’Dangerous like my English teacher’

I had only two friends in Bangalore, besides Maggie. One was Vijay, and the other was Balaji. Each of them was a young entrepreneur with a large heart, and a hearty appetite for booze soaked nights at the end of a hard days work. But these were the impressions I carried from my earlier visit, when both were bachelors. Things had changed since, both were loving husbands to loving wives. And loving among young marrieds had no place for excessive binges. Balaji, whom I met on arrival, had work to attend to. But gave me news of things other than their changed marital status. They had left their company where they used to be co-workers and started off on their own.

“So, Vijay is a rival now.” Balaji had an amazingly open way of talking. He said that to give me the picture that they were business rivals. And yet, the friendship was exactly where I had left three years ago. As strong. But he had an odd attachment, perhaps, to the technically correct word.

I had to meet Vijay. I called him. He said he was out of town, and would reach only by late evening. He insisted we meet though. So, I threw him my other problem.

“I have to meet a friend in Whitefield. And I am heading there. I’ll stay there tonight and push off early morning tomorrow for Mangalore.”

“Oh that’s great. I live on the airport road now. In fact we can meet up somewhere there, which is closer to Whitefield.”

So the meeting was fixed. Rohan and I once again knotted our tool bag and the rucksack carrying all our things onto the carrier of our bike. He had already checked the air and other things with the motorcycle and was fully satisfied. We said our goodbyes to the Ramiah family. And headed out for Whitefield, about 15 kilometres outside Bangalore. I was to meet up with a riot of a woman called Surekha Reys Gamat. An ebullient educator, a widowed mother of two bright children, and a scandalously loquacious woman of great, if occasionally bawdy humour. I had been to her house, but in the failing light, I kept calling her up to get the right left turn. Turned out, we got the right turn all right, and it was veering towards the left alright too. Only, we had missed the turn by about a kilometer. As we slowly rode back along Whitefield’s spinal road, she took charge of things on the cell itself.

“Okay. You are lost. Do you see that sweet shop.”

“Sweet shop,” I repeated.

“Yes, to your left.”

“No sweet shop to my left.”

“It has to be there.”

“Yes. I understand. It has to be there. But it is not there.”

“Let’s ask somebody,” Rohan piped in to help the confusion further along.

Well, soon enough we discovered why we could not find the sweet shop on the left on a road all of two hundred yards. We were looking to the left while coming back into Whitefield. Surekha was giving us directions imagining her guests were riding into the small town the size of a postal stamp. That also was the reason she was irritated. We had to score the highest in spatial intelligence if we could miss a left turn in a road that only had two left turns. And they say two brains are better than one. Well, the helmets must be to blame.

Finally we were directed to find the sweet shop and wait outside. I was instructed to give her details of the vehicle, the colours of our clothes.

“We are the only two guys trussed up, with helmets on our hands, and a Bullet loaded like we had looted a shop and were riding our getaway vehicle.”

I had hardly finished trying to be funny, when Zohrab pulled at my sleeve. Zohrab was Surekha’s 12-year-old son. A sprightly 3’5.

“Harish uncle.”

He was panting. He had obviously raced ahead of his mother’s detailed instructions.

Zohrab asked us to follow him, and before anything else could be got out of him he raced home. Rohan started the bike, and we followed slowly. A little later I met Zohrab’s sister Parnika. Surekha’s eldest was 14.

We exchanged pleasantries. I asked Parnika how come Zohrab was racing away.

“He has to show off no? He just won a prize in athletics, and thinks he is very fast.”

Parnika, me, and Rohan on his bike wheeled into Surekha’s home, which was half arborium. Three years ago that house was an unkempt one, crudely abandoned mid-way through construction. Or so it looked. And Surekha had managed to keep it exactly like that three years thence. The garden had overgrown, so had the trees, and the driveway to the entrance looked untouched too. The house had a personality, a confident casual rakishness that hated grooming. A reflection of its owner’s personality.

“So, you have been riding all around the country?” said Surekha.

She had a way of stating everything, even a question. Surekha almost always talked in the affirmative. Very often, her talk was a long list of instructions or declaration. I liked to imagine that this was the façade that she kept up to mask her insecurities. She was a widow in a house with two very young children. She had nobody anywhere near whom she can claim to be close, as in relatives or lasting friends. Her mother, from whom she was estranged, was in far away Delhi. Her husband died ten years ago. Both her parents-in-law were dead. And, she did not even speak rudimentary Kannada, the local language. She in many ways stuck out like a sore thumb in an enclave of retired men and women, for Whitefield was a quiet, sleepy place much favoured for retirement by those who had finished their working innings. And, knowing her, she did indeed believe that if she was a sore thumb, she better be a very intimidating sore thumb.

“Well, yes. All around the country just to reach you.”

“Accha, yeh bataaO. I am making dinner, will you eat.”

