His specialty was Shakespeare. His presentations of Shakespearean plays were not just presentations; they were events. They were experiences never to leave one’s memory. He was not presenting; he was acting. Many students from other faculties would cancel their regularly scheduled classes and sneak into his class to partake in the experience. Soon, the class size became enormous, and his classes had to be moved to the university auditorium in the second floor. He made his students come to the platform and act out the scenes—rather than just describing the scenes like a conventional professor would.
He was usually late for his classes, maybe some fifteen minutes. The large crowd of attendees would be anxiously waiting for him and would be at their wit’s end, when the one-man phenomenon of Professor Joseph, weighing 250 pounds and six feet in height, would be heard making heavy footsteps on the stairs leading to the second floor of the gathering. He would have already started his class while climbing. The audience could hear his baritone voice breaking the silence of anticipation, since he would have started reciting Macbeth:
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
By this time he would have reached the landing of the stairs, and his students would be joining his recital in a loud chanting. With the chorus in the background, he would resume his recital.
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
He would have entered the class by the time the last line was in recital. It was a dramatic entrance, appropriately enough.
We, the students, would have been so much hyped up by this time that we would lend our ears to listen to anything and everything he had to say. It was a well-known fact that the professor came to his English classes straight from Judas Toddy Club. He would be drunk prior to his presentations, tottering his way from kallu shop. He would add another “tomorrow” to Macbeth’s lines and that was an indication that he was more drunk than usual. If yet another “tomorrow” were added, it would be a hilarious, out of this world presentation delivered by a professor legally drunk. If he recited the following lines,
“To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow/Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,” it signaled a riotous presentation, a presentation that stayed in one’s mind all the way to his dusty death.
We named such classes TUI—teaching under the influence, rephrasing DUI—driving under the influence. Even his presentation of Shakespearean tragedies would be hilarious under such circumstances.
Needless to say, he was a brilliant professor. He was called a “mad professor” in recognition of his genius and creative ways of teaching such as acting out the play he was teaching. We loved him. No, we adored him. Every generation of Amballore University’s literature class worshipped him at the altar of English literature.
He would build his own drama team from his class unfailingly, year after year. The students in his English class would turn out to be famous actors and actresses, some of them crossing to the silver screen. His team would win most of the competitions held during the annual youth festival that was participated in by a number of universities. He also made appearances in those plays in cameo roles. His tireless endeavors would make the university very famous.
Professor Joseph never got married, and it was hard for him to retire, since he knew of nothing else to do except teaching, his passion. The university administration let him teach beyond sixty years, the time at which the faculty usually retired. This was in recognition of his scholarship and the fame that he brought to the university. He was, however, forced to retire by the university principal when he turned seventy, over loud protests from the student community.
He became depressed after retirement. He would wake up in the middle of the night, get dressed, walk to the campus, and sneak into his old office using the keys that he did not return, enter one of the English class rooms, and start teaching Shakespeare to an empty room in the perfect pitch of darkness. He would shout in his grave voice, “I want each of you to remember the quote from As You like It
Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything. “
He was quoting the last lines of “All the World’s a Stage”
He continued, “I want all of you to remember that old age is a second childhood. Life is a circle. You come back to where you start.” This statement would have merited loud applause if there were students in the class.
He would then light up a candle, pulling it out of his pocket. He would undress with no inhibitions. He would then pull out a sari from the paper bag he was carrying. He would dress up in that white cotton sari, which had “Lady Macbeth” prominently embroidered on it. He would abandon his clothes in the classroom and walk out of there, holding a lit candle and repeating Lady Macbeth’s lament:
Here’s the smell of the blood still
All the perfumes of Arabia
Will not sweeten this little hand. Oh, oh, oh!
He would walk through the campus and all the way to his home in the stillness of the night, holding a solitary candle, in perfect imitation of Lady Macbeth’s somnambulistic walk, and reciting her lament over and over again, like a broken record. He would culminate his nocturnal trek by entering his home and washing his hands of any imaginary blood.
The next day, the campus security would find an abandoned mundu and shirt in the English classroom. They would identify the nightly visitor after some episodes and therefore would be able to return the clothes to their rightful owner.
It was not clear if the drama professor was staging a nightly solo drama or if he indeed turned out to be somnambulistic like Lady Macbeth or had gone plain mad, dismayed as he was by losing his esteemed professorship, and sitting at home doing nothing. It was not clear if his passion of teaching and acting was slowly eating him to persuade him to stage his drama to a sleeping world, since the wakeful student crowd had been denied to him.
He would eventually be apprehended and handed over to the Amballore Mental Asylum where he was caged like a bird. He was seen walking the hallways of the mental institution back and forth at night, holding a candle and reciting Lady Macbeth. The warden was sympathetic to the professor and did not interfere, since it was causing no harm to the other inmates.
Then one night, he managed to get out of the asylum through one of the doors inadvertently kept open. It was night. He walked out of his room, down the hallway, and into the wide world outside. He was crossing Hell’s Highway while thus taking his nocturnal trek to the university campus, holding a candle and reciting Lady Macbeth’s lament, when he was struck by a speeding car. Even though the car was speeding, and therefore had to take the blame for the accident, the professor was in a somnambulistic stage, unaware of the surroundings, and therefore would have fallen prey to even the minutest of assaults, let alone a speeding vehicle. The dim candle he was holding did not shed enough light to be seen by the passing motorists. He died on the spot. So much blood drained out of him that all the perfumes of Arabia would not have sweetened his big hand. He was ninety when he died.
