It was so confusing: to call him deuta or sir.
“In school, call him sir, if you don’t like calling him deuta,” my elder brother suggested.
“What do you call him in school?” so I asked him.
“Sir,” my brother replied.
My classmates would burst into laughter, even if I called him deuta by mistake. They didn’t understand that he was sir for me only for six hours a day! In school. In fact, not even six hours. It was only when he came to our English class, or at rare moments when we crossed ways in the school building and greeting him was unavoidable. Rest of the day, he was my deuta. He too would join the entire class in those laughing spells, standing by the edge of the teacher’s table. For a moment, the class would come to a halt until the spell mellowed down, with someone teasing me from behind ‘Odeuta, would you carry me on your lap’ or ‘O deuta, give me a candy please’. I wasn’t a kid! I had outgrown his lap years ago and was just about three and a half inches shorter than him! I could buy candies myself, if I wanted to, of course, from the pocket money I would get from him or ma. But then, that was the way he kept the class entertained. With stories from everywhere.
“It’s not Pat Riot,” he would, for instance, say while teaching The Patriot, “it’s pei— like you pay money to someone —and then, triet. Come on, try once more.” and we would repeat peitriet after him, while our ears waited eagerly to hear the final bell ring for the day.Who likes to learn pronunciation, grammar, unseen comprehension in the last period?
But then, he would make a story of everything he taught. The story of the patriot, he would say, had another story within. And then, he would tell us how the wings of wax of Icarus dismantled when he got too close to the sun ignoring his father, Daedalus’ warnings and fell to his death. And then a moral would follow:
In life, it is important to understand your limits. When you have wings of wax, don’t soar too high, don’t stoop too low.
It was too long and arrhythmic for a moral. Thank God! I’d written it down in my journal.
Every time he taught us how to say a new word, he would also say a few words that rhymed or half-rhymed with it. Like:
Patriot > Harriet > Chariot > Idiot
That day, he left the class in the middle, like most of the days. As the Principal of our school he had many things to do other than explaining The Patriot and teaching us grammar and pronunciation. Nobody cared to think about the question he left behind:
“Why does the patriot, in his last moments, think about Icarus’ story? Was his leap also like Icarus’, in defiance of natural laws of mortal men? Think!”
That’s what he did, whenever there were interruptions: throw a question to the class before attending to those.
“So where were we?” deuta had hurried back in to the classroom after the brief interruption and asked, taking all of us by surprise!As expected nobody had thought about the answer. Perhaps, not even the question. I remembered the question, because he had asked my brother this question at least six times in the last four months!
Unfortunately, deuta remembered the question too! Why would he not? He might have thrown this same question to other classes as well? But good natured as he always was, and sparing as well, he said, “You have three days to think about it. Remember! I need a response from each one of you on Monday.”
“By the way, are you coming for the Republic Day celebrations tomorrow?” he asked another question, just before going out of the room.
Everyone looked at one another’s face. Nobody knew the answer to this question as well. So he smiled and left. Good natured and sparing as he was.
That year the Republic Day was different. For the first time in six years, I wouldn’t have to go for the Republic Day ceremonies in school early in the morning and could sleep till eight or perhaps nine. Thanks to the Bandh that some of the rebel groups had called! A Bandh meant a complete shutdown of businesses, offices, schools, colleges, transport and everything that are, kind of, important for our survival! It’s a funny way of protest though, as if you are asking your kidneys, heart, lungs, eyes, ears, nose etcetera to stop working for a while to tell your mother that you don’t like bitter-gourd for lunch! And it’s like, you are doing it with the bleak hope that your mother doesn’t serve it the next time! Whereas, she’s hell-bent on serving it for dinner as well!
