The English Teacher

by R. K. Narayan

  ‘… And thou, all-shaking Thunder

  Strike flat the thick rotundity o’ the world!’

  I forgot all about the time, all about my unpreparedness.

  ‘… Let the great gods

  That keep this dreadful pother o’er our heads,

  Find out their enemies now.’

  I read on. The boys listened attentively. I passed on to the next scene without knowing it. I could not stop.

  ‘Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are,

  That hide the pelting of this pitiless storm,

  How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,… defend you

  From seasons such as these?’

  At the thought of helpless humanity I nearly broke down. The bell rang, I shut my book with the greatest relief, and walked out of the class.

  I managed the composition hour quite easily. The composition hour is a sort of relaxation for us, where we can sit looking at notebooks and do not demand too much attention from the boys. It was the small gallery room at the end of the southern corridor; I loved this room because the sun came through a ventilator, bringing in a very bright beam of light, and brilliant dust particles floated in it, and the two boys who sat on the second bench looked all aflame. Years and years ago I sat there on the bench as a student, and Gajapathy was then just a junior lecturer and not the big Assistant Professor he was now. I could still see where I used to sit assiduously cultivating correct language and trying to please the lecturer. And to my left would always sit Rangappa, who hated all composition. Little did I dream then that I would be a teacher in the same class.

  The boys were making too much noise. I tapped the table lightly and said: ‘Ramaswami, here is your notebook. See the corrections on it. There are more corrections on it than on any other paper …’ It was a paraphrase of the poem beginning ‘My days among the dead are past …’ He hadn’t understood a line of that poem, yet he had written down two pages about it. According to Ramaswami (though not according to Southey) the scholar when he said, ‘My days among the dead are past’ meant that he was no longer going to worry about his dead relations because wherever his eyes were cast he saw mighty minds of old (he just copies it down from the poem), and so on and on. I enjoyed this paraphrase immensely. I called, ‘Ramaswami, come and receive your notebook …’ My comments on the work could not be publicly shown or uttered. When he came near, I opened the notebook and pointed to my remark at the end of the notebook: ‘Startling!’ I put my finger on this and asked: ‘Do you see what I mean?’

  ‘Yes, sir …’ whispered Ramaswami.

  ‘You are very bad in English.’

  ‘I am sorry, sir …’

  ‘Does this poem make no sense as far as you are concerned?’

  ‘No, sir …’

  ‘Then why do you write so much about it?’

  ‘I do not know, sir …’

  ‘All right, go back to your seat … Come and see me sometime …’

  ‘Yes, sir, when?’

  I couldn’t answer this question, because I visualized all my hours so thoroughly allotted for set tasks that I was at a loss to know when I could ask him to see me. So I replied: ‘I will tell you, go to your seat.’ I spent the rest of the period giving a general analysis of the mistakes I had encountered in this batch of composition – rather very, as such for hence, split infinitives, collective nouns, and all the rest of the traps that the English language sets for foreigners. I then set them an exercise in essay-writing on the epigram ‘Man is the master of his own destiny’. ‘An idiotic theme,’ I felt, ‘this abstract and confounded metaphysic,’ but I could not help it. I had been ordered to set this subject to the class. I watched with interest how the boys were going to tackle it. As a guidance it was my duty to puff up this theme, and so I wrote on the blackboard – ‘Man, what is man? What is destiny? How does he overcome destiny? How does destiny overcome him? What is fate? What is free will?’ – a number of headings which reduced man and his destiny and all the rest to a working formula for these tender creatures to handle.

  By the afternoon I had finished three hours of lecturing, and was, with a faintly smarting throat, resting in a chair in the common room. There were a dozen other teachers. As each of them sat looking at a book or at the ceiling vacantly, there was a silence which seemed to me oppressive. I never liked it. I had my own technique of breaking it. I remarked to no one in particular: ‘We have to decide an important issue before the examinations begin.’ The others looked up with bored half-expectancy. ‘We will have to call a staff meeting to decide how many marks are to be deducted for spelling honours without the middle u.’

  ‘No, no, I don’t think it is necessary,’ said Sastri, the logic lecturer, who had a very straightforward, literal mind, looking up for a moment from the four-day-old newspaper which he was reading. Gajapathy looked over his spectacles, and remarked from the farthest end of the room: ‘You are joking over yesterday’s meeting, I suppose?’ I replied, ‘I am not joking, I am very serious.’

  ‘What is it all about?’ Dr Menon asked. He was Assistant Professor of Philosophy. Gajapathy explained, slowly, like an expert lawyer, what had happened the previous evening.

  ‘No sense of proportion …’ was the philosopher’s verdict. Gajapathy removed his spectacles, folded the sides, and put them away as a preparation for dispute. ‘How would you treat one of your students if he spelt Kant, Cant?’

  ‘I wouldn’t bother very much if he knew correctly what Kant had or hadn’t said,’ replied Dr Menon.

