I was shy and the prospect of joining a new school terrified me. On the opening day, I survived the first four classes, and one of the four teachers even seemed friendly. By midday I had made the acquaintance of two classmates and was beginning to think I may get reconciled to the loss of my earlier school friends and settle down in the new school. The next hour changed it all.
The maths teacher’s name was The Hammer and the classmates told me he had the reputation of being impatient and ill-tempered. His name came from the fact, I was told, that he had on occasions lost his temper and slapped some students very hard.
He started his class by asking the student next to me to summarize what he had taught in the previous class. The boy couldn’t; he stammered a few words and then stopped. This drove The Hammer into a rage, and he came and violently boxed the boy’s ears. “Keep your ears open the next time,” he admonished.
Then he turned to me, expecting me to pick up the thread. I was terrified and could barely stand up. I simply could not say a word, not even that I wasn’t in the earlier class. The Hammer peered at me through his black-framed glasses, then glanced at the class roster and said, “Ah, a new student! Are you dumb or are you just dim-witted? Couldn’t you at least say that you weren’t in the last class?” He asked me to sit down and went on to his next victim.
The next morning I told my mother I didn’t want to go to school. When she asked why, I told her of my experience with The Hammer. She was outraged. She asked me to get dressed and said she was coming to the school with me.
She went straight to the Principal’s office and, before entering, told me she would make sure that the errant teacher was straightened. My mother was a smallish woman, mild-mannered and soft-spoken, but now she sounded like a tiger. When we entered the office I had a great surprise: The Hammer was sitting in the principal’s chair. Apparently he was officiating in the principal’s absence. Before I could alert mother to the fact, however, she had started speaking.
She said she had her son admitted to the school based on good reports she had received about the school, but was now having second thoughts after hearing of her son’s first-day experience. What kind of a teacher would intimidate her child so much that he didn’t even want to return to the school the second day, she asked. To my astonishment, The Hammer assumed a style I could not have believe him capable of. He said that he was surprised and shocked to hear such a report and will immediately take it up with the offending teacher. No teacher should act in a manner that frightens students and he would make sure such incidents did not recur in the school. He assured my mother that he would take prompt and stringent action.
The instant we were out of the Principal’s office, I told mother that her interlocutor was the culprit himself. She was, of course, surprised. But the greater surprise was mine: the bully had been bowed and brought to his knees by the few measured words of my gentle mother. He didn’t even have the guts to admit that he was the teacher in question.
The maths teacher’s name was The Hammer and the classmates told me he had the reputation of being impatient and ill-tempered. His name came from the fact, I was told, that he had on occasions lost his temper and slapped some students very hard.
He started his class by asking the student next to me to summarize what he had taught in the previous class. The boy couldn’t; he stammered a few words and then stopped. This drove The Hammer into a rage, and he came and violently boxed the boy’s ears. “Keep your ears open the next time,” he admonished.
Then he turned to me, expecting me to pick up the thread. I was terrified and could barely stand up. I simply could not say a word, not even that I wasn’t in the earlier class. The Hammer peered at me through his black-framed glasses, then glanced at the class roster and said, “Ah, a new student! Are you dumb or are you just dim-witted? Couldn’t you at least say that you weren’t in the last class?” He asked me to sit down and went on to his next victim.
The next morning I told my mother I didn’t want to go to school. When she asked why, I told her of my experience with The Hammer. She was outraged. She asked me to get dressed and said she was coming to the school with me.
She went straight to the Principal’s office and, before entering, told me she would make sure that the errant teacher was straightened. My mother was a smallish woman, mild-mannered and soft-spoken, but now she sounded like a tiger. When we entered the office I had a great surprise: The Hammer was sitting in the principal’s chair. Apparently he was officiating in the principal’s absence. Before I could alert mother to the fact, however, she had started speaking.
She said she had her son admitted to the school based on good reports she had received about the school, but was now having second thoughts after hearing of her son’s first-day experience. What kind of a teacher would intimidate her child so much that he didn’t even want to return to the school the second day, she asked. To my astonishment, The Hammer assumed a style I could not have believe him capable of. He said that he was surprised and shocked to hear such a report and will immediately take it up with the offending teacher. No teacher should act in a manner that frightens students and he would make sure such incidents did not recur in the school. He assured my mother that he would take prompt and stringent action.
The instant we were out of the Principal’s office, I told mother that her interlocutor was the culprit himself. She was, of course, surprised. But the greater surprise was mine: the bully had been bowed and brought to his knees by the few measured words of my gentle mother. He didn’t even have the guts to admit that he was the teacher in question.
