to another classmate Tushar, I spoke to Sudipto for a few minutes and then exchanged a couple of emails until he died in his early fifties. He had been a professor at London School of Economics then. After his passing, I read Sudipto’s CV on the LSE website. It was breathtaking.

Academics was not my forte, to put it mildly. Neither was I good at sports or music. I think the only area I was reasonably good at in school was painting. It is therefore natural that our fine arts teacher would leave a deep impression on me. He had been a topper of his class at Calcutta Government Art College. Much later, after a painting exhibition organised by him, a critic lamented (in the Bangla magazine Desh) that school teaching had destroyed the artist in him; he could have become a top-notch painter.

We couldn’t have known his level as an artist, but he thrilled us by quickly drawing brilliant landscapes in our drawing notebooks. He taught me how to use the oil pastel. I copied his style with the reverence that a pre-teen can have for a guru. When my work at a sit-and-draw competition was judged the best in school, someone complained I had smuggled in one of his landscapes torn off my notebook and submitted it as my own work. Sadly, my idol too believed it was actually his work!

So, a good effort by me led to the ignominy of being labelled as a suspected cheat. After repeating the pastel drawing while the teacher sat in front, I told him, ‘Sir, I won’t accept the prize.’

The prize – which incidentally was sponsored by him every year – was a silver medal with his mother’s name inscribed on it. He was taken aback by the cheeky protest and quite possibly, felt bad about his error of judgement. He also knew that in the land of Gandhi, I couldn’t be punished for taking a moral high ground. After much melodrama over the next week or so, I was cajoled into accepting the medal in the prize distribution ceremony that followed.

I am not sure if I still have the medal, but its memory stands for a lesson I’ve tried not to forget: to be fair when I had the power over other human beings, however small it might be. It also feels great that I have been a pioneer in the field of “award-wapsi” long before it became a fashionable form of protest in India.

Patro Babu’s speciality was a subject that was finer than fine arts: physics. He was easily the most exciting teacher we had in school. One had to be really dumb not to get a concept that he explained. Besides teaching brilliantly, his other speciality was that he had worked out the physics of hitting errant boys in a way that maximum impact would be made with the least effort.

The redoubtable teacher had an unfortunate clash with Shakuntala Devi, who mesmerised the world by doing long arithmetical calculations (like multiplying two thirteen-digit numbers) in her head. At the University of California, Berkeley, she worked out the cube root of 61,629,875 and the seventh root of 170,859,375 under controlled conditions even before the psychologist who was testing her could jot down the numbers. (She could do it possibly because she had no formal education in her childhood; she was the daughter of a trapeze artist and lion-tamer in a circus.)

When Shakuntala Devi visited our school, she was at the peak of her fame. We, all the students, sat down on the floor of our auditorium, armed with results of long calculations in our notebooks which had been checked multiple times by multiple people. (Electronic calculators were in the womb of a distant future then.) On the stage, where Shakuntala Devi sat, there was a black-board. A senior student would write down the task on the board and Shakuntala would give the answer almost before he could finish writing. The student who had prepared the task would confirm the result.

We were awe-struck, but not Patro Babu. He wrote a complex sum on the board, not a long arithmetical function. Shakuntala Devi hadn’t claimed she could solve every mathematical problem under the sun. She looked at the black-board and asked for the next task. To this, Patro Babu wrote on the board – “Could not be solved”. We were not impressed by this crude exhibition of vanity. 

Vanity would be an unthinkable character trait for Subhankar Babu, who taught us chemistry. Anther brilliant teacher, Sir wouldn’t raise his voice ever. That doesn’t mean our stupidity and lack of application didn’t hurt him. But for him, the most violent form of admonition was a wry smile.  

Although I opted to study science in high school, I was most impressed by three high-school English teachers: Suprabhat Chakraborty, Ajit Babu, and Sailesh Babu. Besides being exceedingly well-read, each one of them was a minor rock star; there was never a dull moment when they were in class. Ajit Babu directed three of us in a play based on the Irish Independence struggle: Lady Augusta Gregory's Rising of the Moon. It was an unforgettable experience.

Suprabhat Babu, who genuinely loved us, could get violently angry. Every time he hit the ceiling, we felt he would suffer brain hemorrhage. One day, when someone did something reprehensible, Sir started from a corner. Standing menacingly in front of the boy he asks, ‘Did you do it?’

Student 1 stands up: ‘No, Sir.’

Sir (at the top of his voice): ‘Are you sure?’

Without waiting for an answer, Suprabhat Babu lands three hefty blows on the fellow and moves on to next in line, ‘Did you do it?’

Boy 2: ‘No Sir.’

Three smacks and then to the next row.

The same words and action were repeated until the teacher was completely exhausted. I haven’t seen a more even-handed, socialistic in distribution of punishment ever. The people who abolished corporal punishment in schools had no idea how entertaining it could be with teachers like Suprabhat Babu around. During the rest of our school days, if we wished to hit a classmate, we wouldn’t forget to ask ‘Are you sure?’ before action.

Ramaranjan Adhikary, who taught us Bangla, had a whacky sense of humour. He regaled us with stories and anecdotes even when he taught grammar. Thanks to him, we learned grammar could be genuinely entertaining. 

Ramaranjan Babu passed away in May 2019. Umapati Babu and Suprabhat Babu had left us earlier. And surely, some others too would have gone. But they continue to live in our collective memory. Teachers, like parents, continue to live even after their death.   

 

Tuesday, 08 September 2020