The English Teacher

by R. K. Narayan

  Leela at first grumbled and demanded to be allotted some worthwhile work. But I persuaded her by dinning into her over and over again: ‘What will your grandmother say if she sees your box!’ Finally she realized the seriousness of the position and said: ‘Yes.’ She went over to her box, and as usual held it by the handle on one side and tipped the entire contents on the floor. They came down with a terrific clatter and crash – a dozen cardboard boxes, her slate, books, wooden toys and engines and motors and dolls, all crashed down in a heap on the floor. She squatted in their midst and said, ‘Shall I throw away the things I don’t want?’

  ‘Yes.’ She started this operation. She picked up and looked at each, and said: ‘This thing is not wanted’ and flung it off to another corner of the hall. This mood had caught her and cardboard boxes and all kinds of things which she cherished seemed to vex her suddenly by their presence. In a short time in another corner of the hall were heaped the bulk of her possessions. Except her school books and five wooden vessels, and a large doll, all the other things were there. I had to go on with my work in another part of the house. But when I saw what she had done, I protested. ‘I tidied up this hall.’ ‘I will throw them in the street now,’ she explained. She came over, picked up a handful, took them to the street, returned with the handful, looked wistfully at the heap and appealed: ‘Father, I must put them all back in the box.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘They are all important …’ she said very earnestly, looking at me fixedly. And forthwith all the toys returned to the box in the same manner as they came out – in a clattering rush.

  I applied for leave in order to meet my mother. I waited at the bus stand, beyond the market square. The glare was blinding; the dust unbearable. The bus from Trichinopoly due to arrive at eleven was not showing any signs even half an hour later. I was growing impatient. The bus service people had made no provision for waiting. There was a miserable tamarind tree with sparse leaves, under which were gathered three women waiting to catch the bus, a coolie waiting for fares, as ass in the neighbourhood who could not stand the heat of the day – and a jutka with horse strapped to it; the jutka man had just brought it in so that there should be a patch of shade on the horse’s snout; he seemed to feel satisfied that he had saved the horse from the heat of the sun. The jutka man was also waiting for the bus to arrive and provide him a fare. He waited for the bus, felt drowsy, curled up in his seat and was soon asleep. The donkey moved nearer and put his mouth into the bunch of grass thrown down on the ground for the horse to munch while the master slept. The donkey pulled out a mouthful, at which the horse stamped and neighed. The car driver woke up and flourished his whip at the donkey. And we enjoyed the whole show, although the sun baked us.

  After all the bus arrived at twelve precisely. Parched and dusty, my mother wriggled herself out from among her fellow passengers. ‘How is the child?’ she asked getting down. It was her very first question. We put her luggage into the jutka, haggled with the driver, and started home. Over the rattling of the wheels she spoke – complaining about my correspondence, enquiring about the child, if the old cook was well, and how I was managing to look after the child. I was tremendously pleased: as I looked at her, warm, and throbbing with life and enquiries, it seemed to restore for a moment one’s sense of security, the solid factors of life, and its warmth and interests.

  My child as usual was waiting at the door, and hardly had the old lady got down from the carriage when she ran to her and was, in a moment, in her arms. I could hardly comprehend – there were so many excited changes between the grandmother and daughter. ‘Granny, open your trunk, open your trunk, what have you brought for me? …’ She went on pestering even before the trunk and bed were brought in. They went in. I paid off the carriage, received the change, and followed. By that time I found there was a great argument going on between them – the little one standing on my mother’s ancient trunk, and insisting upon having it opened immediately. My mother, mildly protesting, requesting to be allowed to rest for a few minutes: ‘Oh, child, there’s no shops in our little place. What should I bring you?’ There were tears in her eyes. She cast a slight look at the room on our right in the hall, my wife’s room, now empty, and touched away the tears with the tip of her fingers.

