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.

A poor man's hospital woes

 

Espousing a keen sense to follow the conventionalities, and somehow handle the hormonal-led heightened palpitations of early youth desire, Ballu got married at sixteen, became father at seventeen, a grandfather at thirty-five when his eldest daughter gave birth to a girl. Imbued with the routine colors of a mundane low-income household, any little pleasure comingled with lots of pain as if in payment to the former, harrowed by continuously evolving challenges, trying to forget the painful constriction of life through cheap liquor, in the next ten years he had many grandchildren.

Sadly, his youngest grandson was born with congenital defect concerning food canal and the respiratory system. A complicated surgery followed. The infant didn’t survive but he left his mark—a bill of three and half lakh rupees to be settled by the poor family. They are landless daily wage earners. It meant they had to borrow the money. Now life and living will exact a bit higher price from them. But they aren’t crestfallen. ‘After all, we come to this world to do exactly these kinds of things only,’ he philosophizes.

The snapshot of a December day

 

The honeycomb in the curry-leaf tree is a buxom round thing now. It serves to have some flowers in your garden. It gives an opportunity to the honeybees to survive for some more time in your area. I keep my eyes ready for the lone honey buzzard that sometimes scans the skies for some odd honeycomb somewhere. Apart from some innocent plunders during childhood, I have never tried to take away honey from a comb. It is as bad as someone taking money from my account. Its smell and sight are my primary takeaways. Maybe they sense and feel safe this way because the honeybees stay almost permanently in the yard.

The sky ponders with an infinitely impersonal look. There are hundreds of marigolds basking under the hazy sunrays of December. In the afternoon, a pale sun shining upon the unassuming flowers, I find the bees almost dozing in calm slumber after getting overfed on the pollen. Look at these little things and an instinct’s illumination, shrouded in the ordinary promptings of a common man, turns it a beautiful world.

The cats are growing finely and the coquettish mysteries cajoling from outside the fence turn them more out-bound these days. Desire is in incubation and they seem to have a liking for cat girls. It means the dove’s eggs are safe so far. At least the eggs may hatch. Beyond that I don’t see much of a chance. It’s such a careless, flimsy nest of sinewy twigs, so low and almost public, that some eagle will have a bigger hatchling breakfast in lieu of the cats missing on the egg breakfast.

In the next-door granduncle’s house, all Labrador Tuffy can do is to bark at the monkeys. He cannot scale walls and jump over roofs like them. One or the other monkey purposefully sits at a point visible to the helpless dog. The clever monkeys keep changing their post, and the sentry Labrador goes barking through the day. He has to realize that one shouldn’t test one’s lungs over the issues about which one cannot do much.

A buffalo that tuned a Mausiji

 

Some people have such incorruptible, indomitable sense of discipline that they would literally make it a credo of their life to avoid any kind of debasement and deformity to the laboriously polished veneer on their persona. Tau Karan Singh had such a disciplined, well ordered and perfectly set-up life off duty that even the duty hours in uniform as an army man stood out a liberal spree of pleasantries and fun. He maintained his well-disciplined tempo, while his peers appeared simply limping and hobbling on the path like errant brats. Any comparison was out of cards.

After retirement, and his routine of thought, action, speech and behavior still more firmly etched in the sacred book of a well-spelt, managed life, he slightly lost the legendary equanimity of mind only in one instance. The stubborn buffalo, ever caught in the ignoble excrescence of indiscipline in its dull brain, tested his patience, the main bulwark of his disciplined life, which stood unruffled even during wars.

Well, there is a pleasanter side to even very grim affairs. Talk to any soldier who has been stationed in Ladhak, he will talk of snows and multi-pronged sorrows in the barren desert. But mention Ladhak to Tauji and an august, illustrious and vivifying smile would surface on his gentle features. It was a very soft smile but you could feel its subterranean sprawl, its vastness in his soul. You just could feel it. The ravishing immensity of those memories would take him in its soft embrace. The precipitous slopes and climatic malignity lost their meaning. You could see that his soul was dancing in inexorable joviality with some fond memories. He would smile and have a lungful of tented kitchen warmth and aroma. ‘Well, the butter toast, fruit jam and tea in the snows tasted far better than anything I have ever eaten in my life!’ he would recall the taste in his mouth, as if lost in a dream, his soul sorteying on sublime promenades in those high barren mountains.

Coming back to the buffalo, she would go into the farthest recesses of the village pond, forcing the ex-soldier to wade his way across the bunch-grass and pinching shrubbery lest she escaped into the countryside for an undisciplined furlough. Both of them would return after a few hours. Her horns adorned with muddy clumps of grasses, promiscuous signs of her indiscipline and revelry.

Tauji, who would have thought hundred times before reprimanding even a Chinese or Paki soldier if they crossed the border inadvertently, finally lost his patience and would chastise the disorderly beast. ‘Sali!’ he would mutter as he gave it a tiny rap on its haunches. This exclamation turned into a regular affair, given the buffalo’s freewheeling indiscipline, so much so that the villagers started to address the buffalo as his son’s Mausiji.

Online kindergarten class

 

As the stalled education system grappled with the Covid-time shutdown of schools, the institutions tried to provide some succor to the anxious parents by going for online classes. It was something superficial and half-baked but the show had to go on and the little students needed to be reminded daily that there are things called studies, school, class, book and teachers.

Suddenly a new set of instructions flashed on Nevaan’s mother’s phone. The teachers wanted a plain background during the online classes. The reason was that one student sat by an aquarium during the class. So instead of paying heed to the alphabets, the students had a good online discussion about the fish, which one is a good fish, which one is bad, who is the Papa fish or Mama fish. Taking inspiration from it, the next day a tiny girl sat with her cat. Then someone found his dog in the class initiating parleys about cats and dogs. So now to avoid the extra load of new and newer topics, the overworked online teachers want a plain white background behind all the students.