Master Aggarwal

 

The village schools of the eighties of the last century were the places where the domineering teachers ruled with illimitable authority and iron hand. Physically strong teachers trampled down any impertinent sign in the class with an alarming tenacity. They had a predilection for using their arms more than their brains. The students from the peasantry class were full of mischief and one needed a lot of iron-will to keep them subdued so as to at least retain them within the premises. Education and Jat farmers was a definite misalliance.

In good moods, they would have weighty puns as well. But the saturine shadow of their fickle moods always lingered on the premises. The teachers who created the maximum fear among the students were, by default, the best teachers among the peasantry. To crown it all, the best teachers were those who broke maximum number of sticks.

There were but some docile teachers, either on account of their mild temperament or lack of physical proportions to turn into a bull on rampage. These docile teachers suffered maybe even more than the students. The students would be kicked, tossed about, yelled at, thwacked and tomahawked by the bullying, big teachers. The beaten pupils would then target the docile teachers. Master Aggarwal was pretty harmless in this regard. Short, chubby, bald, with cute jowls, like Mr. Pickwick, he offered the chink in the stony teacher rampart. No wonder, the students targeted him. The students would pour out their entire vengeance against the teachers as a ‘class’. In a chilling conflagration of mischief, he was given the funniest names possible on earth. More rowdy type of students even misbehaved with him outrightly.

He was born and brought up in the nearest town and commuted daily to face the ordeal. It was like setting out a caged bird into a deep forest suddenly. He didn’t know the desi words in the farming slang. The students took advantage of it. If a student went missing for the day, he would inform him that their bitoda had fever. And Master Aggarwal would agree to it, thinking someone at home fell sick. Little did he know that bitoda stood for the conical structure for storing dung-cakes.

But then he kept his fight on. He kept a short stick and if striking wasn’t his forte, he would prod in the ribs and try to draw some painful cry from the inveterate souls. He also tried to fight on the nomenclature front. He called students ‘abe kambal’, ‘abe khesh’, ‘abe chaddar’, ‘abe pyjama’ based on the most ubiquitous item upon the student’s person.

Kaptan troubled him a lot. Master Aggarwal taught us Mathematics. It was our quarterly test and he arrived with the bundle of evaluated answer sheets. The students but won’t wait for him to start distributing the answer sheets and harangued him a lot. Kaptan as usual was pretty vocal in this. One of the last students in class, as far as marks were concerned but probably first in playing truant, he was very confident this time. During the examination, he was sitting after me and copied with an unbelievable attention. He wrote for the entire three hours. ‘I have never written this much in my entire life,’ he told me after the exam.

Master Aggarwal gave the sum and summary of the results before he started handing over the sheets to the students: ‘Sandeep scores hundred and Kaptan gets zero.’

Kaptan hardly knew anything about mathematics so almost the entire scribbling hadn’t any meaning. He couldn’t believe that so many written pages failed to get him even a single mark. But then he had his own interpretation. Master Aggarwal had very proudly written Zero in flowing alphabets. The Z looked like number three and the over-zealous ‘ero’ looked like three zeroes. That gave Kaptan the right to claim that he had actually scored 3000 out of 100.