When I was eight years old, my family made a big decision. To them, it was about giving me a better education. to me, it felt like moving to a foreign country. They decided to pull me out of my comfortable Hindi school and plant me in the tougher, stricter soil of a Marathi school. My father found Craddock High School nearby. It had a fierce reputation. It promised not just to teach you to read, but to build your character—usually by putting you through the fire.
Looking back now, from the twenty-first century, I wonder if I was scared. Did I worry about learning a new language? Did I fear making new friends? Honestly, I think I had the blessed ignorance of an eight-year-old. Worries about culture and language belong to adults. As a child, my only real worry was the weight of my school bag and what my mother had packed in my tiffin.
***
Ghosts in the Walls
To understand my school, you have to understand the ground it stood on. Wardha is a city that wears its history loosely. Back in the 1850s, it was just a small part of Nagpur. But by the 1860s, the British administrators Sir Bachelor and Sir Reginald Craddock decided to turn it into a proper district headquarters. They designed the city with straight lines and order.
It is a funny twist of history that while we eventually renamed the school, the British ghosts never really left. The school was named after Sir Craddock, and my childhood home was on Bachelor Road. In 1969, to celebrate Mahatma Gandhi’s hundredth birthday, a wave of pride swept the country. Long before Bombay became Mumbai, our school shed its British skin and became Mahatma Gandhi Vidyalaya. But names are tricky things. For those of us who walked its halls in the late sixties, it remained, stubbornly and affectionately, Craddock.
***
Ink-Stained Fingers
Walking through those gates today feels like stepping into a time machine. The air in Wardha still carries the heavy, rhythmic rumble of passing trains—the background music of our childhood. If the wind blows just right, you can smell the raw, earthy scent of the nearby cotton ginning press. That smell is the scent of memory.
I can still picture my elder sister, Pushpa, walking down these corridors. She walked among future giants. The merit list of 1967 wasn’t just a list of names; it was a prediction. Dr. Abhay Bang, Dr. Ulhas Jajoo, Dr. Prasad Trivedi—men who would go on to define medicine in our region—once roamed these halls, probably worrying about homework just like we did. When I walk through the empty school now, the silence feels heavy with their footsteps.
Typing this on a fast computer feels almost wrong, a betrayal of those days. We lived in a world you could touch. In the late sixties, technology wasn’t a screen; it was wood, glass, and metal. We didn’t have ballpoint pens—teachers looked at them with suspicion. We certainly didn’t have felt pens. And fountain pens? Strictly forbidden. They were considered too fancy, or perhaps too messy, for our clumsy hands.
We wrote like clerks from a hundred years ago. We had wooden desks, glass inkwells, and nibs that you had to dip into the ink every few seconds. My friends Santos Kekre, Ravindra Chawade, and I sat squeezed together at desks with sloping tops. They were terrible for your back, but great for sliding things across. Writing wasn’t smooth; it was a rhythm. Dip, write, dip, write. It taught us patience. Those inkwells were little black lakes waiting to spill, always threatening to ruin a clean white shirt.
***
The Math Master
If the school buildings were old-fashioned, the teaching was ancient. And the king of this old world was Mr. Dhage, our Mathematics teacher.
Mr. Dhage wasn’t just a teacher; he was a force of nature. He dressed like a man who didn’t care about mirrors. He wore an oil-stained cap, a collar that refused to sit flat, and sleeves rolled up as if he were ready for a fistfight rather than algebra. His trousers were a faded grey, held up by an old leather belt. He wore worn-out sandals, but he marched in them like a general.
He didn’t wear glasses, but his eyes were terrifying. They swept across the room like searchlights hunting for a prisoner. To Mr. Dhage, math wasn’t a subject; it was a religion. He believed in the old rule: “spare the rod and spoil the child.” He followed this rule with great enthusiasm. My classmate Vilas Thakur calls it “tough love.” I remember it simply as terror.
Mr. Dhage wanted us to memorize everything—the steps, the logic, the ritual. If he saw a mistake in your notebook, his face would twist in genuine pain, as if your bad math physically hurt him. For big mistakes, he would snatch the notebook, tear out the page, crumple it up, and throw it away. “What nonsense is this?” he would shout, his face turning red. “You call this math?”
He had a talent for insults. Abrar Alvi, a student who was a bit slow to answer, was a favorite target. Dhage would sigh, look at the class, and say, “Our train has reached Itarsi junction. We all know the train stops there for thirty minutes to change engines. Abrar is the Itarsi of this class. We must wait.” It was cruel, but if you weren’t Abrar, it was hard not to laugh.
His punishments were strange. If a boy couldn’t solve a problem, Dhage would call on a girl. If she got it right—which they often did—he would order her to lightly slap the boy or twist his ear. The shame was unbearable. The boy would whisper desperately, “Hit me lightly, please!” while the class tried not to giggle. It was a bizarre way to teach, using our awkwardness against us.
***
The Cloud and the Storm
Mr. Dhage’s surname means “Cloud” in Marathi. It was ironic because he loved to make students stand on their benches. I had a very tall friend who, when standing on the bench, would almost touch the ceiling. The class would whisper, “He’s gone into the clouds.”
Dhage’s power didn’t end when the bell rang. Mr. Mankar, our gentle Hindi teacher, had the bad luck of having the class right after Math. Dhage would often keep teaching past his time, lost in a difficult problem or a scolding. We would watch with glee as the two teachers argued at the door—the fierce mathematician refusing to make way for the poet. It was the only time we ever saw Dhage on the defensive.
***
The Drill Sergeant
If Mr. Dhage ruled our minds, Mr. N.D. Kshirsagar—known to everyone as NDS—owned our bodies. He was the Physical Training instructor, built like a rock, with a voice that could shake the walls.
PT class wasn’t playtime; it was military drill. NDS would march us to the ground and line us up by height. We weren’t children to him; we were numbers stitched onto our shirts. “Number 42, straighten up!” he would bark. Under his watch, not even a bird dared to fly across the school grounds without permission.
He was obsessed with precision. He demanded that the National Anthem be sung in exactly fifty-two seconds. No more, no less. He told us to sing from the “umbilicus”—a medical word that confused us, but ensured we shouted with all our might. “Let your voice show pride!” he would command.
I will never forget one morning assembly. The sun was beating down on us when NDS stepped up to announce a punishment. The student in trouble was Deepak Kalode, a senior. The punishment was a public caning. NDS raised the thin stick and brought it down on Deepak’s legs. Deepak took the first few hits in silence.
Then, in a moment that stopped time, Deepak reached out. He grabbed the stick from the teacher’s hand, broke it over his knee into two pieces, then four, then eight, and threw the splinters on the ground. He walked away without a word.
The whole school stood frozen in shock. Even the terrifying NDS didn’t move. It was a rare, electric moment where the wall of discipline cracked, and we saw the fire of youth burning underneath.