  My daughter stamped on the steel trunk, and made such a row that I felt it was time for me to interfere: ‘H’sh, you must learn.…’ I began. But my mother stopped me: ‘Don’t be harsh; poor child, jump down, I’ll open the trunk for you.’ She muttered as she fumbled with the key and the lock: ‘You used to be exactly the same: you’d cling to your father, and wouldn’t let him remove even his sandals before giving you your presents.’ She opened the trunk. My daughter sat on her lap and gazed into the trunk expectantly. My mother pulled out a few saris, a couple of towels, jackets, a horn comb, and lastly a little casket, out of which she produced a gold chain. ‘I had this made for the child at the town shop when your father went there last time. He is the only goldsmith we have near at hand, though fifteen miles away …’ She slipped the chain over the child’s head. ‘Three sovereigns weight. How do you like it?’ Leela looked down at her chest with great satisfaction. The gold chain glistened, but I was absorbed elsewhere. I was staring at the casket from which mother had taken out the chain. ‘Mother, give it here!’ I cried.

  I examined it, measured it with my finger, held it off and scrutinized it – an ivory-worked sandalwood casket. ‘Wait a minute!’ I said and ran into my room. I pulled out the table drawer, turned over the pages containing my wife’s messages. She had written: ‘It is not a very big box – about eight or ten inches long, three inches high, and about four inches wide … the lid of the box is not flat but slightly elevated … It was given to me by my mother-in-law. Box of ivory and sandalwood …’ I took out a little scale and measured the box. The measurements she had given were slightly more or less by about half an inch all round. I put away the scale and read over the message again. I couldn’t yet decide whether her reference was to this casket or some other. And presently I came upon a sentence, which had nearly escaped me all these days. ‘The casket is mounted on short ivory legs, resembling tiger-paws.’ I lifted the casket and examined its legs. The tiger-paws were there. I grew red with excitement. I clutched the pages and was about to run out to read them to my mother. But I checked myself. I’d never spoken of these to anyone so far. She might not see it as I did, she might doubt, cross-examine, feel on the whole disturbed. It meant a new habit of thinking in regard to death, all too difficult at her age, or she might think I was mad. In any case this information was too precious to part with, to make public even to a mother. I put the papers into the drawer, went back, and sat down beside my mother. I said, ‘I like this box, mother, what do you keep in it?’ ‘All your,’ she lowered her voice and muttered in my ear, so that the child should not hear, ‘wife’s jewels. I got this from my sister years ago. Susila used to be fond of it and had once or twice even made bold to ask for it. But somehow I didn’t give it to her … Now I keep her jewels in it. I’ll give it to the child …’

  ‘Can I keep it with me?’ I asked.

  ‘Why do you want it? It’s a jewel box …’

  ‘I like it, mother. I’ll keep some of the child’s knick-knacks in it,’ I said. She gave it to me.

  This discovery made me write to my father-in-law next day for the bundle of fourteen letters, which Susila had often mentioned. Four days later I received a reply. ‘I have searched every nook and corner in the house and every box, but not a single letter is to be found. Perhaps they were in that lot which I saw her and her brother destroying in the fire one day when she was here last. I hope you will forgive this disappointment and not feel dejected.’ In his last paragraph he wrote: ‘I don’t know if you are already aware of it. I have written to your father about it. I intend to make an endowment for my dear grandchild Leela to benefit her when she comes of a marriageable age.’

  I went to my mother. S
he was sitting in the hall, combing the child’s hair. She did everything with her own hands nowadays, often complaining that my neglect had made the child’s tresses shorter.

  ‘I’ve a letter from my father-in-law,’ I began.

  ‘Oh, has he written to you about this matter?’ she said slyly pointing at the child.

  ‘Yes – he has.’

  ‘He wrote to your father,’ she said. ‘He proposes to set apart,’ she indicated with her fingers six, ‘for this person, to be given to her on the day of her marriage.’

  ‘Whose marriage, mother?’ the child asked.

  ‘Somebody’s marriage, child, don’t listen to our talk,’ she said, and continued. ‘And your father also proposes to set apart a similar sum for the same purpose.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, not knowing what to say. ‘She is very lucky!’

  My mother smiled cynically, ‘Of course you must admire her luck.’ She added, with a sigh: ‘What are these? Can these things ever compensate for the absence of that one person?’

