BY P. VIJAYKUMAR

The narrator was happy being a simple schoolteacher… until he got married.

AT THE time of my marriage, I was a schoolteacher. It was a job I loved most because it made me proud that I could inspire and encourage young minds. I had the satisfaction of knowing that I was teaching something that would help my students for the rest of their lives. I was supporting and guiding future leaders. I considered my students’ accomplishments as recognition of my own hard work.

Even though I had been teaching the same subject in different classes, there had never been a dull moment. Kids would surprise me with weird questions, and I was learning every day.

The job also had a rhythmic routine. There were no long hours of work and so I could spend time with family and friends, thanks to long school vacations. People in the locality addressed me as ‘master’ and viewed me with awe. I was thus literally walking on clouds, when some elders in the family thought I had reached an age where a woman was needed to regulate my life.

That was when the shackles fell on me.

Curtains.

During our honeymoon days (that quiet interval between bells and bills), I made the cardinal mistake most young husbands committed. I asked my wife’s suggestions on all silly matters and readily agreed to all her ridiculous advice because I thought that was the best way to convey one’s love. No one told me that I was digging my own funeral pit as I went on taking her advice seriously.

She began to act as though she was superior and told me in a few well-selected words (probably copied from OED) that I was a dullard. I had no futuristic outlook. I was not modern. Like a gramophone needle spinning on the same track, I had been teaching the students the same thing over and over, year after year. Wouldn’t I get bored with repetition? And what pay had I been getting? A pittance! “Are you not ashamed?” she added as a postscript.

To tell you the truth, gentle reader, I had no armour in my archery to counter her verbal attack. My face burned with shame. Everything she said was true. A lesser man would have fallen at her feet and begged for forgiveness for being an ass, but all I did was to stand before her like a dog looking up at its master for orders, subdued and meek. ‘Then what do you suggest?” I asked when the tirade paused to take a breath.

“Do I have to tell you that?” she asked disdainfully. “Look at yourself. Wearing a dull dhoti, a long-sleeved white shirt, worn-out sandals and riding a rickety cycle. Don’t you have any coloured shirt? Have you ever worn pants?” she asked. “Ho, ho, ho! How can I ever present you before my friends?” she lamented. I was afraid she would start crying.

I wanted to ask her whether she was aware that she had been marrying a schoolteacher, but I didn’t. I had never imagined that a teacher’s job was considered the lowest in the marriage market.

“Why don’t you wear pants and shirt as most youngsters do? Is it a taboo to wear pants in the school?” she asked derisively.

Dhoti is a national dress and I love to wear it. That was the answer I should have given, but at this critical juncture words deserted me. My mind was like a slate wiped clean. I groped for an apt reply. None came. But I had a clear indication where this harangue was leading to. My days as a teacher were numbered. It was a question of when the countdown would begin.

“We will forget how you’ve been living till now. From now onwards, I’ll steer you to reach greater heights in life,” she volunteered.

“What you need is a complete change of character to make it at least presentable in public,” she announced.
I shuddered with fright. Was my character in such bad shape? What sort of change was she planning? I was an active member of a cultural club and had held the distinction of collecting more funds for their building projects by presenting myself at the exact time when prominent members of our society got their pay packets in hand. Being a teacher for their wards, they just could not ignore me or pretend to be deaf and dumb.

The first axe fell on such social activities. I should no longer volunteer for fund raising. She said she had seen people wincing rather painfully every time my name was mentioned. Alas! She had been listening to some of the aggrieved.

My irregular eating habits needed straightening, came the next announcement. My goodness! It was true that I had been taking tea at all odd hours, and had never found anything wrong in the tea company’s slogan that ‘any time is tea time’. From now onwards, not more than two cups of tea a day, she declared.

I flinched painfully. I was sure I would fall asleep and tumble from the chair while taking classes, if I didn’t get tea at regular intervals, I can imagine the hullabaloo that would ensue in the class.

No more paan-chewing. Didn’t I know that it was as injurious as smoking? I had the innocuous habit of chewing paan whenever I got some leisure time. The box containing betel leaves and areca nut suddenly disappeared from my writing table. My long association with that box thus ended unceremoniously. But it had a brighter side. My mouth no longer tasted like a cowshed.

The paanwala near our school, however, treated me with disdain. He said I didn’t have a backbone. What the relationship between backbone and chewing paan was, I didn’t understand and didn’t care about. All I knew was that I was saving much more money in the process.

But the changes did not stop with the ban on paan. More changes were in the offing. My dinner was a simple vegetarian meal. I had no liking for fish or meat. It was more hygienic, healthy and good for sleep.

“Are you a bull to eat grass all the time?” my wife asked.

I didn’t answer. Perhaps she knew.

She gave me a study class on the advantage of eating fish. Fish contained something called omega-3 fatty acids which she said would contribute to the health of brain tissue and promote healthy vision. “Your brain needs development,” she concluded. But a doubt remained; I had always thought omega was the name of a watch.

Eating fish would reduce the risk of heart disease and stroke by reducing blood clots and inflammation, lower blood pressure, lower blood fats and boost good cholesterol, she continued. I was impressed. It was always a good thing in having someone in the family with diabetes or cholesterol. You read books and improve your knowledge.