  ‘Oh, I won’t believe it,’ said Gajapathy, ‘there is a merit in accuracy, which must be cultivated for its own sake. I believe it wouldn’t do to slacken anywhere.’

  ‘Americans spell honours without the u,’ I said and this diverted the subject, and deprived Gajapathy of the duel for which he was preparing. ‘Americans are saner than their English cousins in most matters,’ said Dr Menon, who had obtained his Ph.D. at Columbia University.

  ‘I think the American spelling is foolish buffoonery,’ said Gajapathy with his loyalty of a lifetime to English language and literature.

  ‘If we had Americans ruling us, I suppose we would say the same thing of the English people,’ I said.

  ‘Politics need not butt in everywhere. There are times when I wish there were no politics in the world and no one knew who was ruling and how,’ said Gajapathy. ‘This would help a little clearer, freer thinking in all matters. The whole of the West is in a muddle owing to its political consciousness, and what a pity that the East should also follow suit. It is like a weed choking all other human faculties. Shelley in his “Sensitive Plant” …’

  ‘I am afraid your opinions are at least a thousand years behind the times; it is a one-sided view, Mr Gajapathy,’ said Kumar, who lectured on political science to B.A. classes. ‘Corporate life marks the beginning of civilized existence and the emergence of its values …’

  ‘I am sure,’ I said, finding the debate dull, ‘a tormenting question can be framed for the boys at the next examination. “Corporate existence pulled the cave man out into the open. Discuss.” If I have anything to do with the politics paper I’m going to insist on this question and make it compulsory. It will serve the young rascals right …’

  ‘You haven’t yet dropped the frivolous habits of your college days, Krishna,’ said Gajapathy. ‘You must cultivate a little more seriousness of outlook.’

  ‘I have answered an advertisement I saw in an American paper where someone has offered to take on hand people who lack seriousness and turn them into better citizens. I have filled up the necessary coupon and have every hope you will find me passable ere long …’

  ‘Don’t you believe too much in these ads. In the United States there are any number of them. Once when I was in Chicago …’ began Dr Menon of Columbia University, and the bell rang and all his audience rose to go to their different classes.


  I returned to my room. The postman had slipped through the door two letters for me. I knew the pale blue envelope from my wife, who was in the habit of underlining the town three times; she seemed to be always anxious lest the letter should go off to some other town. And then my father’s letter, from the village. Letters are very exciting things for me. I don’t know why. By the time I open and see the contents, I feel an æon might have passed, and my heart goes thumping against my ribs. I looked through my father’s letter first. He still wrote his fine, sharp hand, every letter put down with precision and care but without ornament, written closely on a memo pad of some revenue department. From time immemorial he had written only on those pads. No one knew how many pads he had or how he had come by them – perhaps through the favour of some friend in the Revenue Department. The paper had acquired an elegant tone of brown through years of storing but it was tough as parchment. My father had a steel pen with a fat green wooden handle, with which he had written for years. He had several bottles of ink – his own make from a recipe which was exclusively his and of which he was excessively proud. He would make up his store of ink once a year; and we little ones of the household waited for the event with tremendous enthusiasm – all the servants in the house would be present: a special brick oven was raised in the backyard, with a cauldron sizzling over it all day, and father presiding. The most interesting part, however, would be the trip the previous evening for shopping to Kavadi – our nearest town, fifteen miles off. At three in the afternoon father would yoke the big bulls to the waggon and we were dressed and ready for the expedition – I and my elder brother, and my two sisters. My elder brother would exact obedience and we would have to take our seats in the cart according to his directions. The way he handled us we always expected he would become a commander of an army or a police officer – but the poor fellow settled as auditor in Hyderabad and was nose-led by his wife. He was always full of worries, being a father of ten, and having a haughty nagging wife. He seldom visited us in the village, being so much wrapped up in his own auditing and family.

  We reached Kavadi at about two o’clock. Invariably I would fall to sleep lulled by the jingling of the bells around the neck of the bulls.

  Kavadi was a wonderful place for one like me from the village – a street full of all sorts of shops, sewing-machines rattling away, coloured ribbons streaming down from shop-fronts. My father had his favourite shop. The shopman would seat us all on the mat; and my father would buy us some edibles from the opposite shop, while the ink-ingredients were being packed. He would buy us each a toy – a ball, a monkey dangling at the end of a rubber-piece, and a doll, and invariably an exercise book and a pencil for my elder brother, declaring that he was past the age of having toys, a reminder which made him smart every time he heard it. The road would be ankle deep in bleached dust and the numerous cattle and country carts passing along stirred it up so much that a cloud always hung over the road, imparting an enchanting haze to the whole place, though, by the time we started back, so much of this dust settled on our skins and hair that our mother had to give us a bath as soon as we reached home.