  ‘Who is to be married, mother?’ the child asked again.

  ‘A girl in our place,’ said her grandmother.

  ‘How big is she?’ asked the child. For some unknown reason she seemed to be concerned with the bulk of this bride. My mother said: ‘Even if she has proved unlucky in other matters, let her at least have a well-provided future.’

  My mother stayed with us for four weeks. My father’s condition had improved and she could stay with us – happy days; the child bloomed with a new life, under her handling. She ceased to approach me for company or help. She stuck to her grandmother morning to night and slept on her bed at night. She bloomed in this warmth. Children need above all else the warmth of a mother’s touch. Watching her now I realized with a pang that the very best I could provide was still hopelessly inadequate. And if the child had looked happy under my handling it was more out of tolerance than anything else.

  On the eve of her departure mother was packing up. The child stood beside her watching and asked: ‘Mother, are you going?’

  ‘Yes, dear, yes.’

  ‘Don’t go,’ she said and looked so miserable that mother said: ‘Will you come with me?’ Leela jumped at this suggestion. She cried: ‘Give me a box, father, I want to put my things into it.’ I said soothingly: ‘There is time, there is time.’ At which she became uncontrollable. My mother said: ‘Seriously, why don’t you let me take her with me?’ I said: ‘She will not go. She will want me too …’ Granny said: ‘Your father will not come with us.’

  ‘Oh!’ said the child, ‘why not?’

  ‘He has his school to attend …’

  ‘But I have also my school,’ Leela replied irrelevantly.

  ‘So, you must stay and let grandmother go,’ I said.

  ‘Why will she not stay here?’ the child asked. I saw that she had made up her mind to go with her grandmother. She was thrilled to hear that there were other children in the house. My sister’s two children and a few others, numbering in all seven. Leela could not understand what it meant. How could there be children at home? Children were to be seen only in schools. So she asked: ‘Is it a school?’

  Next afternoon she was ready to start with her grandmother. I felt acute anxiety about sending her by bus. I had never been separated from her; the thought appalled me. But as I saw her bubbling over with enthusiasm I told myself: ‘Don’t be selfish. She must have her own life.’ Her trunk of toys and her bed of clothes were there, perched upon the bus next afternoon. I had been dinning into my mother’s ears instructions regarding the child. Even as the conductor blew his whistle I shouted instructions. ‘Don’t allow her to lean out. See that she doesn’t eat too many sweets. She gets a racking cough at nights. Oil and bath every Friday, but the water must not be too hot … She must be immediately wrapped up … Milk, only half a tumbler …’ My mother merely smiled.

  The child said: ‘Father, I will write you a letter.’

  The bus groaned and moved, and was soon lost in a screen of dust of its own kicking.

  A few weeks later a letter arrived from my father, enclosing a scrap of paper with a scrawl on it. My father wrote: ‘The enclosed letter is from your Leela. I just mentioned today that I was going to write to you, and at once she declared she had much to write to you too. I gave her my pencil and the paper, and she has written this letter.’ I looked at a small slip of paper: the familiar memo pad of my father’s neatly torn in half. I saw huge scrawls looking like trees or clouds and a few letters of the alphabet and at the bottom the huge word: LEELA. It was folded and on the flap was written ‘To my beloved father’, which was in my father’s handwriting, though he tried to disguise it by writing rounded capital letters. Moreover there was his favourite ink. I looked at this communication from my daughter and felt very happy. I folded it and put it in my purse as if it were a rare document. My father’s letter explained: ‘You may want to know what she has written. Here is the paraphrase. She is always surrounded by a dozen children, always playing, building a castle on the pyol on which her grandfather is resting. He is spending all his time watching her and what a great joy it is. It has made him forget his illness, watching her. In the evening she goes out with her granny to the tank or the garden. She is in splendid health, eating and digesting everything that her granny gives her. A teacher comes to teach her in the afternoon. She sleeps beside her granny. I asked her if she wants her father. “Yes,” she says, “let him come here,” which is a very profound suggestion. I would ask you to come and spend your week-end holidays with her. After all she is only four hours off from your place. So I hope you will not allow any feeling of loneliness to oppress you …’

  I boarded the bus for the village next week-end.

