Ninth (BH:D164)

January 14, 2012

Bright red, catchy huge hoarding announcing "Time Of India- All Kerala Edition from Feb 1st" has been erected on the Vellyambalam-Sasthamangalam road. I think Malayalees have missed Shakeela soft porn long enough, now they are ready for morning delivery to their doorstep.

More than a total of couple of hours yesterday and today were spent chatting up with the "guys" of the neighborhood. Three of them get together to play '1-pitch-out-underarm' version of the cricket. Couple of them are in 9th class and the third one, Dhanush is 23. 

Yesterday evening somehow the discussion ended up being about suicides. 

"A guy in our school committed suicide...hung himself....they say....people are saying that it is because he was not given meat and fish"

"Don't be ridiculous"

"No, that is what people are saying, I swear! His parents wanted him to do some ritual abstinence and he committed suicide!"

I braced myself for more ridiculous explanations for bipolar disorder and depression which here is still simply "lack of enthusiasm" that some scolding and may be caning can cure!

"This other girl in my class,cut her veins!"

"You saw her cutting?"

"No!"

"Then?"

"We know she did...sure aanu sure aanu (surely surely)"

"For what?"

"Love failure"

"Huh?"

"This boy in the class rejected her."

"She must have just applied lipstick to her wrists and scared you guys"

"Nooooo...she did...really! Another boy also hung himself"

"What? again 'love failure'?"

"Yes...he liked this girl....went and told her...but she said she likes his friend and not him!"

"How old are these people?"

"14...like me only"

This 14 year old young man's greatest current ambition is to speak English fluently. So Dhanush has declared mandatory 2 afternoons a week when only English will be spoken in the group. This upsets the third member who studies in a Malayalam medium school but he is gracious enough to play along. To their 14 year old minds, owing to my decade long stay in America, I am a superstar in the English speaking department. But it has already been pointed out that I speak nothing like the cowboys in the Westerns. So there is a slight doubt somewhere in the back of those minds about the tale of my American experience.

More cheerful conversation this afternoon as I tossed the ball for their batting practice. After Jimmy the dog passed away few months ago, some rats have made his cage their toilet. 

" I can play only till 5pm."

"Why?"

"I have Maths tuition"

"Who teaches you?"

"Padma teacher"

"How is she?"

"Fat with pimples"

"Woah...I meant how she teaches...why would you think I wanted your beauty analysis!"

"You didn't specify how she teaches!"

"What is she teaching you now?"

"Circles"

I recounted the ancient Shulbhasutra/Aryabhattiya/Bhaskara problem about the owl feeding on a mouse connected to circle geometry from 800 BC. They were genuinely interested.

"Do you have computer science class?" I continued

"Yes"

"What are you learning?"

"We just play games"

"Not C++?"

"That is only next year. Where do you download new movies from?"

"You shouldn't download them...police will arrest you"

"No, no, no, I don't download new movies...only old ones from piratebay and torrents"

"Why don't you stream from youtube?"

"It is expensive....net is free in our plan only from 2am to 8am, so I keep automatic downloading that starts at 2am. First month I didn't know and I got punished when the bill came as Rs.3000. I am allowed to use the net only during two days a week"

"Good parenting!"

"We had some Russian students visit our school."

"What did they do?"

"Girls are so tall. They did some singing and dancing. The boys kick about...they call it dancing...we were all laughing."

I tried to recollect incidents when I was 14 and in the 9th class. Memory is nothing but imaginations seeded by vague recollections. I am sure there were over 180 school days in 9th class. Yet I can only remember very few incidents. 

I remember we had a particularly soft spoken biology teacher. She was some school administrator's wife. Very pleasing old lady. One morning the lesson was nutrition. As an opener, she asked us what we all had for breakfast. 

I had had dosas. I had no idea what dosa was called in English. Did it even have an English name?! I didn't want to stand up and say "dosa". I thought everyone would laugh. Something seemed amiss to my 14 year old mind about admitting to 'dosa' consumption while conversing in English and wearing a maroon tie with blue stripes. 

Looked like I wasn't alone with these sentiments. An eerie silence had descended on the class despite it being such a simple, straightforward, non-theoritical, out-of-syllabus, about-life question. But a nutritional query had transmuted into a linguistic conundrum!

The first boy who was asked got away with "bread". The next one said he just has milk every morning. Another one said she didn't have anything in that morning. The whole class shirked away from naming the true, local dishes. 

The teacher nodded towards me. I lied. I said rice. It was the only food item whose English name came to mind in that emergency situation. She gave me a strange look, "Rice?! in the morning?" and asked the whole class, "Don't any of you eat normal breakfast items like puttu, dosa, idli or appam?"

Our school had a superb Quiz team duo the previous year who went about winning almost all the tournaments in the city. As they had moved on beyond high school, I ended up in the new high school team.Tragic experience. It became the habit to travel to the different schools with the trophies that had been won the previous year, lose hopelessly, leave the trophy and return empty handed. 

But thanks to experience, I redeemed myself next year in 10th class when we reclaimed the lost glory.

I remember an intra-class written quiz that was organized to pick the team for the inter-class quiz. I remember that one question : Name the capital of Myanmar. It was only weeks ago that Burma had changed its name to Myanmar. I didn't know the answer. I resorted to some instant scheming. It looked like Roshin knew the answer. I told him we could team up if he showed me the answer and I will leak to him some answers he didn't know. Rest of the details are blurry. Hari Pillai and I qualified to form the team with Roshin being a very close third. Was their a tie-breaker? I wish I could remember/imagine more details. 

In the written qualifiers for the interclass (only 6 teams could make it to the final on stage) held in the library room, I remember Hari emphatically telling me that Miyazawa was the Japenese Prime Minister. 

A particularly well-endowed girl from 12th class was in a team. One of the trivial stories about the quiz that circulated the next day said that in answer to the question "who is the speaker of the Lok Sabha?" this girl had leaned over to her partner and whispered, "I think it is a Malayalee. Is it Oommen Chandy?" 

We all laughed hard. The story was repeated several times for the next few days and we laughed every time. We took it as confirmation to our own juvenile, imbecile stereotyping that breasts and brain can't both be simultaneously big!