Anyway, everyone liked bandhs for their own reasons. For the people who worked in offices, it was an extra day off — they loved it, if a bandh was called on a Monday and they hated if it coincided with a public holiday, like Republic or Independence day; for the grocery, vegetable, fish and meat sellers at the lower market it would be relief for one day from paying protection money to the local Dadas; for me and my friends, bandhs meant never-ending days in the cricket ground or free-wheeling bi-cycle rides through the unexplored roads of the city. The roads would be mostly empty during bandhs, for, nobody wanted their vehicles burnt or damaged. Two things remained open though – hospitals and the roadside shacks selling tea, betel-nut, cigarettes and bread-toasts. Even the representatives of protestors needed those services! Funnier was the fact you’d only see representatives of the protestors, never the actual ones. And these representatives were often the local Dadas. Nobody had seen the actual protestors. Rumour was that they came out of their hideouts in the jungles of Burma and Bangladesh only when they had to carry out some very serious mission. Like abducting top-notch businessmen and high-ranked officials for ransoms, or to blast the oil pipelines, or to teach lesson to a traitor who didn’t believe in their demand for a free, sovereign state.
Nogenkhura, who had his paan-dokan open, was the only one who had seen the faces of the actual protestors. He didn’t acknowledge that though. But Sanjay, the chemist, while taking an afternoon stroll in his terrace, saw three men, wearing full-mask helmets in a Yamaha RX 100 stop at Nogenkhura’s shack to buy betel-nut. Sanjay reasoned that only the actual protestors, the rebels, rode Yamaha RX 100 bikes on bandh days to keep a vigil, lest anyone had violated their decree. Sanjay, who could easily understand what those guys were up to, immediately went inside his house and told his wife.
“He is going to pay up a heavy price for breaking the decree! They have come to do justice and they won’t spare him anyway. I just hope, his family is saved.” he said in a trembling voice while hastily locking the main door of his house. Zeetu, the elder son of Sanjay, who played football with my elder brother had overheard the conversation between his parents. However, he was too scared himself to come out and raise an alarm with those it mattered the most — the family of the person who the punishment was to be meted out.
The first waves of wailings were heard around six thirty in the evening. I had just returned from a bi-cycle ride to the GeetaMandir Hills with my friends and was freshening up in the bathroom. Monochromatic images of magnificent bungalows and apartments along the Mother Teresa Road flashed back, as I was sprinkling water on my face and torso. Someday, I will have my house there, whizzed passed by mind. On the way back, my friend Biswa, who was pillion riding my bi-cycle, sang all the way:
oxuntoradoi
tenekoinesababormoromlogakoi
oxuntoradoi…
Earlier in the afternoon, before the bi-cycle ride, we had lost a fifteen-over match to Student’s Club by fifty six runs. For the first time in its history of its existence over five and half winters, One Star Club, that was our team, had lost a match to our arch rivals! The loss lingered for long and all Biswa was doing was trying to shoo away the humiliation.
The wailings now were a sharp contrast to the lyrics of Biswa’s song. Arrhythmic, shrill, heart-crunching, deathly! It came from our living room! It was ma. By the time I came out of the bathroom, that was, perhaps, a few seconds later, I heard many more voices everyone that came to view had joined in our living room to create a collective wailing! I had no idea why!
In the next fifteen or twenty minutes everyone in the vicinity was on their way to the school. My elder brother almost dragged me through the lanes for about ten minutes while he ran, and made me run too, in an effort to reach the school at the earliest. Barefoot, as we were, the pebbles on the road pierced our feet with every step we took. I too tried to cry like my brother. But I couldn’t. Although everyone’s wails around had made the message very clear: the three men in the Yamaha RX 100, shot deuta dead in his cabin in the school!
“It’s not your London, Bopa! Here people have a different notion of nation now,” Aita had warned Deuta, when he was going out in the morning to hoist the Indian Tricolour in school. All by himself. I was still in bed, half-woken, pretending to be in deep sleep.
The next day, Biswa also told me that the protestors’ representatives were adding deuta in the list of Bissaakh-ghatok — traitor. Deuta would have taught us how to pronounce the word: say Tray like the tray you carry glasses of water or cups of tea, and tuh — trai-tuh. It half-rhymed with deu-tuh.
Days later, people were still talking about the justice meted out to deuta by the protestors. The common view was that all his education ultimately proved him wrong. With deep sighs and moistened eyes they would add that he was perhaps destined to meet his end in the hands of his own people. He shouldn’t have soared that high, they would conclude.
