A Failing System

Let us call the boy Jatin. If memory serves, that was his name. It is a common enough name, though, since one should protect his identity. And, it has been over 25 years since one worked with him. Of significance here is the fact that Jatin was the one to hammer the last nail into an otherwise promising career as a teacher in the CBSE system.

The grade nine exams are just over and he is one the boys being “retained”. For some odd and completely obscure reason, he has been asked to see me. He arrives with a note one afternoon just as I am about to wheel my bicycle out of the stand to go home. The note, from the school principal, asks me to see if I can work with him to help him pass his English re-exam.

The memory of his face is as clear as looking into the past through a crystal ball. Not that one has ever experienced looking through a crystal ball but one assumes it would be clear at the centre and swirly on the sides. There he stands, hesitating in the doorway, sort of nervously sweaty around the eyebrows – the eyes have to zoom in to the image at the centre of the said crystal – and definitely beading on the upper lip. His light brown hair stands up near the parting and is smoothed down on the sides. And one drop of sweat makes its way slowly down the side of his face, trickles down his cheek and hangs on his jawline as I read the note twice, thrice, trying to make sense of exactly what may be going on.

When he speaks, his voice has a tremulous timbre. Not surprising, perhaps. The child is completely done for in terms of self-confidence as I will discover in a few days. Will you help me, ma’am, he asks. I will, will, I will, work really hard, he stammers out. Let me find out how to do that, I tell him. I am, I freely admit, stalling. For one thing, I don't teach grade nine and don't know the child. Then, I don't know what he needs to be taught. I also have no idea when his re-take is, pushing me into further uncertainty. To be honest, I am looking for a way to say no but the child's pleading eyes make it impossible to find a simple way to put together the “n” and the “o” in a meaningful way.

The morrow reveals that he has not cleared three subjects but English is the high stakes one. You might ask why this is so, and rightly too, when the child’s ancestors have diligently escaped being anglicised for so long. In the virtually pre-dawn meeting (for those who really enjoy their sleep), in the only plush office in the school, I ask the question begging to be asked: Why me?

Why not you, retorts Mr B, or Sir B since the faculty conferred a knighthood on him.

Well, logically, I am not competent enough, I venture.

Sir B smiles benignly through his greying Frenchie. Your competence is not in question, he says. What else?

All right, I’m terrified, I confess. The stakes for the child, and by association for me, are too high.

A pause as he marshals his arguments. One, he says, in this one year, I have never known you to refuse to take up a challenge. Two, your compassion for the children exceeds the combined warmth of the entire faculty. Three, you are better read that the rest of the English department. Four, your skills as a teacher are far better honed than most I’ve met in my 15 years in this profession. Should I stop now or do you need more praise, he quirks another smile.

In some other incarnation, such hyperbole may have made me blush; but in this one I am too tough and way too thick-skinned to fall for flattery. Instead, I ask about the elephant in the room. Why shouldn’t, I say carefully without naming names, the regular grade nine teacher, who knows the requirements, do this?

He gives me a look that says, And I really thought you were intelligent!
Look, he says patiently, don't you think if the regular teacher was capable of this, the boy would have passed?

Ha, here comes the logical fallacy! And this is where our opinions diverge, irreconcilably. Sir, I say sternly, the remaining 54 kids in her class DID pass!

Of course there’s a pregnant pause. He hesitates before walking into my trap but there’s no help for it. What this boy needs, he concedes reluctantly, is some individual attention.

It’s the starter that will curdle the milk and leaven my bread. Now you see why I keep harping on the need for smaller classes? I don’t say it; I don’t need to. He can read it in the triumph of my grin.

He shrugs and raises his hands in a surrender-gesture. I have to report to a governing body, you know, he repeats defeatedly. Any less than 55 and we can't make what needs to be made. I will have to hike up the fee and dozens of kids’ parents will no longer be able to afford it. Or I will have to pay my teachers less.

I shake my head at him and follow the script we have evolved over the past year. Sir, a school cannot be run only for profit. It may not be illegal but is completely unethical.

He says his line with more emotion than usual: find me a solution and I will implement it.

Which, as they say, is neither here nor there. But after working with the man for nearly a year, I know that he’s not making excuses. He is the real McCoy and has supported many seemingly hair-brained but worthy causes. The economics of small classes is really beyond his ken. A metaphor exists, they say, that can describe any situation: the one best suited to this one involves heads and brick walls.

Then an afternoon dream. I am standing in the middle of a bunch of people. Some of them look like my colleagues but have a menacing air. Some words echo around us. Where are the results… The results… What is the value? The value? He’s a failure. You're a failure. You should both go. I wake up, palms sweaty, hair wet, out of breath and there they are again, pinning me down with their furious expressions. Every time I try to break out of the circle they move in closer. I collapse in the middle.

Quite obviously stress. No need for Freud to understand that one.

The next day I begin work with Jatin. We meet before school while the cleaner bhaiyas are still sweeping and mopping, look for a desk and a chair, and start work. Or attempt to start work. Shelley’s “Ozymandias” pops open. Freaky, I think. I had the same textbook nearly a decade ago with Mrs Jesuratnam’s gentle voice reading it out before explaining it line by line. I can do this, I tell myself.

I ask him to read through the poem. Read it aloud. You have to hear the sounds, I suggest.
Hesitating, painfully slowly, each word a labour, Jatin does. He stumbles on “antique”, then on “shattered visage”, “wrinkled”, “sneer”, “sculptor”, “passions”, “pedestal”, “Ozymandias”, “colossal wreck”…

I look on, listen to him stutter and stammer his way through this reading and do despair!
What did you understand, I ask, very cautiously.

Silence.

