Shala (9 page)

Shirodkar did not initially realize I was looking at her. I had read in one of Naru mama’s psychology books that if there is silence all around and you concentrate on an individual‘s back, that individual is bound to look back at you. I looked at her from the corner of my eyes, but I was sure that she was aware. Someone cracked a joke and all the boys laughed out loud. She turned to look at the boys and saw me staring at her. It is natural for anyone, finding the other person staring at him or her, to assume it must have been a coincidence. The person is tempted to check out once more to confirm whether it really was a coincidence. I was sure she would check. So I continued to stare. She turned and, finding me staring at her, quickly turned away.

I knew that she would not turn to look at me again. Not so quickly. I kept my face straight but, through the corner of my eyes, I was keenly looked her.

There were a lot of fruit flies buzzing overhead. One had to swat them or shoo them away. Shirodkar waved her hand to shoo away the flies and took a chance to look in my direction. From the corner of my eyes, I caught her checking on me. She did the same once again, but I did not try to catch her. But the next time she turned around, I looked straight into her eyes. She quickly turned away, knowing she had been caught.

The game was getting enjoyable, despite the emptiness in the pit of my stomach refusing to go away. I played with grass and made a makeshift doll out of it. I could make its arms move by pulling its legs. Then I made the doll walk a few steps on the ground. My eyes, all this while, were constantly on the alert to catch her sight.

She was watching me for sure. Listening to the entire oath of the Scouts and Guides is boring and one cannot help getting distracted. She must have seen me making that doll. She turned to glance at me and I could see a slight smile playing on her lips. She probably wanted to say the doll was cute. Her eyes, her face—they had lit up. A lightness filled me—it was like the feeling you get when you have a sweet, soothing ice-candy on a hot summer day.

‘Joshi, what is going on over there?’ I heard Manjrekar sir’s voice.

I looked ahead with a start. Thankfully he did not seem angry. His raised his eyebrows in question. I quickly threw away the grass doll. Some of the boys turned back to look at me.

‘Nothing at all, Sir,’ I blurted. We were usually not intimidated by him and I was more surprised than afraid.

‘What do you mean nothing? Are you listening to what I am saying?’ he asked. ‘Okay, tell me the last rule which I just read out.’

Had he asked me to repeat what he had just said, I would have been in trouble. But he had framed the question differently asking me to repeat the last rule—the tenth rule. I knew it by heart. I said, ‘A Scout is clean in thought, word and deed.’

He gave me a knowing smile. He knew I had managed a narrow escape but did not say anything. The other children could not guess, but it was enough for me. I dared not look at him despite having given the right answer.

We were left free once the Scouts’ anthem had been sung. ‘Go and observe the nature around you,’ sir said. The two of them sat down on the chairs, and we were free to roam around. We could hear the parade practice of the NCC cadets going on amidst incessant whistling. We boys too had our long, narrow whistles with us and we blew them whenever we liked. The sky was clear and blue just the way described in the Scouts’ song, ‘the blue sky spreading the love of brotherhood’. Wildflowers bloomed in the grass and the blue hills beyond the tiled, sloping roofs of Umbarpada village looked inviting. The girls looked like flamingoes in their pink silk scarves.

My heart went wild with joy and I wanted to dance around. We had the entire ground to ourselves; our two favourite teachers sat on the chairs and chatted; the woods were green and dense and the sunshine was warm and friendly. Shirodkar and her gang were a little away, but I could spot her from any distance. She looked like a fairy queen. Her image seemed to fill up the entire playground. The grass and the woods around reminded me of the African grasslands in Lord Bedon Powell’s stories. I was not concerned with other characters in the story. All that mattered was her presence. Everything else was irrelevant.

W
e were sitting in the mid-break in the woods when Dashrath suddenly announced, ‘Chaila, my bottle burst yesterday.’

We had just finished our ice-candies. For a change, I had got some money from Aaisaheb and had bought one on my own. Surya sat on a rock while Santya was hanging on a branch when Dashrath made the remark.

‘Don’t tell me!’ Surya said, getting down.

‘Really, bhenchod,’ Dashrath said, looking down at the leaf he was busy tearing into pieces. Chitre and I looked at each other.

‘What happened?’ Surya prompted. ‘Were you watching some photos?’