It takes guts to talk like that to your visitors just as they entered. Guts, and of course, an easy familiarity. She had both. Especially guts. She was a dedicated teacher who has involved herself exclusively with alternate education and primary education for the differently enabled children. Her involvement had cost her children, both who were perfectly well endowed, long stretches of their schooling life among children who were not “normal” in the regular sense. She believed that it was an investment in their sensitivity.

It was as well that Surekha asked. I called Vijay again, and he said he’d reach a particular restaurant, about seven kilometers from Whitefield by about nine pm. So I told her that Rohan and I were off to meet a friend and we would be back late.

“Late. How Late?”
“Late, as in pretty late. Maybe mid-night.”

Surekha promptly marched into her room and brought out a key. She instructed me how to open the gate to get in.

“I have an early day, and I need to send my kids to bed in time.”

She also introduced me to a shy young man who was her paying guest in an adjoining room which she let out. He was promptly co-opted into agreeing to let us in, and making space in his room for us.

Rohan and I left for the restaurant where we were to meet Vijay. We reached there, about two hours before Vijay could finally make it. By then, tiredness had overwhelmed me. And Vijay too had had just finished a hard day’s work. My trip to Mysore the previous night, and then back on the road, another late night, packing so many visits had evaporated all the energy that the train ride from Vizag to Bangalore had built up.

So I asked Vijay about his wife.

“I have a daughter,” he announced.

That was news.
“Fida”

A beautiful short name. Vijay insisted I should have breakfast with him in the morning. His house was on the way we would be taking to leave Bangalore.

“And you can meet Fida.”

That was a clincher. Not that I love to meet infants, but I loved the name. It had a nice ring. Besides, at this point none of us was fit for anything other than sleep. I promised to land up for breakfast on our way out of Bangalore, and wound down back to Surekha’s house.

We opened the gate as noiselessly as possible, which was about as noiseless as an industrial plant on full shift. We slid the bike to where it was supposed to be kept. And, with Surekha’s keys we opened the door, and tip- toed to her paying guest’s room. He was asleep, till we entered. There were beds nicely made up for the two of us. I hit the bed without a second thought. The first was that I had to wake up to meet Surekha before she left for work. Zohrab and Parnika too were in the same school where she was a principal. And their school started at a criminally early seven in the morning.

In the morning I got up a little past six, staggered into the bathroom, brushed my teeth, splashed some water on the face, and bravely welcomed another morning. Still sleep drunk, I walked into the living room, nobody there. The kitchen was active, though. I walked into the kitchen, and found Surekha working on a pan on the gas stove. I did not see a stool or a chair, so promptly slid my back along the wall till I was seated on the floor.

“So how was the night?”

“Not too exciting.”

She started talking right away as if a night had not interefered with our conversation at all. I was still trying to get the yawns away, only half listening to her banter.

“You are a gentleman. I have not done my legs, and you don’t breathe a word.”

I was shaken awake. I discovered the cause of her early morning corny humour. She was dressed only in the kameez, the top half of the Salwar. She did not have anything under. And from where I was seated, I couldn’t find a better vantage point to ogle at her.

“But I am embarrassed,” she said, “there is a chair under the clothes there, but you’ll also have to clear the books under the clothes.”

Surekha was irrepressible.

Soon, she had packed her breakfast, as well as for the children. They emerged, all bright in freshly ironed uniforms. In some time, the time I went back to my room to wake up Rohan, Surekha was transformed from an overgrown hostel girl into a very intimidating school principal. Her saree, her huge framed glasses. Everything was in place.

“You look a very scary principal.”

“Tell you what, the other day I was explaining the meaning of the word ‘dangerous’ to class three students in my school. After I had explained to them the meaning as well as I could I asked the class if they understood. They said they did. So asked them to write down a sentence that would use the word in it,” Surekha said all in a torrent while still picking up her books, nudging Zohrab to the door, and telling Parnika to get something.

“You know what a little fellow wrote, ‘dangerous like my English teacher’.” And she broke into a throaty laughter.

She disappeared beyond the farmhouse gate in a flurry of voile colour, while school kids in their uniform fluttered from all around her into a big car that came to pick them up. The fifty year old school principal, like a mother hen, scooped all her chickens with her into the car. Among them were her own 14-year-old Parnika and 12-year- old Zohrab. I almost expected to see some flowers on her crisp cotton fall away like small loose feathers when the door of the car closed behind the teacher and her flock. Like if somebody just put in a vast number of fluttering chicken into the coop.

I remembered Parnika’s line, “I want to become a teacher, but, never, never a momma.”
Rohan and I set off after a more unhurried goodbye to Surekha’s paying guest, the shy unassuming boy who was from a coffee-plantation -owning Coorgi family. With the directions Vijay gave us, we reached his place soon.