Long before I had come across the word "malingerer", I had practiced the art myself. As a Bengali it came naturally; And I must say that I climbed great heights of this magical art at a considerably tender age. A prodigy I was, and might very well have become a master of this trait only if I did not have to taste it one fateful day.
The year was 1994 and I was in the 6th standard then. Even then, I had loved weekends and hated Mondays. But the bitterness towards those Mondays were as different from now as chalk and cheese. For some reason (and you'll soon know why), even to this day the mention of "chalk" never fails to raise the bile up my esophagus. So there I was sitting on my crumpled bed on one of those Monday-mornings looking at the perennial flow of the silver of the Ganges. Back then we lived by the bank of the river, near Belur Math. I had often sat by the window and wondered if I could drop school and become like Tagore or go about peregrinating the country like Vivekananda as only 6th graders can. My thoughts on that morning were less noble though. Ma had come with a cup full of milk and kept it on the side-table, and returned to the kitchen. I had a general uncanny liking for milk since I was a child, but on Mondays the steaming hot white liquid inevitably evoked a sense of nausea. I gulped half a glass of the liquid and dragged my feet to the bathroom. The mirror above the wash basin was fixed to the wall. For an adult with a 6 feet 2 inch frame like my father's it was placed at a perfect height. For me it was only about seeing the disheveled hair and the drooping eyes. That morning those eyes said a sad story. They forewarned of impending disaster if appropriate action was delayed. Suddenly, as if on cue the churn in my stomach increased and the mercury galloped a couple of degrees, and I flopped back to me bed.
Ma came and found her little one curled under the blanket. She was not one to give in to juvenile tantrums. So, in a sterner-than-normal voice she asked me to get up and get ready for school. The engine in her revved and I could feel it. But by now the churn in my stomach had upped the ante as well, and the mercury had just managed to scale the 100 Fahrenheit summit. I decided to give all the bacteria, virus and other imaginary micro-organisms in my body a little more time. In fifteen minutes it would be show-time. The car would blow the horn downstairs demanding me to come down to be whisked to school, and Ma would have no other alternative but to make the solitary phone call to Papa. So I moaned in my bed writhing in pain and slipped incoherent words out of my mouth that sounded like "stomach-ache", "absent", and "school" all in one breath, and directed them towards the kitchen. Sure enough in a few minutes Ma whizzed past the bed mentioning some incomprehensible punishment if I ever ate outside again (which I had done the previous night). She reached for the phone and dialed my father's office phone. The battle was reaching a favourable end. The microbes in my body cheered like Gauls and I shivered under the blanket with a sheepish grin on my face.
In a minute, the car was gone, my school clothes went back to the closet and an extra blanket came over me. An irrevocable writ had just been passed by a man sitting with a telephone receiver in one hand and a half-burnt Wills Navy-Cut in another; And most importantly, Mullick sir's knuckles would have to find someone else's cranium to crack on today! "I love my father", I reminded myself. Men must at all time be able to take such irrevocable decisions and one day I must remember to be one such man, I told myself.
Every Monday of my life in 1994 was a chapter from an Edgar Allan Poe novel. The morning classes of English, Mathematics and History were progressively unlikable sessions. Then there was a lunch-break, followed by the assembly bell (or rather the death knell). Mullick sir would walk in tip-toed wearing a well-pressed dark coloured trouser and a cream coloured shirt. The golden buckle of his belt shone like the hilt of a sword tucked in a scabbard (and he kept touching it as if to remind others that it was there). He was a well-oiled machine (as was apparent from his back-brushed hair) throwing sparks of Bengali literature to burn down the few hatochhara baandor's around him. Though I never acted like one, my inability to rote the 16 golden lines of a vernacular poem inevitably classified me as one. Some Monday's were better than others, because the poems were easier to memorize. I could memorize the first four lines and then the rest fell in place like hills and valleys (or do they call it "iambic pentameter"/). Those poems strangely reduced my Monday morning stomach aches. And then there were the hurricane-poems which twisted and turned mid-way and played a game of Chinese Checkers with my memory. Those invoked the plotting devil in me on those mornings. The punishment that came along with the title that sir conferred was unique in its concoction of comedy, pain and humiliation. He would pull the students left ear down till the head and torso were horizontal to the ground (like plucking a fruit from a high branch). Then with a swift action he would release the reddened ear, but before the head sprang upwards he would bring down the knuckles of his fist directly on the cranium of the unfortunate head. Before the dizziness waned he would write a full page of remarks in the student's diary in affluent English, just to prove that his ken of knowledge did indeed transgress language barriers!
Such have I fought many a Monday-morning battle in my youth. But even great warriors do have chinks in their armor. In my case it was just that! Ma always forgot the previous Monday's incident, making it easier for me to stage the same show over. But somehow the fact that stomach aches were showing up too often in his son's belly did not go down well with my father. I forgot to mention that after the Monday morning veto that my father would pass over Ma, he would send the company doctor to see me. Now, I do not know if this doctor knew that my stomach aches were as concocted as the strange sounds that he claimed to hear when he placed the stethoscope over my stomach; But his smile always had the I'll-tell-your-daddy-this-time look. He would then prescribe some medicine which I could swear were rank placebos, because they silently entered my system and left it, without making a noise. And then, one fine day this doctor pulled a Brutus on me!