However, the net result was not very encouraging. I began to see more fish on the dining table - cooked, fried or just swimming merrily in a little puddle of chilli water. I had a feeling that if I continued with this diet, I would, in a couple of months, look like a fish.

Worse, she found my position as a schoolteacher most disparaging. She complained that I was not ambitious and not earning enough money. I was aware that a teacher’s job was not a lucrative one. Why couldn’t I try for an office job? she asked. She reminded me that I was a double graduate and intelligent as a cockroach. Though I didn’t particularly like that comparison, I was glad that she had at least acknowledged that I was intelligent.

To tell you the truth, I was pleased with my job at the school and did not take a fancy to an office job. At the most, she argued, when I turn over the hill and was about to be tossed into the waste paper basket, the school management might make me the headmaster, but how much salary could I expect to earn then?

“If you don’t think of yourself, you should think of our children,” she cautioned me. Till now, I had not exactly looked before us or behind us and had no aspiration beyond the ignorant present. But the picture she painted about a bleak future, I admit, floored me. She did have a point there and I promised to look around for an office job.

Because, as you see, I had heard that it was more conducive to peace to leave my wife with the last word. I began to scan all advertisements and started sending applications for every position, whether it suited my qualifications or not. But I had a strange feeling that my application presented a dismal picture of my torn and tattered life. I had no idea what I was capable of doing in an office. All I knew was talking. I could talk from morning till evening to any group, without letting them to go to sleep. Would anybody hire me just to talk, talk and talk all the time?

Strangely, I got a few replies and I went wearing new pants and shirt, socks and all like a circus clown and presented myself before some serious looking, grim-faced executives who asked me questions on everything under the sun except what I had been teaching at the school. At the end of the interviews, they told me that they would let me know; which I translated as, “Get out! You’re wasting our time.”

One evening, when I returned home, I found my wife very excited. From what she was blabbering about, I gathered that I had been offered the position of an administrative officer by a reputed firm.

Never did I imagine that somebody would be foolish enough to actually let me know. But, instead of basking in the sunshine of fortune, I was obsessed with all sorts of purely ethical doubts and fears. I had no previous experience in administration and had no idea what my job profile would be. I had a dreadful foreboding that it was goodbye to the tranquillity that I had been enjoying so long.

I soon discovered that my imagination and reality had no common ground for meeting. I had thought that it was a job that would tie me down to my seat the whole day. In fact, I never got time to sit on my chair. Some issue or other would crop up and I was always on tenterhooks.

If the bulbs burnt out, I was called in to arrange a replacement and if the toilet flush was not working, I had to run around to find a plumber. I was at the receiving end if the canteen tea tasted like mud water, boiled and sweetened. I became the sort of man everybody could kick around for all crises at the office. How could I foresee that our office car would suddenly become irresolute and cough midway from the airport and the city and refuse to carry our chairman to the guest house in the middle of a cold night?

For all the hard work I had been doing, I was getting earfuls of invectives from my boss. My self-esteem fell. My confidence got a hard beating. The smile from my face took a long vacation. I began to doubt whether this was work that I had fancied most. There were no compliments for the good work done, no patting on the back.

“You’ve resigned from school?” the fishmonger at the corner of my street asked me one evening as I returned home. “That was the most foolish thing to do!” he expressed his frank opinion. I recoiled.

“You left school?” the vegetable vendor was surprised. The regular people whom I normally meet in the street but did not know their names, stopped smiling at me. Some parents of my pupils wanted to know why I had left and pleaded with me to return to the school. I felt guilty. I had failed them. I never knew their love for me. Indeed I missed my students. I missed their friendly smiles, the classroom jokes, the sense of elation that I had when my students fared well in the exams. Now all were lost irretrievably. Had I not listened to my wife’s lectures, I realised, I would not be in such a dilemma.

I now knew exactly what it meant to be a fish out of water. My colleagues in the office were most uncooperative and unhelpful. The spirit of conviviality that I had enjoyed at the school was lacking. I felt as if a thick curtain had fallen on all joy and happiness to shut me out from everything, save dull endurance.

It scared me to think that I would be doing the same type of work day after day, month after month, year after year. I could foresee a number of tomorrows just all in a line - the first of them the biggest and clearest and others getting smaller and smaller as they stood farther away - but they all seemed very fierce and brutal as if shouting, ‘’We’re coming, beware of us.”

I was a self-critic to know that an office job was not my cup of tea. I was haunted by a host of thick files bound by red ribbons that turned my dreams into a continuous nightmare. No fishmonger, no vegetable vendor, no dhobi, no milkman, no newspaper boy or neighbours would care much where I worked, and what job I had been doing if I continued to work in an office.

And a slow realisation dawned on me that, if I stayed in this place, my autobiography would be as devoid of any interest as my autopsy would be. So, one morning, without telling my wife (I had had enough of her tall opinions), I went to the school to see my old friend who was the school administrator, told him my sob story and cried on his shoulder.

He smiled and patted me on my back. “I knew you’d return. You can’t stay away from us,” he said. “When are you rejoining?”

You see, I had not resigned my job, as my wife had advised. My friend had suggested taking a long leave on the ground of pursuing further studies and then deciding when to quit.

I had indeed pursued further studies - and learnt new lessons!

Now I was returning to my homeland…

Courtesy: Women’s Era