My Days (2 page)

Thinking it over, I am unable to explain how this course helped me in becoming literate. If we were not kneading clay, we were only cutting papers and folding them. We were armed each with a pair of scissors; this was a welcome instrument in one's hand, no doubt, but the fingers ached with a dull pain at the joints when one had to cut out angular objects—the scissor points would not easily lend themselves to any manoeuvring around the corners. At the next stage I carried a slate, which displayed on its face a single alphabet or number traced over and over again, bloated and distorted by overlapping lines. This again was a mess, the slate having become white with the constant rubbing with the palm of my hand, as if a great quantity of talcum had been spilled on it, and it was always difficult to decipher the writing, which was white on a whiter background. Again my neighbours seemed to excel in this task; their letters were sharper, symmetrical, and they somehow managed to keep their slates shining black, against which the white letters stood out clearly. The teacher did not seem to mind how I wrote or what I produced, so long as I remained within the classroom without making myself a nuisance in any way. All that he objected to, in me or anyone, was sticking out one's tongue while writing, which most children are apt to do. He kept a sharp lookout for tongues-out in the classroom, and tapped his desk violently with the cane and shouted, “Hey, you brats, pull your tongues back,” and all of us obeyed him with a simultaneous clicking of our tongues—one golden chance, not to be missed, for making a little noise in an otherwise gloomy and silent atmosphere.

We were let off at four-thirty. Emerging from the school gate, we always ran into the rear-guard of the corporation caravan and followed it; there was no way of avoiding it, as its route and time were fixed inviolably like the motion of the stars in their orbits. Boys going in the same direction formed a group, and we chatted and played and giggled on our way home.

My grandmother examined my slate when I returned home, and remarked, “They don't seem to teach you anything in your school.” Every day she commented thus and then ordered, “Wash your feet and hands under the tap and come into the kitchen.” When I had accomplished these difficult tasks, she would have coffee and tiffin for me in the kitchen. She would have interrupted her gardening to attend to me, and resuming it, go on until late in the evening. From her gardening, after changing into dry clothes, and chewing betel-nut and leaf, she came straight for me. She would place an easy chair in the garden for herself and a stool beside it for me, fix up a lamp, and attempt to supplement with her coaching the inadequate education I got in the school. She taught me multiplication; I had to recite the tables up to twelve every day and then all the thirty letters of Tamil alphabet, followed by Avvaiyar's
*
sayings. She also made me repeat a few Sanskrit slokas praising Saraswathi, the Goddess of Learning. And then she softly rendered a few classical melodies, whose Raga were to be quickly identified by me. If I fumbled she scolded me unreservedly but rewarded me with a coin if I proved diligent. She was methodical, noting in a small diary my daily lessons to be gone through. The schedule was inflexible and she would rise to give me my dinner only after I had completed it. I felt sleepy within a few minutes of starting my lessons; but she met the situation by keeping at hand a bowl of water and dabbing my eyes with cold water to keep me awake—very much like torturers reviving and refreshing their victims in order to continue the third degree. Grandmotherhood was a wrong vocation for her; she ought to have been a school inspectress. She had an absolute passion to teach and mould a young mind. In later years, after my uncle was married and had children, as they came of a teachable age she took charge of them one by one. She became more aggressive, too, as at teaching time she always kept beside her long broomsticks of coconut leaf-ribs, and whacked her pupils during the lesson; she made them sit at a measured distance from her, so that they might not be beyond her reach. Her brightest pupil was my cousin Janaki, now a grandmother, who at ten years of age was commended at all family gatherings for her recitations, songs, and prayers, but who had had to learn it all the hard way; she was a conscientious pupil and always picked up a choice of broomsticks along with her books whenever she went up for her lessons (an extension of the non-violence philosophy, by which you not only love your enemy but lend your active co-operation by arming him or her with the right stick).