In the summer of 1946 I became a prisoner in the third floor of my family’s large, gated house in Kolkata, India — known then as Calcutta. A conflict had broken out in the streets between Hindus and Muslims, and it would eventually kill five thousand people in the city. We were Christians, but the violence was so random it seemed anybody could be killed simply on suspicion. I watched from an upstairs window as passersby were stabbed. I was seven.
My father was a soft-spoken man with scores of friends in both the Hindu and Muslim communities. Many of those friends lived in small, unprotected houses and were prime targets for roving mobs of angry men. One, a professor whose son was my friend, asked for refuge in our house, and my parents immediately agreed. The word spread, and by the next evening nine more families were staying with us. My father did not feel he could turn them away. When another four families sought our help, he emptied the library to make space for them.
Three days later, as the killing continued on the streets, the word of my father’s actions reached a mob leader, who showed up at our house with two associates and demanded to see my father. My mother insisted on coming to the door with him. I stood just behind her. The mob leader said that, as Christians, we could remain in our home un-disturbed, but the outsiders we had taken in must return to their own houses.
Father explained that they had come to him because they feared for their lives. How could he ask them to leave?
The mob leader was unmoved. “If you keep them in your home,” he said menacingly, “you will not be safe any-more.”
My father, whom I had always known to avoid confrontations, all on a sudden turned uncharacteristically firm. “I am sorry,” he said. “They need my help, and I cannot turn my back on them.”
In less than two hours the mob returned with a collection of scrap wood — mostly broken furniture from houses they had looted — and heaped it at the four corners of our home. My father frantically called the police, but almost total anarchy prevailed.
As we watched from the windows, the mob set fire to the piles. Puffs of smoke appeared, then flames. I threw up in terror. My mother tried to calm my brother and me as my father continued to make desperate calls.
Then we heard what sounded like firecrackers, and we saw the would-be arsonists running. The government had decided to send in the troops, who were advancing and firing on the mobs. We were saved.
More than fifty years later what remains most vivid in my memory is how my soft-spoken father, when pushed to his limit, had decided to speak up.
My father was a soft-spoken man with scores of friends in both the Hindu and Muslim communities. Many of those friends lived in small, unprotected houses and were prime targets for roving mobs of angry men. One, a professor whose son was my friend, asked for refuge in our house, and my parents immediately agreed. The word spread, and by the next evening nine more families were staying with us. My father did not feel he could turn them away. When another four families sought our help, he emptied the library to make space for them.
Three days later, as the killing continued on the streets, the word of my father’s actions reached a mob leader, who showed up at our house with two associates and demanded to see my father. My mother insisted on coming to the door with him. I stood just behind her. The mob leader said that, as Christians, we could remain in our home un-disturbed, but the outsiders we had taken in must return to their own houses.
Father explained that they had come to him because they feared for their lives. How could he ask them to leave?
The mob leader was unmoved. “If you keep them in your home,” he said menacingly, “you will not be safe any-more.”
My father, whom I had always known to avoid confrontations, all on a sudden turned uncharacteristically firm. “I am sorry,” he said. “They need my help, and I cannot turn my back on them.”
In less than two hours the mob returned with a collection of scrap wood — mostly broken furniture from houses they had looted — and heaped it at the four corners of our home. My father frantically called the police, but almost total anarchy prevailed.
As we watched from the windows, the mob set fire to the piles. Puffs of smoke appeared, then flames. I threw up in terror. My mother tried to calm my brother and me as my father continued to make desperate calls.
Then we heard what sounded like firecrackers, and we saw the would-be arsonists running. The government had decided to send in the troops, who were advancing and firing on the mobs. We were saved.
More than fifty years later what remains most vivid in my memory is how my soft-spoken father, when pushed to his limit, had decided to speak up.
My uncles and aunts treated Aunt Bea with great deference and my grandmother with obvious affection. I did not know why. I had figured out that she was not a sister of my mother. Was she then an in-law who had mysteriously gained a special status? It took me fifteen years to ferret the story out of my mother.
Years earlier, as a new bride, my grandmother struck a great friendship with her neighbor, also a new bride. Three years later when they both became pregnant and produced a son and a daughter respectively within three months, they joked that their children might marry and join the two families. As the children grew up and played together in the neighborhood, they did become close friends and seemed almost inseparable. Eventually the girl, Bea, went to college to study literature and the boy, my uncle Sudhir, went to the medical college. Grandma was partial to strikingly attractive Bea and spoke openly now of making her a daughter-in-law when her son Sudhir would become a full-fledged doctor in town.
