I was a backbencher. Once, in my classroom, there happened to be some chairs. I stacked them up, one atop the other, finally making a careful tower of five chairs. Then I sat proudly on this DIY throne. All of this was done during those precious few minutes of freedom in between periods when one teacher left and the other was yet to arrive. It was the Sanskrit period and this particular teacher, Balakram Sir, usually came in a little late. He was also very strict. However, that day he decided to come in early. As was the fate of Indian royalty, I was banished from the throne and tortured. In other words, he made me step down and beat me like crazy with this weapon he carried everywhere, an awful cane which had an elastic bend for evoking extra agony. At once, marks formed wherever it fell on my bony body. This teacher was especially sadistic: he used to poke pencils deeply into the various crevices and depressions in the body, like behind the ears or the bone behind the neck. I got beaten up pretty badly on a routine basis until I was in the tenth standard.
* * *
Our sarkari school itself was located at a height and it was open on all sides. Due to the elevation, the surrounding houses were located at the same level as well. So we could peek into the windows of the houses. We had this one teacher who was not interested in teaching at all. He was quite weird. He used to take out wads of money, mostly Rs 20 notes bundled up into rolls and fastened with rubber bands, and display them on the teacher’s table. Far away, but within clear visibility, a girl in one of the houses was making uplas out of cow and buffalo dung. Every day she came out at the same time, which was around 10 a.m. We would pretend to be immersed in our textbooks as if they were the most interesting things in the world. But every now and then, we would catch a glimpse of his shady activities. He would flip around the rolls of money showing them off to the girl. It was extremely strange, we thought in our innocence, not understanding the entire story.
* * *
My friend was participating in the annual school play. He requested the teacher to take me in it as well. Knowing what a shy boy I was, the teacher was far from keen to cast me. But eventually she did. I was playing a small-time politician. We were enacting a mock Parliament. A topic was chosen and we were to debate for and against it. She gave me only one line. But I rehearsed like crazy for it.
On the day of the show, I kept talking and talking and talking. Instead of one line, I ended up saying ten lines. As soon as I got off the stage, I realized that I did not remember what I had said and assumed that I had said it all wrong. But after the show, many people in the audience came up to me and congratulated me; however, they also said that they did not understand what I had said. But it felt good, really good. Imagine my surprise! I understood then that this was because I was completely in character and it had nothing to do with the lines.
7Of Love Letters and Kites
Like most people, I was about fourteen or fifteen years old when I first fell in love. Out of respect for her and her privacy, let’s change her name to, say, Shahana. She was a few years younger than me and belonged to an orthodox Muslim family. They were extremely conservative, so much so that she was not allowed to leave her house too many times and during the rare times when she did, somebody almost always accompanied her; sometimes it would be her younger brother, a toddler, who would be on her hip when she went to buy vegetables from the market. Initially, Shahana used to come outside only in a burqa. Still I stared at her softly, showing that I had eyes for her and her only, to let her know that I was besotted with her. She caught the rather obvious hint. She also figured that this thin lad called Nawaz went to the sarkari school, walking right past her house at a certain time, around 10 a.m. And then he walked back the same path on his way home at around 4 p.m. She used to stand outside her door at these times and we gazed into each other’s eyes without blinking, without saying a word. Whatever you want to call this went on for an entire year.
An actual meeting was becoming next to impossible. In those days, electricity outages were common and the darkness held great potential for clandestine meetings. But families worried especially about girls in such situations, so that option never worked out for me. Still, I did not give up hope. While flying kites, I used to write a love note and stick it on the back of the kite. Then I would navigate the kite ever so carefully so that it landed on her terrace and I’d wait with bated breath for her to pick up the note. This was rather risky as I had to gauge the wind’s every whim, lest it land on another terrace and create a potential apocalypse for us. Strangely enough, every time I needed the wind to ferry the kite back to my terrace so that I could read her reply, the wind would stubbornly refuse to blow in that direction. Nature was not on our side but our love letters continued.
‘I love you a lot!’ I’d write.
‘Me too!’ she’d reply.
‘Meet me tonight,’ I’d beg.
‘My Ammi is home. I can’t come outside,’ she’d