Ours was a Lutheran Mission School—mostly for boarders who were Christian converts. The teachers were all converts, and, towards the few non-Christian students like me, they displayed a lot of hatred. Most of the Christian students also detested us. The scripture classes were mostly devoted to attacking and lampooning the Hindu gods, and violent abuses were heaped on idol-worshippers as a prelude to glorifying Jesus. Among the non-Christians in our class I was the only Brahmin boy, and received special attention; the whole class would turn in my direction when the teacher said that Brahmins claiming to be vegetarians ate fish and meat in secret, in a sneaky way, and were responsible for the soaring price of those commodities. In spite of the uneasy time during the lessons, the Biblical stories themselves enchanted me. Especially the Old Testament seemed to me full of fascinating characters—I loved the Rebeccas and Ruths one came across. When one or the other filled her pitcher from the well and poured water into the mouth of Lazarus or someone racked with thirst, I became thirsty too and longed for a draught of that crystal-clear, icy water. I stood up to be permitted to go out for a drink of water at the back-yard tap. When Jesus said, “I shall make you fishers of men,” I felt embarrassed lest they should be reminded of fish and Brahmins again. I bowed my head apprehensively at such moments.

What I suffered in the class as a non-Christian was nothing compared to what a Christian missionary suffered when he came to preach at our street corner. If Christian salvation came out of suffering, here was one who must have attained it. A European missionary with a long beard, escorted by a group of Indian converts carrying violins and harmoniums, would station himself modestly at the junction between Vellala Street and Purasawalkam High Road. A gentle concert would begin unobtrusively. A few onlookers stopped by, the priest nodded to everyone in a friendly manner, casting a genial look around, while the musicians rendered a full-throated Biblical hymn over the babble of the street, with its hawkers' cries and the jutka-drivers' urging of their lean horses. Urchins sat down in the front row on the ground, and all sorts of men and women assembled. When the preacher was satisfied that he had gathered a good audience, he made a sign to the musicians to stop. His speech, breaking into the abrupt silence that ensued, was delivered in an absolutely literary Tamil, stiff and formal, culled out of a dictionary, as far away from normal speech as it could be. It was obvious that he had taken a lot of trouble to learn the local language so that he could communicate his message to the heathen masses successfully. But Tamil is a tongue-twister and a demanding language even for Indians from other provinces, the difficulty being that the phonetic value and the orthography are different, and it cannot be successfully uttered by mere learning; it has to be inherited by the ear. I am saying this to explain why the preacher was at first listened to with apparent attention, without any mishap to him. This seemed to encourage him to go on with greater fervour, flourishing his arms and raising his tone to a delirious pitch, his phrases punctuated with “Amen” from his followers.

Suddenly, the audience woke up to the fact that the preacher was addressing them as “sinners” (“
Pavigal
” in Tamil) and that he was calling our gods names. He was suggesting that they fling all the stone gods into the moss-covered green tanks in our temples, repent their sins, and seek baptism. For God would forgive all sinners and the Son of God would take on the load of their sins. When the public realized what he was saying, pandemonium broke out. People shouted, commanded him to shut up, moved in on his followers—who fled to save their limbs and instruments. The audience now rained mud and stone on the preacher and smothered him under bundles of wet green grass. Actually, every evening a temporary grass market sprang upon this piece of ground for the benefit of jutka-drivers, and all through the evening hot exchanges went on over the price of each bundle, the grass-selling women shrieking at their customers and trying to match their ribaldry while transacting business. It was impolitic of the preacher to have chosen this spot, but he had his own reasons, apparently. Now people snatched up handfuls of grass and flung them on him, but his voice went on unceasingly through all the travail; lamps lit up by his assistants earlier were snatched away and smashed. The preacher, bedraggled and almost camouflaged with damp grass and water, went through his programme to the last minute as scheduled. Then he suddenly disappeared into the night. One would have thought that the man would never come again. But he did, exactly on the same day a week hence, at the next street corner.