‘No. Nothing of that sort,’ Dashrath said, looking at us sheepishly. ‘It was in my dreams. I slept off at ten and when I woke up in the morning, I discovered this!’ he said, pointing at his groin.

‘Better be careful,’ Phawdya warned. ‘If you lose too much of your juice, you may die.’

That scared Dashrath. Earlier Harishchandra and Surya had confessed of their ‘bottles’ bursting, but they seemed relaxed. They were not worried. Dashrath was petrified hearing Phawdya’s warning.

‘Don’t worry. There is nothing to fear,’ Chitre said. The nonchalance with which he said so made us wonder whether he knew much more.

‘What do you mean nothing to fear?’ Phawdya erupted. ‘Do you know each drop of that thing is made up of millions of blood cells?’

‘There is nothing of that sort,’ Chitre continued authoritatively.

‘How the hell do you know all this, bhenchod?’ Phawdya challenged.

‘My Kaka is a doctor. He had explained everything to me and even gave me a book to read. He said it is good if the bottle bursts once in a while. It is quite natural. In fact, you need to worry only if it doesn’t.’

We looked at him with newfound respect. Dashrath moved closer to him. Santya came down from the tree branch.

‘What if the bottle bursts every night?’ Dashrath asked.

‘It won’t happen every night,’ Chitre said. ‘And don’t bother even if it does. But don’t play around deliberately. I will give you the book to read if you wish.’

‘No need. I am fine as long as you are telling me the truth.’

‘Yes, of course. This happens to all of us.’

‘Just don’t go about fingering girls,’ Surya said, getting back to his elements.

‘Who the hell is asking for your advice, bhenchod?’ Dashrath said, flinging a stone at him.

‘Arre, Arre. Don’t hit me, saale,’ Surya said, dodging the stone. ‘Hey, Joshi. Why don’t you get that magazine from the library? What is it called
Apsara
or something?’

‘No,’ I said firmly.

‘Saale, why don’t you get it?’ He pleaded. ‘It is fun to read. When was the last time we read it?’

‘Joshi, get the magazine, please,’ Phawdya said. ‘Remember that serial? That fellow Govindrao and that woman Leela!’

‘Yes!’ Surya said. ‘Let us read what they are doing now.’

‘No way,’ I said. ‘I would be damned if I bring it again.’

I had made the mistake once in the beginning of the year. The magazine was issued from the Municipal Library. Aaisaheb does not care, but Ambabai does not allow me to read it. She does not mind my getting it home for her from the library; she loves to read it. I had carried it to school the next day to show it to my friends. We read it first at our adda. In Pethkar ma’am’s class, Surya poked me in my back with his pencil and took the magazine away. For some time, he and Phawdya read it without making any noise, but then he got excited and whispered a tad too loud, ‘Hey, just see, bhenchod, what is written,’ he said and then read out; ‘Govindrao lifted Leela off the ground and threw her on the bed and then with his rough hands, started to paw at her ample bosom…’

The boys around us giggled. The girls too must have heard as they sniggered. Pethkar ma’am, otherwise quite absent-minded, quickly identified the source of the disturbance. She came over to Surya’s bench. Surya did not see her coming. It was too late to hide the magazine by then.

‘Oh, so this is what is keeping you busy, is it?’ she said. ‘No wonder you are not interested in History. Why would you be, when you have such interesting stuff to read?’ So saying, she snatched the magazine and put it on her table and her purse on top of it.

I was in deep shit. It was a library magazine. If I confided at home, I would be thrown to the wolves. I had to find a way of retrieving it. I asked Surya to go and get it from the staff room, but he just laughed out stupidly and walked away. I had no choice but to go the staff room myself. I went in with an excuse ready: how I had got it for my mother from the library the previous evening but had forgotten to remove it from my school bag; how Surya had seen it in my bag and had started reading it. I was prepared to plead the magazine belonged to the library and was on the verge of tears, but I soon discovered there was no need for concocting a story. To my surprise, I found ma’am engrossed in the magazine! She asked me to come and collect it after school hours.

That taught me a lesson. No more magazines to school. Of course, I still enjoy reading the magazine when there is no one at home. A frisson of excitement runs through my body when I read the stories. Once Chitre had got an English film magazine with awesome photographs. He says seeing is not as much fun as reading. I agree. But these days nothing gives me as much pleasure as thinking about Shirodkar.

