Back to school, 80s style

Of fairy godmothers and wolves in sheep clothing

Hola Global Jigsaw,

For today’s post, an excerpt from a project I am currently working on. It will give you a glimpse into 1980s school life in New Delhi, which when written about with three decades hindsight sounds, “akin to fairy tales – horrifying and fascinating…In place of wolves in grandmother’s clothes, evil witches, and fairy godmothers, my stories feature teachers.”

I am clapping enthusiastically as my younger son walks onto the stage to receive a certificate from his school principal. Nico, is being feted for having been “caught being good.” Every Friday, the international school he attends in Jakarta awards this title at the morning assembly, to a child whom a teacher has spotted being particularly helpful or kind. Parents are invited to watch and the whole auditorium is suffused with sweetness.

What is this planet I have travelled to? So very distant from my school auditorium in New Delhi, where our morning assemblies involved watching the principal lean his body weight into the cracking slaps that he landed on the cheeks of children caught being bad. There were usually four or five boys – girls were exempt – on the daily slapping menu. They had been bad in a variety of enterprising ways. Someone might have let off a firecracker in the toilets. Someone else, was caught smoking in a corner off the basketball court. Another’s uniform might not have been up to scratch.

The front facade of the school that I attended in New Delhi in the 1980s/early 1990s.

Regardless of the infraction, the correct consequence according to our principal, Mr B, was a resounding slap. Dressed in a sparkling white polyester safari suit, the half-sleeved top of which spread tightly over his ample belly, the principal was a man with a straightforward, and consistent, sense of duty. He existed to catch and punish the errant among his flock.

Morning assemblies were conducted according to an unvarying formula. The students, sat on the floor in lines arranged according to their year groups and sections. The principal loomed above on a stage, standing behind a podium. To kick things off, the whole school body engaged is some desultory singing: a mixture of nation-praising and devotional songs. This was followed by two children from the “house” that was “on duty” that month, marching up to the podium. The first would read out a summary of the news, carefully copied out from the headlines of the day’s newspapers. The second would then give a talk on a suitably ingratiating topic, like the “Need for discipline in young people’s lives.” 

And finally, it was the moment that Mr. B had seemingly been employed for. The Slapping. A line of errant lads would be led up to stand beside him. As they ambled along, some looked shame-faced and red-eyed. Others stared out at the gathered student body defiantly, the half-smile of the martyr upon their lips. The principal’s voice would reach thunderous levels of indignation as he called out each miscreant’s offense, followed by the hard thwack of a slap. His hand was often left imprinted white on the cheek of the child; all the blood squeezed out from the surface area of contact.

This ritual humiliation hardly caused a stir among the audience. Most of us were so acclimatized to The Slapping that we paid only minimal attention, preferring to play finger football with the large black ants that crawled about between us, on the floor.

Xxxx

In Jakarta, Nico’s assembly is over, and he is bounding up to me clutching his ‘caught being good” certificate, awarded for having been ‘caught,’ “demonstrating empathy and inclusivity on the playground,” earlier that week. He takes me by the hand and pulls me towards his classroom, where parents are invited monthly to take a look at the “art” displays of their children.

Nico is in preschool-4, on the cusp of entering grade-1. Classes have recently been focused on encouraging the five year olds to recognize their emotional state by associating them with colours. Red is angry, blue is calm, yellow is tired and so on. The paintings on display are pictorial representations of each child’s preferred strategy of returning themselves to a “blue” state, when agitated.

A little girl has drawn a stick figure eating a fish. “When I’m sad, I like to eat salmon to feel happy again,” the teacher has printed out carefully below the masterwork.

xxx

“Are you wanting me to be sending you to Mr. B?” our middle-school geography teacher, Mrs U, who is as enthusiastic about gerunds as Mr. B is about slapping, asks me. I am 13 years old and instead of paying attention to the diagram of the layers of the atmosphere in the textbook open in front of me, I’ve been whispering to my best friend about a cassette that my brother had managed to procure, with pop songs recorded off a US radio station.

The evening before, I’d spent hours playing and rewinding the songs on my tape recorder, trying to discern the lyrics and write them down in my beloved snoopy-jacketed notebook. My set of friends are all heavily into the film, Flashdance’s soundtrack. A personal favourite, is a song called “Fruit Juice tonight.”  It would take me many years to discover that it is in fact titled, “Seduce me tonight.”

Unable to explain any of this to my geography teacher, I merely cast my eyes down in what I hope is a contrite look. Mrs. U, who is prone to, what I now know to be hot flashes, begins to sweat at the exertion of threatening me and deflates onto the desk, where she dabs at her forehead weakly with the hanky she’d been clutching in her left fist. The right one holds chalk. “Please, can someone be opening the window to let the climate in?” she gasps.

I attend what, in India, is called an English medium school. It is a private school where the primary medium of instruction is in English. As Mrs. U’s argot exemplifies, this includes all manner of englishes. It is an elite school, admission to which is prized. Classes are enormous. We are usually 40 students in each section and there are 6 or 7 sections that comprise each year group. The pedagogical philosophy stresses constant examinations, copious by-rote memorization and regurgitation of facts.  

And yet, between the slapping and exams, there is a wild freedom to the place, which will give future descriptions of it a fictional feel. My children will come to treat my schoolgirl yarns as akin to fairy tales – horrifying and fascinating. They will ask to hear them at bedtime, tickled by the idea of their mother in the role of a powerless child at the mercy of capricious adults. In place of wolves in grandmother’s clothes, evil witches, and fairy godmothers, my stories feature teachers.

xxxxx

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Till soon,

Pallavi