  I returned from the village. The house seemed unbearably dull. But I bore it. ‘There is no escape from loneliness and separation …’ I told myself often. ‘Wife, child, brothers, parents, friends … We come together only to go apart again. It is one continuous movement. They move away from us as we move away from them. The law of life can’t be avoided. The law comes into operation the moment we detach ourselves from our mother’s womb. All struggle and misery in life is due to our attempt to arrest this law or get away from it or in allowing ourselves to be hurt by it. The fact must be recognized. A profound unmitigated loneliness is the only truth of life. All else is false. My mother got away from her parents, my sisters from our house, I and my brother away from each other, my wife was torn away from me, my daughter is going away with my mother, my father has gone away from his father, my earliest friends – where are they? They scatter apart like the droplets of a water-spray. The law of life. No sense in battling against it …’ Thus I reconciled myself to this separation with less struggle than before. I read a lot, I wrote a lot, I reflected as much as I could. I saw pictures, went out for walks, and frequently met my friend the headmaster. I spent a great deal of my time watching the children at play or hearing him narrate his stories for the children as they sat under the mango tree in the school compound. When I sat there at the threshold of his hut and watched the children, all sense of loneliness ceased to oppress, and I felt a deep joy and contentment stirring within me. I felt there was nothing more for me to demand of life. The headmaster’s presence was always most soothing. He was a very happy man nowadays. His school had over two hundred pupils studying in it and he was able to spend as much as he wanted in staffing and equipping the school.

  His wife and children visited him often, at least thrice in a day. He treated them kindly, although he still refused to visit them at home, and strictly forbade them to call him father or husband. His wife, a greatly chastened person now, often implored him to let her bring him his food. He firmly declined the offer, declaring: ‘No, it is there that all the trouble starts. The kitchen is the deadliest arsenal a woman possesses.’

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  My mind was made up. I was in search of a harmonious existence and
everything that disturbed that harmony was to be rigorously excluded, even my college work. One whole night I sat up in the loneliness of my house thinking it over, and before the night was out my mind was made up. I could not go on with that work; nor did I need the one hundred rupees they gave me. At first I had thought of sending in my resignation by letter to Brown, and making an end of it. I would avoid all the personal contacts, persuasions, and all the possible sentimentalities inevitable in the act of snapping familiar roots. I would send in a letter which would be a classic in its own way, and which would singe the fingers of whoever touched it. In it I was going to attack a whole century of false education. I was going to explain why I could no longer stuff Shakespeare and Elizabethan metre and Romantic poetry for the hundredth time into young minds and feed them on the dead mutton of literary analysis and theories and histories, while what they needed was lessons in the fullest use of the mind. This education had reduced us to a nation of morons; we were strangers to our own culture and camp followers of another culture, feeding on leavings and garbage.

  After coffee I sat down at my table with several sheets of large paper before me. I began ‘Dear Mr Brown: This is my letter of resignation. You will doubtless want to know the reasons. Here they are …’ I didn’t like this. It was too breezy. I scored it out and began again. I filled three sheets, and reading it over, felt ashamed of myself. It was too theatrical and pompous for my taste. I was entangled too much in theories and platitudes and holding forth to all whom it might concern. It was like a rabid attack on all English writers, which was hardly my purpose. ‘What fool could be insensible to Shakespeare’s sonnets or the Ode to the West Wind or “A thing of beauty is a joy for ever”?’ I reflected. ‘But what about examinations and critical notes? Didn’t these largely take the place of literature? What about our own roots?’ I thought over it deeply and felt very puzzled. I added: ‘I am up against the system, the whole method and approach of a system of education which makes us morons, cultural morons, but efficient clerks for all your business and administrative offices. You must not think that I am opposed to my particular studies of authors …’ The repetition of ideas uttered a hundred times before. It looked like a rehash of an article entitled ‘Problems of Higher Education’, which appeared again and again in a weekend educational supplement – the yarn some ‘educationist’ was spinning out for ten rupees a column.