T
he much acclaimed
Sholay
was finally being screened in our town. We were familiar with all the dialogues, having heard them on radio for months on end. Our town did not have a seventy mm screen but then something was better than nothing. Having seen the movie, Surya went about singing ‘
mehbooba, mehbooba’
all the time. Santya had bought the audio cassette and it was fun to ask him to repeat the dialogues in our free time.

Except for a few such diversions, school continued as before. It was the month of October and the sun burnt brightly. The paddy fields were dry and the crop had turned yellow. The frogs had vanished long ago. It was no fun watching the playground in the harsh sunlight of the afternoon. The roofs trapped the heat inside, making the rooms hot and muggy. What was worse, we had to deal with dreary lessons and boring teachers. Marathi was okay except for some dull songs and abhangs. Hindi was easy. The French Revolution in the History class seemed unending. Geography was luckily being taught by Manjrekar sir, but the portions were tough including different types of winds, moving of continents, types of rocks and what not. Algebra had simultaneous equations and division of whole numbers. We had the entire classification of plants and animals in Biology. Simple trees and plants were given complicated names like coelentrata, plantohelianthis, and echinodermata. It was difficult to even pronounce them! Chemistry had its own share of difficult equations. Newton and Edison’s experiments made our life difficult in the Physics class. We were at our wits’ end.

Bendre ma’am continued to torture us as before. One day, on a whim, she decided to check our notebooks. As expected, they were not covered. Most had photos of filmstars like Rajesh Khanna, Dharmendra and Hema Malini or cricketers like Wadekar, Engineer, Bedi, etc. It enraged her. She issued instructions to get our notebooks covered the very next day. The paper had to be specifically brown. We were left with no choice. Santu, poor fellow, did not know where to buy the paper. He seemed petrified.

I took his notebook home. Baba had got the paper from his office long back. I used that to cover our notebooks. Phawdya’s mother was upset; she had to spend money to buy the paper. Surya loves such tasks and covered all his notebooks with brown paper. Chitre, meticulous as always, had had his notebooks covered with wax-coated paper since the term began.

Ma’am inspected the notebooks the next day. Amongst the boys, Dashrath, Memane and Kadam were caught. They were given the usual ‘cane treatment’. Santya was grateful I had saved his day. Sundri, amongst the girls, was not spared. Ma’am, disappointed at having caught only a few offenders, was itching to catch more. She decided to inspect each and every notebook carefully. Seeing Shirodkar’s notebook, she commented. ‘This is not brown colour. It is yellow. I had asked for brown, don’t you remember?’

‘Ma’am, it
is brown
paper,’ Shirodkar asserted.

‘Do you think I am colour blind? Stand up.’

Shirodkar stood up, fearing the worst. She was clutching her handkerchief tightly in one hand while the other hand covered her mouth. The whole class watched her silently.

‘My dad covered the notebook for me,’ she said in her defence.

‘Are you arguing with me? It is
not
brown paper,‘ she said, mercilessly tearing the cover off the notebook.

‘Get it covered properly by tomorrow. And if you don’t know what brown is, ask the shopkeeper. He will tell you.’

Shirodkar was sobbing softly. The class was silent.

‘My father personally covered them, staying awake till late night,’ she said.

‘There is no need to cry now. Get it done tomorrow.’ Turning towards us, she said, ‘Class! Open the page to lesson number nine.’

I was fuming at Bendre, but I realized I could do nothing. I cursed her that she may never get married and suffer from TB and get no water when she lay dying and die begging on the streets. The boys too were fuming but were silent. We vented our anger in the mid-break. We wanted to teach her a lesson.

N
ext day one of the teachers was absent. Manjrekar sir came in the free class. We normally get the last five minutes in his class free. He taught us Civics that day and wound up dusting the chalk dust off his palms. Surya prompted me, ‘Joshi, ask him something terrific.’

I thought for a moment and then raised my hand. Sir raised his eyebrows questioningly.

‘Sir, what is the meaning of Emergency?’ I asked in a clear, loud voice.

‘Shabbash!’ he exclaimed. ‘Someone has finally had the guts to ask this question. I was waiting for the day when at least one of you would get up and ask.’