Never quite happy at school, never
doing as well as expected, but not
too badly either, frequently visiting
my father’s office at Nariman Point, where the blinds
kept the sun out of his room. Nariman Point
didn’t exist when I was very small, except as a strip
of land darkly petering out from Marine Drive
into the sea. The sea — the prisoner and attendant
god of this city, one of the points where its secular
locutions, its advertisement hoardings, its hotels,
are linked to the horizon; emptiness. Each year
we’d watch as the road congealed with people and cars,
and Ganesh was carried out to sea, the giant god
sinking, his trunk tranquil, with the Queen’s Necklace
behind him, and the Cream Centre; Malabar Hill
and Walkeshwar on one side as he drowned.
The promise that he’d return next year was made good
in the same emphatic way. These days, the traffic
from Haji Ali to Peddar Road to Marine Drive to Cuffe
Parade is so bad, with massed, uncertain files
of slowly moving cars, that it seems the Ganesh festival
is perpetually in progress. Sometimes it takes an hour
to get from Haji Ali to Nariman Point. When I was
a child, it took fifteen or twenty minutes from home
in Malabar Hill, past Churchgate, to school, which began
at half past eight sharp. There were four branches: infant,
junior, middle, senior. The day began with
“Almighty Father, who art in heaven” and hymns
like “All Things Bright and Beautiful.”
And though things were largely beautiful and bright
for us, the pupils, perhaps they weren’t for the teachers,
who couldn’t be too well paid. As for us, we were princelings
or delinquents; however poor our report cards, whatever
the black marks against our names, the blot on the pages
of our exercise books, our almighty fathers, in the end,
would save us. I had my own school diary
with the school logo on the cover; its last pages
came to be thick with the teachers’ messages in the red
ink of their ballpoint pens. These admonitions
I needed to get initialled in my mother’s impatient hand.
Some of the teachers vacillated between resentment
and a cold, tranquil estimate of our fathers’ wealth.
Some of the very teachers who pulled us up in class
gave us private tuition for extra money.
They seemed transformed, smaller, entering our homes,
as we must have been transformed in their eyes
when they discovered our houses firsthand. A few
commanded respect naturally; but we, in reality,
commanded them all, because we could
escape them, but not they us. Repeating themselves,
possibly until the end of their working days,
they’d stand in the morning as the Lord’s Prayer was said,
or write out sums, later, on the blackboard,
till the peon rang the bell; a new set of boys go home
in big cars, while teachers arrive next morning
on buses and scooters. Pigeons, their silly murmurs,
I remember from the senior school classrooms.
I recall little from all I learnt: H2O,
NO2, zygotes, amoebae, the life cycle
of the parasite, a ball expanding with heat
and failing to pass through a ring, the way a tinder
burst brightly into flames, thrust in a jar of oxygen,
before the flame went out, exhaling carbon dioxide.
All that comes back: the way we were looking
not at the flames, but at the freckles on the prettiest
girls’ legs, at the back of their heads, and how
quickly we’d forgotten the prayers said earlier
that morning, and shrugged off fear of sin. We were
afraid of no higher entity, at least
not afraid enough. No wonder, then, after
all those hours in the classroom, we learnt so little.
There was no guardian to review our daydreams;
with the wanton abandon that belongs
to a state of natural anarchy, our imagination,
possessed by something like the whooping courage of the pillaging
soldier touring razed villages, chose the girl
two rows from us, as the lesson progressed, or even
the teacher with chalk on her fingers,
the outline of her breasts visible in the dull,
electric glow of our vision, stopping short only
at some revered and long cherished figure, like a tea taster
coming to a halt in his quick tasting, and wrinkling
his nose at something inadmissible or fundamentally wrong.
There was no VHP to monitor these pictures
in our head; there were only our parents; they couldn’t know
much of what were loosely called our “thoughts.” If they’d ever
had, once, similar ones themselves, they’d forgotten,
with the amnesia that growing up induces, erasing forever
what it means not to have been adult. The classes
were interspersed with the granddaughters
and grandsons of the Birlas and the Tatas, of the families
that owned Roger’s soda — a scion, Pheroze,
was a close accomplice in the third standard—
and Duke’s Mangola. Biscuits, soft drinks, aerated
water circulated between class and the home.
So much money in a single classroom,
albeit incarnated in the figures of children
between four and five feet tall (the taller boys pushing
the shorter ones, whenever they could, like bulls)—
if a teacher had thought to hold a classroom
to ransom, he might have recovered
enough money to recompense him for his labours
several pensions over. When promoted to the eighth
standard, I was moved from section A to section
B, where unruly students were consigned,
by a teacher, Punoose, who saw this as
a punishment for my talkativeness.
Punoose was bespectacled, overweight; we disposed
of the “Mrs.” when referring to her, as a way
of cutting her to size in our conversations.
Even here, in B, there was a Birla granddaughter,
a fair, frail girl, without distinction in studies,
passably pretty, whom you’d find difficult
to associate with that industrial empire.
She had a crush on Suresh, a gymnast
and boxer, who became our contemporary because
he’d failed and had to repeat a class
(not for the first time). Finding myself seated next to him,
we argued but became friends of a kind. Shirkers
and hoodlums outnumbered angels around me; and I,
a shy — if intermittently talkative — boy,
felt obliged to pose as a hoodlum.
Thus, I got away with the grudging respect of the likes
of Arun Kapoor, whom Lobo, the physics teacher,
called “monster,” not only because of his size, but for
his one stone eye. There was one brilliant boy
in that menagerie: Subramaniam. This lanky South Indian
from an unremarkable middle-class family used words
like “trepidation” and “verisimilitude.”
He was chasteningly good at science: I once
visited him in his flat — a typical government-service
residence, with its large hall and sparse
furniture, and a smell of spices everywhere.
I watched as his mother brought him a tumbler of milk
and toasted sandwich. He told me, as he ate, that he ran
two miles around the undulating paths