The preacher was a foolhardy zealot to have chosen this particular area, as this was one place where the second commandment was totally violated. If you drew a large circle with this spot as the centre, the circumference would enclose several temples where people thronged for worship every evening. Vellala Street itself, though a short stretch, had three temples on it—one for Ganesha, the elephant-faced god, next to it Krishna's temple, and farther off one for Ponni Amman, the goddess who was the frontier guardian at a time when this part of Madras was just a village. Where Vellala Street ended, Ponni Amman Street began, with its own row of shops and houses closely packed. If you went up Ponni Amman Street, you reached Lawdor's Gate (who was this Lawdor? What of the Gate? None in sight now), and it led on to Gangadeswarar Street, which again derived its name from the temple of Iswara (the Shiva who bears the River Ganga on his matted locks), a very large and ancient temple with a thirty-foot doorway, spacious corridors for circumambulation, and a tank for holy baths, public washing of clothes, and periodic drownings. (The tank still claims its quota of human life—one a year.) This temple of Iswara is really a focal point for weddings, funeral obsequies (at the tank), and spontaneous social gatherings, not to mention contact with God. The first nationalist agitation in Madras, in 1916, protesting against something named the Rowlatt Act, was organized here. A procession with patriotic songs and slogan-shouting started from the temple and went round the streets. I joined the procession entranced, and when we returned to the starting point, some enthusiast—the Pankaja Lodge, perhaps—provided refreshments for the tired crowd. When I went home after this patriotic endeavour, I was taken to task by my uncle, who was anti-political and did not want me to be misled. He condemned all rulers, governments, and administrative machinery as Satanic and saw no logic in seeking a change of rulers.

Beyond the temple at the street corner, there was a little shrine of Ganesha, which was once again a favourite of the school-going public; placed in a position of vantage, this god received a considerable amount of worship, as well as offerings of coconut and coins in the tin money-box fixed to the doorpost. Facing this was the temple of Hanuman, the God of Energy. All these temples attracted the citizens of the area almost every evening. Recently I revisited Purasawalkam and spent a couple of hours viewing the old landmarks, and I found, though multi-storey buildings and new shop fronts and modern villas and the traffic stream have altered the general outlook, that the four or five temples I have mentioned are still solid and unchanged, oil lamps still burning, and the congregations the same as they were half a century or more ago, surviving the street-corner Iconoclast as well as the anti-iconoclasts who sought to demolish him with mud and bundles of grass.

T
his is not strictly coming in a sequence, for the following incident must have hapened before I was put to school. I have already mentioned the temple of Ponni Amman. Once a year on a certain date the image of the goddess was taken out of its sanctum at the other end of Vellala Street and carried in a procession to our end of the street, and placed on a decorated pedestal at the entrance to a fuel shop opposite our house. I never understood how the fuel shop came to be connected with this festivity, but there it was—a hoary tradition by which it looked as if the goddess's annual vacation was spent at this spot, where all fuel business was suspended for ten days. The fuel merchant, of the name Kodandam, was a positive-minded character who would have fought out the issue if any change were suggested or if he were denied the privilege of playing host to the goddess. He was an expert in wielding and whirling a bamboo staff, so deftly that he could create a regular shield around himself and ward off any attack. He was a champion in this art, and brooked no performance of it by anyone else in his presence. He was a violent man who viewed it as a challenge to his own integrity, and beat up those who sought to display their proficiency. His shop, at the confluence of two roads, was the route for funeral processions passing westward; sometimes, when the body of an eminent personage was carried, pole-wielders marched in the procession as a special honour to the departed soul. It was an accepted convention that they should lower their staves and suspend their skill while passing the fuel shop. Otherwise there would be trouble. There were some unfortunate occasions when Kodandam blocked the funeral passage and beat up his challengers, and the pall-bearers fled, abandoning the corpse on its decorated bier in mid-street.