Hmm. Just as I thought. My gut clenches with the realisation that this is it. The problem does not lie in the shallow waters of understanding. They go deep into the context of the child. Where do I begin the narrative that will lead him to see the emptiness of pride, the ephemerality of the human being, the eternity of the sands of time? How do I break it down so that two weeks from now he can answer questions like “Explain, in your own words, what the poet means by ‘half sunk a shattered visage lies’”?

We plod. First explain the meanings of the words. Then each line. Then put it all together with the themes. Try not to slip into Hindi as that is inadvisable at this stage. Ask him questions to see what understanding now exists. Set him two questions to complete at home.

Day 2, we plod again. He has written the answers to my two questions with meticulous care. Each misspelled word is artistic in its perfect formation. Each ungrammatical sentence exemplary in its neatness. We are swimming together in a swift river trying to make it upstream. His strokes are neat but he has no power to move from where we are, treading water. Shortly hereafter, we will both be swept in some other direction, or for better or for worse, drown. I mention the word sonnet and his eyes glaze over. Fourteen lines, I remind him, now on the edge of desperation. Maybe it is not important for him to know that a sonnet has fourteen lines.

We plod on to the “Chimney Sweep”. Then I notice a teardrop. My mother died last year, he whispers when I stop reading. The cold creeps up my spine. She was very beautiful, he adds. Irrelevantly I wonder if her being beautiful makes the loss greater for him. Put your psychology in the cupboard, Sir B had suggested to all of us a few days ago, otherwise my head will certainly roll. Yes, of course, I should plod on with the poem when the child was crying over the loss of his parent.

Do you want to tell me about her, I ask, gently. He wipes a tear with the back of his hand. I miss her, he says simply. She was nice, he adds after a moment. He doesn't seem to have the vocabulary to say very much more.

I wait, though, long enough so that he can play out whatever memories haunt him, before venturing again: should we do this poem another day? Yes, he says.

Flipping forward I find the ubiquitous “Daffodils” stretching across the page. Oh dear god, now a flower he has never seen. Apollo! Athena! Inspire me!

Should I draw this flower for you, I ask intrepidly. He nods. I manage a squiggly something that may or may not be mistaken for a daffodil. He laughs. What a strange sound it is! Not the laugh itself. It's the usual boyish giggle. But it's the first time I have heard him laugh. Strange in that way. I mock-frown and demand to know what is funny. He reads my expression and relaxes. It looks like a funny face, he volunteers. I add a smile, a nose and two little eyes. He giggles again. So this fellow, I begin, having nothing better to do than wander around the countryside, sees these funny-faced flowers spread out over a field. He is listening intently. And then he really likes how the wind is making them move, like they are dancing, you know…? He nods. And later, when he is sometimes sitting on his couch, doing nothing, just thinking, he remembers them and feels happy, I finish. How’s that, I want to ask, for a gradesaver summary? He frowns, then asks: doesn’t he have a job? I burst out laughing. He realises I am laughing with him, not at him, and joins in. Possibly, we have made good ol’ William turn in his grave but what the hell?

Somehow he gets this one. Maybe he gazes at things in his mind’s eye too. He doesn’t, of course, volunteer this. I am just playing with conjecture. Two more questions are set for homework and we wind up. A little lighter than the previous day. A little less stressed out. A little more connected with an unfathomable mind. A little closer to Doomsday.

He’s getting it, I want to yell with joy a few days later, when “the Road not Taken” makes him wish that he could have choices too. What would you do, I ask, if you had choices? He thinks for a while. I would like to help my father in his shop, he says finally. What stops you, I ask.

He looks disturbed for a bit, then: I have to come school; I have to study and get good marks; my father doesn’t want me to grow up and sit at shop; he wants me to be engineer or doctor; he says anyone can sit at shop – it does not need a mind. But I know it needs a mind and I want to help him. He works so hard, it all for me, to give me good education, job, but it is not needed. I help him at shop and we both be happy. We don’t need more.

This is the child they flunked for his lack of grammar. In the corpus that is his life, he has already written narratives that many grown ups fail to understand till the moment of truth, the few seconds before death takes them. How does he understand, I wonder, that contentment can come from many things and not necessarily from those that the world thinks of as important. Why does he need to study Frost when he is already ready to choose a path different from that taken by the rat racers? But. Not for me to question why. I plod on with Frost, then Ezekiel’s throes of scorpion stings. And there’s further plodding.

Between poets we work on grammar. On vocabulary. We make a little dictionary in an address book and he writes down as many new words as he meets every day. We practice structures till nine out of ten sentences have very minor errors. We mug up spelling lists and drill and drill and drill.

Soon, too soon, the re-take day creeps up, much as a hidden snake in the grass. Nervously, I wait for him to tell me if he did well. I find things to do to keep me back after school, refusing to leave till I know.

At 3 p.m. he comes in. He has been crying. We sit in silence for a long time. I am scared to ask so I let the silence wash over us in wave after wave till finally, he looks up from his chewed up nails and says: I passed English; but not Maths; not Science. I have failed.

When he leaves, the only sound left is the ticking of my wrist watch as I put my head on my desk, willing myself to be still because the only other option is to break everything in sight. Almost an hour later, I make my way to the only plush office in the school and knock on the door. I don’t have to ask, it must be written on my face.

Sir B shrugs: If I promote him to grade 10 he will bring down the result. This is my first batch and I have to prove myself to the governing body. I can’t have a bad result.

The last nail.

I walk up to his desk and gently put a sheet of paper in front of him. As I recall it has some platitudes about personal reasons. Some crap about the past year being edifying. Some shit about great memories and incredible learning. Some utter nonsense about gratitude at being given this fantastic chance. And a request to relieve me of my duties in a month’s time.

With shock he looks up from reading it: I did not think you were a quitter, he says finally.

No, I am not, I tell him quietly. But I have realised that I can no longer be a party to this failing system.