2
The head teacher started to take lessons from us, particularly from those who he knew were not in the habit of doing the homework. He would take off the thick wooden handle of the big iron-hammer used to hit the bell or a bamboo-wicker used to goad the cattle-herd and start beating the palms of the pupil who got stuck in the middle of the poem while reciting and was asked to spread his unfolded palms before the teacher with a hammer. Each beat accompanied some spontaneous wrath-words from the teacher and some flinching reflexes from the pupil under the beat. The beating sent a message of fear to the rest, but only for the day. Because, within a few more moments, the jolly first assistant teacher came in and the class broke into laughter after his witty remarks and funny stories. I must say he had a very beautiful style of teaching, quite different from the others. Our head teacher really wanted his students to shine and was difficult to get angry. But, when he was, for some student, it was difficult to get him back to his cool.
We, the pupils of this primary school, all belonged to there – the residence of the school. Therefore, it was obvious that the teachers knew us very well as we knew them. And, it was more so, that I had always been in their good books as my head teacher and the first assistant teacher were on very intimate terms with my father whom they respected very much like their elder brother. My father was senior to them, and it is good here to mention that they liked my father more because of his similar humorous nature. They knew each other from their childhood days in this neighbourhood and when this trio talked together, they talked in their unpolished local dialect of East Bengal, which itself was very funny, lively to ears. I enjoyed that too much.
I used to call them ‘uncle’. It was quite uneasy for me, therefore, to call them ‘Mastar Mashai’ (Sir) in the classroom, which was customary in the school. Often times, I tried to avoid calling them ‘Mastar Mashai’ and called them ‘uncle’ and they corrected me affectionately. The head teacher uncle had always been affectionate to me and to a larger degree. One day, when I forgot lessons and could not answer the third assistant teacher, he reported me to the head teacher uncle. He was writing at his table a little ahead. ‘Sir, here is your best boy. He hasn’t done his lessons today’, he smiled and asked, ‘what now sir?’ The head teacher uncle lifted his face and replied in an equal smiling tone, ‘I am not going to accept that he has not done his lessons. The most I can accept is that he must have forgotten the lessons’. And, indeed it was. I did my lessons, but I had forgotten the lesson that day. I could read hardly twice last night and it was not enough. I was not a boy with very easy grasping. I had to read the same lesson repeatedly to commit to memory. But, once I got it I got for life.
