Amit Chaudhuri - Real Time - Stories and a Reminiscence

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

of Altamount Road each morning. Once,

he came to my flat and stood before

the series of encyclopaedias on my shelves

that my father had bought me, and said, with the slightest

hint of irony and envy, and only

the remotest suggestion of judgement:

“Do you ever read these?” I prevaricated

guiltily; he didn’t wait for my reply

but picked one up and went through its pages

intently, as if he’d consume them in a glance.

I’m sure he must be in America,

and that tenacity, which took him running two miles

in the morning, probably got him somewhere at last.

As for me, I took my chances with teachers and exams.

I kept long hair; let my mind wander;

was reprimanded, and yet I managed

to keep afloat. Suresh, who was never expected

to shine in studies, blemished his record further

by refusing to participate in competitive sports

and antagonising his house master, Lewis, the maths teacher,

for whom such things mattered. Suresh had become

a compulsive daydreamer, sitting

on the first row to the left, next to the large, sweet,

but dim Yugoslav beauty, Biljana Obradovic.

He was short but good-looking, with a hooked nose and a slouch,

attractive to girls. Sujata Birla’s attentions

were a source of discomfiture (“She walks funny”), but he liked

Rehab Barodawalla, and the way, by late

morning, her socks would settle into two rings

at the bottom of her ankles. Later, in junior college,

we met again, but our interest in each other

had waned. I, for one, had become more “poetic.”

I could grow my hair as long as I wanted now. My father

was Chief Executive; we lived in a five-room apartment

on the twenty-fifth floor in Cuffe Parade.

My problem was how to suffer, for I knew

suffering to be essential to art; and yet

there was little cause for suffering; I had loving parents

and everything I required. I disowned our Mercedes-

Benz, took the 106 bus, but remained

unable to solve my lack of want.

I pretended to be poor; I wore khadi.

My parents hosted ever larger parties.

I grew thin and consumptive worrying about the absence

of poverty in my life, and the continued, benign

attendance of parents who were good and kind:

all the wrong ingredients, I feared, for the birth

of poetry. Starting to study for O

and A levels, I lost touch with college friends.

Taking long walks down Cuffe Parade towards

Regal Cinema, I only ever visited Elphinstone