Roshni S“Mumma, I’m feeling giddy,” I whisper in a tired-sounding breath. This is the second time in one week and the nth time in the past couple of months that I’m giddy. Ma and Papa were initially impressed by my vocabulary as a 7-year-old. Today, they noticed me clutching at my stomach while saying this.
“What do you mean by ‘giddy’ moley, explain?” asked Papa in the sugary sweet voice that he thought camouflaged his intent well. I did not know precisely what this word meant but I figured stomach pain must be the wrong answer because his voice had sweetened. I mumbled “backache” and slid my hand to my back and tummy in turns for effect. To his credit, he let it be, and I skipped school yet another day.
Mrs. P could make the bravest, most gutsy child faint, and I was just a timid kid back then. She stood tall at about five feet three inches, sporting an untidy ‘boy cut’ with all the energy of a nervous chicken and the confidence of a raptor. Her large spectacles slid up and down her nose depending on how far the object of her fury, or worse, mockery, was. You had to meet her a few times to understand the brand of sadism she had patented.
Rumour had it that Mrs P was the way she was because she was a divorcee, or was it a widow? I remember the sting both these labels carried in the 80s. At school, she earned a nickname, “Pisssand!”. Apparently, this sounded similar to the word for ‘crazy’ in Konkani. Pissssssand……people would hiss distastefully while speaking of her. Seven-year-old me believed she deserved it.
The classroom where I studied was like most others in that school, a full panel of wall-to-wall windows. The sun only passed that way, though, after Mrs P had boarded the school bus to get home. The mighty sun knew better than the seniors, who giggled too loudly as they passed her room. Legend has it that she invited them in for a chat, and those girls never crossed that room again without gripping a rosary in their hands and a prayer on their lips.
In Mrs P’s class that year even sounds needed rescue. Yelps let out by children at the receiving end of a ruler escaped the room, and the swings in the playground carried these baby sounds over the boundary to safety. No one helped the kids.
Despite the melancholy and fear that the first month in her class brought with it, I looked forward to Wednesdays. Crafts period! Cross stitch was on the cards, and I couldn’t wait to be allowed to use a needle! I was using a fabric dyed in the unlikeable green of hospital gowns, scrubs, and curtains. It matched well with the grey dankness of Mrs P’s classroom. As she walked around the room watching us work and commenting on it, bobbing her head, I would wait till she was a row behind me to drop my green cloth and take time to pick it up in the hope that she would pass me by.
The witch would sniff out this scared kid. “What is this, Subhash?” she asked me on a Wednesday, chuckling to herself. She lifted up the untidy needlework for the class to see. My cheeks and eyes were burning, and my ears threatened to singe my hair, but her mockery wouldn’t stop. When it was all over, I stuffed this vomit green piece of cloth into the bottom of my bag. Next Wednesday I was giddy again.
After that, I managed to keep it low long enough, but sometimes well-meaning parents deliver the scared kid on a platter to the witch. There was the PTM- the parents-teacher meet – and the parents told her of my fear of her and faking illness to avoid school. The months that followed were harrowing.
I remember an instance where girls who went out during recess while it was raining were stripped to their slips and made to stand in front of the class. One child who wasn’t wearing a slip received a lashing and shaming that would make your skin shrink and fall off. No one, absolutely no one, pulled up teachers for violence and humiliation tactics.
A few years ago, a classmate mentioned her, and I felt a wave of empathy like never before. It startled me, but I had more in common with Mrs P as an adult. I have been angry. I have seemed like an unhinged person looking for a scapegoat or a punching bag. Rage and grief of decades have come out spluttering and bubbling. I have dug my heels in and lived the part of the angry young woman.
I found myself not fitting into the moulds created for me in this world. I raged. I raged enough to burn down the world itself. Deeply judgemental, with a razor-sharp tongue, I walked through years of my life leaving many friends and lovers wounded.
When I thought I had resolved some of this and simmered down- I brought a cat into my life-Begum. This tiny thing tested every drop of patience I had stocked up. I wanted an independent companion, and she followed me to the loo. I wanted soundless afternoons, and she turned out to be the chattiest kitty in town. There were days I would bellow at her, demanding her silence and obedience while her stunned big eyes shivered back at me.
My childhood experiences with anger and violence, not just at the hands of Mrs P but other adults too, had led me to believe that only terrible people pick on children or those less privileged who cannot fight back. When I became this terrible person for a while, the terrible became tangible and human for me.
People don’t come out of the womb angry or mean-spirited. There are wars within us that we end up fighting; Mrs P probably had hers, like I had mine. People have bad years, where all their reserves of empathy and compassion are barely adequate for themselves, the others always get the short end of the stick more so, if the others are little people.
When I look back now, I can see her caustic wit, twinkling eyes and her mischief even. She also seemed to be the only one who dared to be irreverent with the nuns who commanded all the power in our school. I remember her laughter and her jokes and feel no remnant of the fear from my childhood. I know nothing of her, really, but I see her in my mind now and feel compassion. For that angry young woman, who was rumoured to be dealing with things that no one had a roadmap for, without role models and idols to learn from, bringing up a child, being called mad by her colleagues and feared by her students. Had I found myself teaching little snots and had one of my own to raise – who is to say I would have managed any more grace than she could put together. Women have it tough, and many like us respond to it by hardening a little and acting out in ways we are not always acutely aware of.
These days I always feel a surge of compassion for hurt women, who hurt others. It has become easier to let go of my own righteous hurt. My forgiveness for one is also my apology to another. When I learn to forgive Mrs P, I reach out to forgive myself too.
This essay was written in the Ochre Sky Memoir writing workshop facilitated by Natasha Badhwar and Raju Tai.
