Among the sea of boys at Craddock, Santosh Kekre was an aristocrat of hardware. He was a lean, wiry boy, possessed of an infectious smile that seemed far too large for his modest frame. However, it was his school bag—or rather, the lack of one—that defined him. Every morning, Santosh arrived clutching a distinctive aluminum box. It was a sturdy, rectangular affair that clattered rhythmically against his thigh as he walked. To the rest of us, this was an invitation to mischief, and we promptly christened him “Petiwala.” Most boys would have withered under such a title, but Santosh wore the nickname like a medal of office.
There was a quiet gravity to Santosh that we didn’t quite understand until we heard of the Great Encephalitis Outbreak of 1958. In a time when medicine was more a matter of prayer than penicillin, Santosh had been one of only two children in all of Vidarbha to survive the brain fever. He had spent three months in the cavernous wards of Mayo Hospital, Nagpur, enduring the terrifying ritual of the lumbar puncture—a needle to the spine that would have broken the spirit of a grown man. The Nagpur newspapers had hailed him as a medical miracle. We looked at him with a new kind of awe; the virus had spared his sharp mind, leaving only his lean frame and that indestructible smile as a testament to his victory.
***
The Battle of the Double ‘E’
Our schoolroom was a place where the teacher’s word was Law, even when the Law was wrong. I remember a particularly stifling afternoon when our teacher—a woman of formidable certainties—scrawled the word “Seing” on the blackboard. “Memorize it,” she commanded. “S-E-I-N-G.” The room was silent, save for the scratching of nibs. Then, from the middle row, the Petiwala’s hand went up. With the reckless honesty of a survivor, Santosh pointed out the missing ‘e’.
The teacher froze. She turned from the board, bestowing upon Santosh a look so withering it should have reduced him to ash. “So,” she hissed, “the student has become the master? You add ‘ing’ to ‘go’ to make ‘going,’ do you not? Therefore, ‘see’ becomes ‘seing.’ Do not try to teach me my own tongue!” Trembling but undeterred, Santosh did not retreat. He took the matter to the Headmaster, Mr. M.J. Deshmukh, a man whose authority was announced by the rhythmic thump-drag of his noticeable limp. The teacher was reprimanded, the ‘e’ was restored, and Santosh returned to his desk, utterly unaware that he had just committed the ultimate sin of embarrassing a person in power.
***
The Ritual of the Mathematical Slap
In the gallery of masters, Mr. Dhage, our Mathematics teacher, occupied a pedestal all his own. He was a striking figure, dressed in an oil-stained Gandhi topi and sleeves rolled up as if he were about to move a mountain. Mr. Dhage did not merely teach mathematics; he performed it. He poured his heart and soul into the intricate rituals of simple and compound interest, and the mysteries of time, work, and speed.
Whenever he spotted a blunder, his face would undergo a dramatic transformation. His features would contort with a sorrow so deep one might think he had been personally betrayed. If the mistake was particularly egregious, he would snatch the notebook with a sudden movement, tear out the offending pages, and toss the crumpled remains aside with a sigh of absolute frustration. “What nonsense is this?” he would roar. Perhaps the most dreaded of his rituals involved the rare presence of the opposite gender. If a boy failed to solve an equation, Mr. Dhage would turn to one of the girls. If she provided the correct step, he would command her to walk over and strike the boy on the head while he held his own ear in penance. It was an exquisite humiliation.
***
The Song of the Dug-Dugi
If the aluminum box was Santosh’s trademark, his father’s car was the town’s entertainment. Mr. Kekre senior was a man of unimpeachable honesty who served the Zilla Parishad. His pride and joy was a second-hand Morris Eight, a temperamental beast that seemed to view the streets of Wardha with deep suspicion. It groaned, it wheezed, and it frequently gave up the ghost in the middle of the busiest intersections. We called it “Dug-Dugi” because of the peculiar, rhythmic thumping sound its engine made—a sound that resembled a folk drum more than a combustion engine. Whenever we heard that familiar dug-dug-dug echoing down the road, we knew the Kekre family was approaching. Eventually, the family moved away to Panaji, but in the corridors of Craddock, the ghost of the Petiwala and the missing ‘e’ remained.
***
The Republic of Equals
In our class, Chandu Fattepuria came from wealth; Suhas Jajoo had an enviable pedigree; Santosh Kekre’s father was a senior administrator. Three students had politically active fathers: Baban Sonwane’s father was a State Minister; Ashok Gode’s father was the President of the Zilla Parishad. Despite the hierarchy of the town, the school was a perfect republic of equals. The sons of Ministers sat on the same splintered benches as the sons of teachers. Wealth provided no shield; our parents gave teachers a simple mandate: “Do not spare the rod if they stumble.”
During the break, we found our true freedom. The ultimate luxury was a rented bicycle. For the princely sum of 10 paise per hour, we could hire a heavy, black Hercules cycle. We took turns wobbling across the grounds, the wind in our faces and the rattling of the chain providing the soundtrack to our liberation. For those sixty minutes, we weren’t just students—we were masters of the road.
***
The Coffee at Two A.M.
Decades passed, as they inevitably do. I ran into my old bench-mate Shekhar at a Thane railway platform long after our paths had diverged. That night, in a city far from Wardha, Shekhar brewed coffee at two in the morning. We sat and talked until the sun rose. When his wife emerged, she found two middle-aged men chatting with the feverish intensity of those two boys who had once been separated by a math teacher’s whim. She wondered who this stranger was who hadn’t even attended their wedding, unaware that in the world of Craddock, time and weddings are secondary to the bond of a shared bench.