A lesson in Partition

This post is again a trip down the nostalgia lane. Again triggerred by a post in facebook by my good friend Chandrashekar, whose efforts have been incidental in stoking those still burning embers of our memory. Of our merry days at high school when the school used to give us a high.

It was the most memorable of those times when the world was our Oyster, when every dream, however distant seemed merely a deferred reality. When the only limitation was our pronounced inability to understand our own.

The Eighth standard class is a memorable one for many. For me it was, in more ways than one. Just out of a board exam in seventh standard down south in Chikmagalur, eighth standard, for one was a new stepping stone and even more exciting because that was my first year in New Delhi. Coming up there to the plains from the very plateaued Deccan, everything seemed so different in its expanse. In no time we moved to a house in Karol Bagh area and My dad had enrolled all three of us (me , my sister and my brother) at Delhi Kannada School, a destination every kannadiga child , ended up in , those days. Though I did not speak a word of Hindi, the Lingua Franca, of New Delhi, it seemed to matter very little, as my dad walked me to the classroom on the first day.
The first person that I met in my new class was Sudhir Prabhu. He was my first friend in the class and before I knew it, Sudhir had ensured that I was well assimilated with all the boys in the class. I say boys ,distinctly , for in those days we did not see eye to eye with the girls in the class. The Mars Venus divide was in its primary manifestation and talking to the other gender was out of question.

One of our favourite pastimes at class was to play our version of squash. Innovative as we we were , we needed no rackets and our hands were as good as any other Yonex rackets! Our Eighth standard classroom was quite big wherein we had occupied a little more than half of the classroom, with two coloumns for the boys and the other two for the girls, leaving a huge area at the back , empty. This soon turned into our improvised squash court wherein we all stood in a lateral line and the first person threw a tennis ball at the wall and the next one would hit it back at the wall with his hand on the rebound. The third person would then take it on the next rebound and so continued the game . The way a person was out of the game was when he missed taking the ball on the rebound. This way the game would continue until there just two left and those two would slug it out and the last man standing was the winner.

We had Arun Kumar Rao (Aka, AK in short) amongst us whose exploits in power sports were well known. Long before our current day Dhoni and Virat Kohli, he was the best hard hitter of the ball that any one of us knew. He was one of the most prized batsman in our class . He had a natural gift in the form of a remarkable ability to dispatch any ball to the covers at will. His powerful forehand would have eclipsed even that of John Mc Enroe, I am sure. In our game of squash nobody wanted to be next to him as doing so would be a guaranteed exit from the game, for his shots would be so powerfull that anybody who dared to attempt to take AK's "shot" on the rebound would also run the risk of an injury!

It was during one such game that I learnt the pain of partition, a pain which until that time I had seen only through Attenborough's dramatisation in his magnum opus, "Gandhi". Partition till then was a mere chapter in history, devoid of any emotion.

During this game it was Suresh's ( AKA choorchi, our child actor hero of "Woh Ghar" fame) turn to be the next in line to AK. As soon as AK got his turn to play, he dispatched the ball with such great force that on the rebound, it came like a guided missile at choorchi, aimed directly at his silly point which would have given him considerable pain . Choorchi , more in a poor attempt at self defence than in playing the ball , pushed his hand in front. Such was the force of the ball that all that choorchi succeeded in doing, was to deflect the ball to desk of one of the girls. And not any mere girl, but that of one of the most fiercest of them all, Miss L.

Well, we went to collect our property from enemy territory and we sent two of our best warriors Venkatesh Thantry and Dinesh Shetty to Miss L, do this particular operation. Well, they decided to play ball, in a manner very different from ours , and Miss L, supported by all the girls who had rallied behind her, simply refused to give us the ball. She demanded an apology and also a promise that the ball would never come to their area again. The promise could have been given, for we were quite adept in making many countless ones in the past, but it was the apology, which to render , would have been hurting to our eighth standard male ego, All the three , Venkatesh Thantry ,Dinesh Shetty and Miss L, were well versed in verbal warfare, and in the ensuing showdown a lot of shouting happened along with slogan writing calling the fairer gender all kinds of names ( i was rather very instrumental in this particular activity) and paper missiles were launched from our side which I remember had more accuracy and success than the real ones launched by the allied armies in Afghanistan. This war led to a loss of territory for us boys as the girls took over the huge expanse at the back of the class, our squash court, and partitioned it into two with desks acting as the border. The girls told us that we could play in our area only and should the ball come over to their area beyond the partition, we would forfeit it.

Now this was an all new ball game! We had to beat a strategic retreat and do a rethink our gameplan. We had just fought a war and just when we thought that we were winning , we ended up losing territory! This was certainly not acceptable

The next thing we knew , Mrs. Suman Pradhan our gentle Quinquagenarian class teacher walked in. It was her class in Hindi that was next. She always had an air of gentle authority about her , one which she carried with an amazing grace. No sooner did she sit down after we exch exchanged the mandatory greetings of the hour , than her attention was drawn to the new enactment of the partition. If any one of us were expecting any kudos or backpatting, we couldnt have been more farther from the truth. She saw the partition with bewilderment, which turned into a wee bit hint of a flash of anger , which soon gave way to utter sense of grief mixed with horror. She rised her matronly voice , and asked us in Hindi (& I quote verbatim) " yeh hindustan - pakistan kya bana rakha hai? Kya Zara sa bhi sharm nahi hain aap logon ko? is desh ki ek bar batwaara ho chuka hai! Tassali nahin mili aapko, ke aap aur batwaara karne par tule huen ho?Agar Bhai behen Jaise nahi rahe sakthe........ to is batwaara se aapko Kya khushi milegi? Kya yehi maine aap sab ko sikhaaya hain?(what is this hindustan Pakistan like partition that you people have done? Don't you people have even a little bit of shame? This country has already been partitioned once! Are you people still so insatiated, that you're hell bent on creating more partitions?If you cannot live like brothers and sisters.......what is that great pleasure that you seek in partition? Is this what you have learnt from me?)

With this sudden outburst, some dam burst open and there were tears which were flowing freely down her cheeks. The hidden grief she had , some old wounds of the country's partition came into the open. I am sure all of us realised the meaning of Wordsworth's lines in his poem, The Solitary Reaper

Or is it some more humble lay,
Familiar matter of to-day?
Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain,
That has been, and may be again?

To continue quoting Wordsworth, we stood motionless and still. Suddenly in less than a moment, the grief of Partition, which happenned over thirty eight years ago, sank into us. The truth hit us slowly, the realisation that the partition of the nation was itself not so painful as to the sense of the partition in itself. The partition of families , the partion of many homes , the irrepairable partion of hearts across a land which hitherto was ours and which is now ours and theirs, the parition of us into us and them, all came gushing into us. We sat numb, in sudden enlightenment, and we partioned our idea of the barrier between the girls and boys , and made a one "us" by the casting away the "them" in our short lived us and them. It was one lesson in partition that any one of us in the class that day is ever likely to forget.

Needless to say the partition that we had so proudly erected was removed with an utter sense of guilt .

Good teachers merely teach but truly great are those teachers who inspire!

It is often said that one is lucky to get good teachers in life. Luckier still are those who get to imbibe from them, but blessed are those who get teachers , who continue to teach them long after they are no longer physically present in front of them.

We are all blessed ,for we had Mrs. Pradhan as our class teacher.