  I don’t know why my father took this ink business so very seriously, when we could buy all the ink we wanted in the shop and save ourselves all bother. He would be near his brick kiln the whole of the next day boiling up this potion, and distilling, and straining, and filling up huge mud jugs. He filled small glass pots for our use, and locked up the store in an almirah. We wrote our copies and lessons in this ink. It had a greenish tint which we didn’t like, and which made us long for the blue or black ink sold in the shop. We never got over the feeling that this ink was not real ink – perhaps because of its pale greenish tinge, but my father seemed to appreciate it for that very reason, declaring that you couldn’t buy that elegant shade even if you paid a fortune for it.

  My father’s letter brought back to me not only the air of the village and all my childhood, but along with it all the facts – home, coconut-garden, harvest, revenue demand. He had devoted nearly a paragraph to my mother’s health with a faint suggestion of complaint that she was not looking after herself quite properly – still keeping late hours for food – the last to eat in the house and still reluctant to swallow the medicines given to her …

  And then came a paragraph of more immediate interest to me. ‘Your father-in-law has written a letter today. I hear that by God’s grace, your wife Susila, and the baby, are keeping well. He suggests that you should take her and the baby and set up a family and not live in a hostel any longer. He has my entire concurrence in this matter, as I think in the best interests of yourself you should set up a family. You have been in the hostel too long and I don’t feel you ought to be wasting the best of your life in the hostel as it will affect your health and outlook. Your mother is also of the same view since your father-in-law’s place is not a very healthy one for an infant. If you have no serious objection to this, your father-in-law suggests the 10th of next month as the most suitable and auspicious date …’

  He was a B.A. of the olden days brought up on Pater and Carlyle and Scott and Browning; personally looked after by Dr William Miller, Mark Hunter and other eminent professors of Madras College; he was fastidious and precise in handling the English language, though with a very slight pomposity inevitable in the men of those days. After passing his B.A. he refused to enter Government service, as many of his generation did, but went back and settled in his village and looked after his lands and property. I said to myself on reading his letter: ‘God, what am I to do with a little child of seven months?…’ This somehow seemed to terrify me. How did one manage these things? I had visited my wife’s place three or four times since the baby was born. At the first trip I could hardly take notice of the child, although for my wife’s sake I had to pinch its cheeks. I no doubt felt a mild affection for it, but there was nothing compelling or indispensable about it … During the subsequent interviews I found more interest in the girl and began to feel that it would be nice to have her about the home, cooing and shouting … But I didn’t bargain to accept her guardianship so suddenly. I had seen my sister’s children of that age, seven months or eight months old, and they started howling and crying at nights till we felt that they would not survive whatever was afflicting them. But my mother was there, and she could take them in hand expertly: a fomentation, a rub with an oil, some decoction down their throats, and they were quietened.

  My father’s letter had a postscript: ‘To help you set up the family your mother is quite willing to come and stay with you for a few weeks. I have not the slightest objection …’

  I put down my father’s letter. There was much food for thought in it.

  I smelt my wife’s letter before opening it. It carried with it the fragrance of her trunk, in which she always kept her stationery – a mild jasmine smell surrounded her and all her possessions ever since I had known her. I hurriedly glanced through her letter. In her uniform rotund hand, she had written a good deal about the child which made me want to see her at once. The baby was really too intelligent for her age, understood everything that was being said and done in the house. There was every indication that she was going to prove the most astonishingly intelligent person in the family. She crawled on her belly all over the place, and kept a spy-like watch on her mother’s movements. Too cunning! She was learning to say ‘Appa’ (father); and with every look was asking her mother when father proposed to take them home – I liked this, but was not prepared to accept it totally. She then referred to the letter from my father and her father and requested me to set up a house at the earliest moment possible. I felt I was someone whose plans and determinations were of the utmost importance to others …

  I placed the letter on the table, locked the room, and went out for a wash. While crossing the quadrangle my eyes fell on a jasmine bush which completely covered our library wall. I had seen it as a very young sapling years and years ago. When I was a student, I had taken a special interest in its g
rowth, and trained it up a small bamboo bower which I had put up with the help of Singaram the old peon … Many persons had laughed at me for it. ‘Why should we grow a jasmine bush in a boys’ hostel?’ I was often asked. ‘Just to remind us that there are better things in the world, that is all,’ I replied. It was a struggle for existence for that plant, all kinds of cows trespassing into the compound and biting off the stalk. It went up and down several times causing me unending anxiety. And then one day I got the idea of entrusting it to Singaram’s care with the suggestion that he might take its flowers, if they appeared, to his womenfolk at home and for the god during the celebration of the Vinayaka festival in the hostel. Since then it grew up under his personal care. He dealt severely with persons who went near it; and as a special favour, occasionally left half a dozen buds on the sill of my window. Now as I passed along to the bathroom I looked at it and said: ‘I’m about to leave you … after all these years … after ten years’ – the period I had spent in the hostel, first as student and then as teacher. I sighed as I passed it, the only object of any beauty hereabouts. The rest of the quadrangle was mere mud, scorched by Malgudi sun.