MY TEACHERS: I

I was a student of the famous Somalwar High School of the city. This used to be (and to a certain extent still is) a merit producing factory – by merit one means the students earning a position in the merit list of the State Board, this should not be mixed up with real merit. Since it produced so many merit students and since the admissions to the professional courses such as medicine and engineering was solely on the basis of marks, many of the alumni of this school are today doctors and engineers. There is little doubt that many of the alumni must have very good memories of their schooling days and must feel cheerful thinking of the good old Somalwar High School.

For me, the things are otherwise. I hated the School from the bottom of my heart. There were many reasons for this. First and foremost I found it against fun. It came in my way of enjoying life. The teachers, most of them, were big bores. Some of them were dictators. The main motivational tool that they possessed was the cane. The School had already lost all charm for me, the day I outgrew the fear of the cane, the School lost the only restraint it could have had upon me. The only thing which made me continue to go to School regularly was the formidable academic reputation of my father who was a numismatist and epigraphist of international repute and the love that my mother showered upon me. I did not want to hurt my parents and so I continued attending the School regularly without learning anything.

I hated my teachers back then. I do not do so anymore. When you grow up you find out many things about life and your judgment of people is then rarely based on just a single facet of their lives. So, as I grew up and found out more about the condition in which our teachers lived, the kind of mindset of which they were a product and therefore could not help the way they acted, the real good intentions they had in their heart for us, the ambitions that they nurtured for us, and, at least according to their own parameters, did the best possible for us so that we grew up as better people economically and morally, my hatred for them vanished completely. They tried their best – only I did not love them for that and found their methods repulsive.

I am going to write on many of my teachers. I am not going to hold back anything from these descriptions. The pictures presented are as I viewed them then. The idea is not to hurt their memories. I am only being truthful to my own self and recreating the image I formed of them in my mind while I was a student.

Mr. Umathe
He was our teacher in the 1st standard. He was a diminutive, darkish colored, bespectacled man who initiated us into the alphabet, the numerals and the basics of mathematical calculations.

His method was to walk into the class and occupy the chair which was on a raised platform. Throughout the day he would remain rooted to the chair rarely rising from it when the use of the blackboard became unavoidable. The class was divided into two neat rows of desks and benches leaving a clear aisle in between the rows. On one side sat the boys and on the other the girls. His chair and table were placed neatly in between the two rows.

But the thing that he concentrated upon throughout the day was chewing the betel nut. This was the variety called the chikkan supari because inside the mouth it became slightly sticky. His tongue and the teeth were the most artistic organs he possessed because he could sense the shape of the invisible betel nut with these. His method was to chisel and carve the betel nut in a manner that it remained a perfect sphere of gradually diminishing size all the while that it was there in his mouth. His tongue and teeth deftly judged and decided which part of the betel nut to chip and how much of it to be chipped so that it remained a perfect sphere. His mouth worked and worked and worked at it. All this while we were busy in the task of repeatedly writing the alphabet a hundred times or the tables a hundred times and so on.

The second artistic activity that he had honed to perfection was demonstrated when the need to speak arose. When this happened, his lips would pucker into a perfect circle, the spherical betel nut would be pushed to the middle of this circle and then the tongue, acting as a bolt in a gun, would give it one quick but measured jab. Before this happened though, he would point his lips upwards. The wet, sticky sphere, when it came out, darted upwards, carved a parabola and then descended onto his table. The table was old fashioned – it had two shallow pits on both the sides for filling the ink. So measured were his actions that the spherical betel nut would descend cleanly into the left side pit and stay there. Afterwards, the speech over, the sphere went back to the moist cave of his mouth to get further reduced in size and to land back into the pit when the need to speak arose again. Very rarely did his tongue misjudge the pressure required. When this happened, the sphere would land in the aisle and roll to a distance. When it came to rest, the boy besides whom it had come to rest was expected to pick up the sticky ball and deposit it into the pit where it should have landed in the first place. This task occasionally fell upon me also. I would use the thumb and the tip of the forefinger to pick up the sticky, glistening thing and wipe the fingers on the seat of my pants afterwards. To him it did not matter that the thing was moist and quite bit of dirt from the aisle must be sticking to it – he put it back in his mouth.

This is the only thing I remember of this man, my first teacher.