Sudhir’s life took an unexpected turn was when a senior British army officer came to speak to the graduating class of the medical college and proposed an opportunity to the fresh doctors. They could sign up, offer to serve in the British army for two years and receive, in addition to a tempting salary, a handsome sign-up bonus and a generous severance package when they completed their term. The army was short of doctors and it was recruiting both soldiers and doctors urgently from colonial India for its troops fighting in the Boer War.
Uncle Sudhir signed up, with the thought that he could use the money to realize his dream of setting up a private practice in town when he returned after two years, and went to Transvaal as a cavalry regiment’s physician. Eight months later, the inexperienced regiment was ambushed as it went through a mountain pass. Firing erupted from either side of the pass and the regiment was decimated. The Boers came down from the mountains after the onslaught to deliver a coup de grace to the few soldiers who were still alive. Sudhir was lucky to have fallen under his horse with the first shot to his thigh, unconscious. When he came to, he was the only one alive in a field of cadavers. He took the bullet out with a scalpel, helped himself to his medical supplies, gathered whatever provisions he found on some of the dead soldiers and took refuge in the woods. He travelled during the night, and on the third day hobbled his way into a hamlet where a farmer gave him refuge. When he recovered from his wound after weeks, he walked to a larger town where he was finally able to send a report to an army command. He recovered in a hospital for four months before he was repatriated to India for disability separation.
He found that, based on an earlier report that the entire regiment had been waylaid and killed, the army had paid full compensation to his parents. Grandmother, knowing that Bea was regarded in the community as virtually betrothed to her son, had advised her mother to get her quickly married elsewhere. Bea was a new bride a month before Sudhir’s unexpected return, married to the principal of the best school in town. Grandmother called all her sons and daughters and told them that, though a mishap prevented Bea from joining her family through marriage, Bea must forever be treated as a valued member of the family and invited with her husband to all family events. She was.
Every afternoon, as I played soccer on the school grounds, I would see from a distance three people seated round a small table on the terrace of the principal’s residence: the principal, uncle Sudhir, now a doctor with his private practice, and Bea, our mysterious in-law, serving tea to the two men on either side of her.
ooo
Years earlier, as a new bride, my grandmother struck a great friendship with her neighbor, also a new bride. Three years later when they both became pregnant and produced a son and a daughter respectively within three months, they joked that their children might marry and join the two families. As the children grew up and played together in the neighborhood, they did become close friends and seemed almost inseparable. Eventually the girl, Bea, went to college to study literature and the boy, my uncle Sudhir, went to the medical college. Grandma was partial to strikingly attractive Bea and spoke openly now of making her a daughter-in-law when her son Sudhir would become a full-fledged doctor in town.
Sudhir’s life took an unexpected turn was when a senior British army officer came to speak to the graduating class of the medical college and proposed an opportunity to the fresh doctors. They could sign up, offer to serve in the British army for two years and receive, in addition to a tempting salary, a handsome sign-up bonus and a generous severance package when they completed their term. The army was short of doctors and it was recruiting both soldiers and doctors urgently from colonial India for its troops fighting in the Boer War.
Uncle Sudhir signed up, with the thought that he could use the money to realize his dream of setting up a private practice in town when he returned after two years, and went to Transvaal as a cavalry regiment’s physician. Eight months later, the inexperienced regiment was ambushed as it went through a mountain pass. Firing erupted from either side of the pass and the regiment was decimated. The Boers came down from the mountains after the onslaught to deliver a coup de grace to the few soldiers who were still alive. Sudhir was lucky to have fallen under his horse with the first shot to his thigh, unconscious. When he came to, he was the only one alive in a field of cadavers. He took the bullet out with a scalpel, helped himself to his medical supplies, gathered whatever provisions he found on some of the dead soldiers and took refuge in the woods. He travelled during the night, and on the third day hobbled his way into a hamlet where a farmer gave him refuge. When he recovered from his wound after weeks, he walked to a larger town where he was finally able to send a report to an army command. He recovered in a hospital for four months before he was repatriated to India for disability separation.
He found that, based on an earlier report that the entire regiment had been waylaid and killed, the army had paid full compensation to his parents. Grandmother, knowing that Bea was regarded in the community as virtually betrothed to her son, had advised her mother to get her quickly married elsewhere. Bea was a new bride a month before Sudhir’s unexpected return, married to the principal of the best school in town. Grandmother called all her sons and daughters and told them that, though a mishap prevented Bea from joining her family through marriage, Bea must forever be treated as a valued member of the family and invited with her husband to all family events. She was.
Every afternoon, as I played soccer on the school grounds, I would see from a distance three people seated round a small table on the terrace of the principal’s residence: the principal, uncle Sudhir, now a doctor with his private practice, and Bea, our mysterious in-law, serving tea to the two men on either side of her.
ooo