Read And Then One Day: A Memoir for Free Online

handle of a feather duster for chastisement.
    In later life after having been roused to fury by something my own children did, I often, on calmer reflection, realized that it was my own insecurities and failings in something completely unrelated that had made me bully them thus, and I did it only because I could. When I’ve struck any of them or felt the urge to do so, my own frustrations have always been the cause. I sometimes wonder how many disappointments and failures poor Miss Perry or Brother Burke must have lived with to relish being so relentlessly cruel to the children in their care.
    Shah Mamu had a dramatic face-off with Miss Perry one Sunday when he came to take us all ‘out’. Going out of school on Sunday was a big thing but Miss Perry would always keep some student or the other ‘in’ probably because she couldn’t bear to be alone, and on this and many another weekend I was the one chosen to get some maths drilled into my unwilling head. Shah Mamu the handsome dog’s grand arrival obviously made an impact on the old maid but he was told to wait. After standing around politely for a while, not his style at all, he barged straight into the drawing room where the extra class was on, and brazenly demanded that she let me off. Miss Perry held her ground until something sounding suspiciously like profanity to her ears was said. She blanched and weakly threatened to send him to the Principal. My hair stood on end when I heard him snarl, ‘What the damn Principal will do? He’ll hang me?’ And to my utter astonishment, instead of pulling his ears for his atrocious grammar and taking the ‘skin off his back’ with her feather duster after disabling him with one of her roundhouse forehands, or much worse, putting a hex on him and turning him to stone, she actually caved in and turned quite mild before letting me off the hook. Valiant valiant Shah Mamu! To Ma Perry’s credit, she did not hold the incident against me, I guess she didn’t need to, I gave her plenty of other reasons anyway and I didn’t dare defy her. But one day in the grip of a fit of insanity, which I suspect was inspired by Shah Mamu’s sparring session with Miss Perry, I started imitating Brother Burke’s nasal drawl right under his nose. I leave it to your imagination, dear reader, to visualize what happened to me. A real sight for the gods would have been a run-in between Brother Burke and Shah Mamu.
    Old Burke, after continuing to terrorize (and according to many, also teach) students rather well for many more years, went back to Ireland in the mid nineties, and finally mingled with his own earth. My prayer for him is that in the big projection room in the sky he has the most comfortable seat and an unending store of his favourite movies for all eternity. That, and I also hope he keeps getting rapped on the head with a hard knuckle every now and then when he least expects it.
    As for Miss Perry, sometime in the mid nineties I learnt she was in a home for the aged in Lucknow. I wrote her a letter, I don’t know why, and she replied saying she remembered me, but I doubt if she did. I heard later that she’d suffered a brutal death at the hands of an intruder. I don’t suspect it was one of her students.



Cricket, my second, er... third love
    M y grades continued to slip, my tonsils were removed, my pubic hair began to grow, a hundred ‘naya paisa’ replaced the sixteen annas in a rupee, kilometres replaced miles and the unsatiated curiosity about the opposite sex began its torment, causing me to sink deeper and deeper into myself. I still never got a chance to act on the stage, and the gulf between my parents and me began to widen. Through my time in Sem I was befriended by two people, Karan Chand Raj (‘KC’) Singh who was the prince, not that I would ever have believed it then, and is now the raja of an estate called Kashipur, and Satvinder (‘Pearly’) Dhingra. Both from privileged homes, they were kind and generous and