He suggested to my father that I may have some "unexplained" stomach ailment, and that I take a "barium test". As inert as the substance may sounds, the test proved to be a torment. The test started at five in the morning with a full glass of "chalk-paste" (a.k.a barium sulphate) thrust down my food pipe. I felt being embalmed for posterity. All the Monday-morning nausea that I had conjured in the past returned for real and tears welled out of those drooping eyes seeking instant penance. I spent the rest of the day being X-ray'ed at two-hour intervals while the chalk-paste traversed the entire route of my digestive system. Needless to say that the reports came squeaky clean. My sins had been white-washed, thoroughly. Mullick sir's knuckles were now a dream that I looked forward too. My appreciation for Bengali poems scaled newer heights as my brain kept switching off after rehearsing 12 lines. The memory of the barium-sulphate though egged me on.
PS: The barium-sulphate suspension came out of my system in all its glory on a Monday, Tuesday and the following Wednesday.
Ma came and found her little one curled under the blanket. She was not one to give in to juvenile tantrums. So, in a sterner-than-normal voice she asked me to get up and get ready for school. The engine in her revved and I could feel it. But by now the churn in my stomach had upped the ante as well, and the mercury had just managed to scale the 100 Fahrenheit summit. I decided to give all the bacteria, virus and other imaginary micro-organisms in my body a little more time. In fifteen minutes it would be show-time. The car would blow the horn downstairs demanding me to come down to be whisked to school, and Ma would have no other alternative but to make the solitary phone call to Papa. So I moaned in my bed writhing in pain and slipped incoherent words out of my mouth that sounded like "stomach-ache", "absent", and "school" all in one breath, and directed them towards the kitchen. Sure enough in a few minutes Ma whizzed past the bed mentioning some incomprehensible punishment if I ever ate outside again (which I had done the previous night). She reached for the phone and dialed my father's office phone. The battle was reaching a favourable end. The microbes in my body cheered like Gauls and I shivered under the blanket with a sheepish grin on my face.
In a minute, the car was gone, my school clothes went back to the closet and an extra blanket came over me. An irrevocable writ had just been passed by a man sitting with a telephone receiver in one hand and a half-burnt Wills Navy-Cut in another; And most importantly, Mullick sir's knuckles would have to find someone else's cranium to crack on today! "I love my father", I reminded myself. Men must at all time be able to take such irrevocable decisions and one day I must remember to be one such man, I told myself.
Every Monday of my life in 1994 was a chapter from an Edgar Allan Poe novel. The morning classes of English, Mathematics and History were progressively unlikable sessions. Then there was a lunch-break, followed by the assembly bell (or rather the death knell). Mullick sir would walk in tip-toed wearing a well-pressed dark coloured trouser and a cream coloured shirt. The golden buckle of his belt shone like the hilt of a sword tucked in a scabbard (and he kept touching it as if to remind others that it was there). He was a well-oiled machine (as was apparent from his back-brushed hair) throwing sparks of Bengali literature to burn down the few hatochhara baandor's around him. Though I never acted like one, my inability to rote the 16 golden lines of a vernacular poem inevitably classified me as one. Some Monday's were better than others, because the poems were easier to memorize. I could memorize the first four lines and then the rest fell in place like hills and valleys (or do they call it "iambic pentameter"/). Those poems strangely reduced my Monday morning stomach aches. And then there were the hurricane-poems which twisted and turned mid-way and played a game of Chinese Checkers with my memory. Those invoked the plotting devil in me on those mornings. The punishment that came along with the title that sir conferred was unique in its concoction of comedy, pain and humiliation. He would pull the students left ear down till the head and torso were horizontal to the ground (like plucking a fruit from a high branch). Then with a swift action he would release the reddened ear, but before the head sprang upwards he would bring down the knuckles of his fist directly on the cranium of the unfortunate head. Before the dizziness waned he would write a full page of remarks in the student's diary in affluent English, just to prove that his ken of knowledge did indeed transgress language barriers!
Such have I fought many a Monday-morning battle in my youth. But even great warriors do have chinks in their armor. In my case it was just that! Ma always forgot the previous Monday's incident, making it easier for me to stage the same show over. But somehow the fact that stomach aches were showing up too often in his son's belly did not go down well with my father. I forgot to mention that after the Monday morning veto that my father would pass over Ma, he would send the company doctor to see me. Now, I do not know if this doctor knew that my stomach aches were as concocted as the strange sounds that he claimed to hear when he placed the stethoscope over my stomach; But his smile always had the I'll-tell-your-daddy-this-time look. He would then prescribe some medicine which I could swear were rank placebos, because they silently entered my system and left it, without making a noise. And then, one fine day this doctor pulled a Brutus on me!
He suggested to my father that I may have some "unexplained" stomach ailment, and that I take a "barium test". As inert as the substance may sounds, the test proved to be a torment. The test started at five in the morning with a full glass of "chalk-paste" (a.k.a barium sulphate) thrust down my food pipe. I felt being embalmed for posterity. All the Monday-morning nausea that I had conjured in the past returned for real and tears welled out of those drooping eyes seeking instant penance. I spent the rest of the day being X-ray'ed at two-hour intervals while the chalk-paste traversed the entire route of my digestive system. Needless to say that the reports came squeaky clean. My sins had been white-washed, thoroughly. Mullick sir's knuckles were now a dream that I looked forward too. My appreciation for Bengali poems scaled newer heights as my brain kept switching off after rehearsing 12 lines. The memory of the barium-sulphate though egged me on.
PS: The barium-sulphate suspension came out of my system in all its glory on a Monday, Tuesday and the following Wednesday.
2 comments:
Dadu-r gatta :-)
You are truly developing into a raconteur of rare merit, Saptarshi. This precisely the sort of writing that used to be called belles lettres once upon a time (romyorochona in Bengali), an almost forgotten art in this grossly utilitarian and philistinic age ( most of your readers might not even know what those two words mean!) Keep writing, I tell you, and do think about visiting a publisher one of these days.
Sir
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