When we heard this story told us by Toms, there was none in the group who did not have teary eyes. It was a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions. It was a tragedy that the bard himself would have loved to pen.
Then there was the mathematics professor, T.T. Thomas, who could write long algebraic equations effortlessly on the blackboard and solve any mathematics riddle as if it was easy like one plus one equals two.
We disc
ussed about the Sharada teacher in botany class, who came dressed like an actress every day and whose class, we boys were always looking forward to. She was capable of explaining any intricate detail in botany in her magically feminine voice. We paid attention not only to her beauty, but more importantly, to her beautiful voice. Toms, the macho student who always sat in the back row, would repeatedly interrupt her with questions; partly because he was too busy staring at her to concentrate, but mostly because he wanted to hear her voice again.
Toms would later marry the professor in spite of twelve years of age difference. They would settle down with three children. We would be attending one of his children’s—Elsie’s—wedding in two days.
How fast time flies and how strangely things turn out, I thought.
12THE WEDDING
Tom’s daughter Elsie was marrying Jason. Both of them were software engineers and in their late twenties. He was working for the software giant TCS—Tata Consultancy Services and she was working for Wipro, another IT giant.
I walked around the houseboat amid the jubilant wedding crowd and finally settled down on a sofa on the upper deck, enjoying the panoramic view, as if I was watching a 360-degree IMAX movie. The tranquility that enveloped me even in the midst of a large, noisy crowd was astounding, and contributing to it was the smooth floatation of the houseboat amid the hypnotizing scenes of the surrounding greenery. There was a canopy of palm tree leaves over the observation deck along the path of the boat ride that intermittently cleared to let in the sunlight, revealing a clear, blue sky. The surreal feeling of the calm gliding along the smooth waters was augmented by the toddy that I was sipping. There really is no viewing of Kerala scenery that you would do justice to, unless it is accompanied by a steady flow of kallu.
The backwaters of Kerala span a distance of six hundred miles. It is a labyrinth of interlinked rivers, lagoons, lakes, and canals. This is also the meeting ground of freshwater from inland and the seawater from the Arabian Sea. The houseboat is a descendant of the kettuvallom that was traditionally used as transportation in the backwaters and also to move goods from inland to the sea. The kettuvallom is charioted along waterways by oarsmen who use poles to propel. Modern houseboats are exotic barges powered by high-power engines and functioning as hotels in motion.
I was in a different world altogether, surrounded by Kerala’s magnificent scenery on one side and the assembled younger generation on other side, whom I struggled to understand. I could not help once more comparing the present generation to ours. The young generation was unbelievably different from my generation which struggled hard to reach where we are today. There were historical events that made them luckier than us.
For one, once India opened its markets and financial venues to the outside world—which happened past the prime of my generation— affluence came knocking. Another important factor was the emergence of the IT industry in India, in lockstep with the advancement of technology and internet all over the world. Most of the young people I met in Kerala belonged to the Internet generation. Indians, skilled in science and mathematics, easily adapted to the world of technology, engineering, and information system. In a nutshell, the current generation was lucky to be born at a time when there was resurgence in Indian political history and a renaissance in technology all over the world. I was witnessing the results of these developments right through the prosperous and vibrant young crowd I mingled with.
As for my generation, we were born in an India unified for the first time in its long history, and this happened after the British left. The nation was pretty much groping in the dark, slowly coming to terms with the reality of being a new nation, ebullient with gaining independence, and yet struggling to rule over millions of people at opposite extremes of culture, heritage, language, and religion. While the nation was struggling to build itself with substantially no help from the outside world, we, the individuals, were struggling to prove ourselves and define our lives. We struggled hard, because we had to.
The wedding was the culmination of two years of dating and another year of engagement. The days of arranged marriages were mostly gone. I heard that the couple had already been staying together in a condo in Trichur. Back in the old days such an arrangement was unheard of in Kerala. For one, the villagers would chase the couple out of the town with warning not to come back. Assigning the couple as target in a shooting range or a rock-throwing contest would not have been outside the realms of possibility. But now, life there was like in Canada. As for the arranged marriages and the unique role of the honeymoon night to host the very first love-making—they were the stuff that fairy tales were made of, unlike in the old days.
Many homes owned a car compared to when I left India, when owning a car was confined to the ranks of the ultra rich. The surprising thing, however, was that the infrastructure still remained archaic while affluence, technological advancement, and information system outgrowth skyrocketed precipitously.
The family structure used to be hierarchical in Kerala, where the elders enjoyed respect, love and admiration. I was surprised to see that the elders remained isolated in the present society, aloof from mainstream population. There were many senior citizen homes now.
Toms came introducing the couple. The bride was unlike the traditional bride of old, who could not be seen until after the wedding. The social customs dictated the husband-to-be not to look at wife-to-be prior to the wedding ceremony. Elsie was well dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, unlike the shy bride of yesteryear, who would make her appearance in an elegant sari on her wedding day. I was nevertheless puzzled why the bride was in jeans and a T-shirt. “Oh that! That was the decision the bride and the groom agreed on—to be married in common people’s clothes,” Toms explained. I tried to suppress my surprise. I learned later that this was the bride’s second wedding. Her first marriage fizzled in a matter of one year. She did not want to have another wedding with great expectations and traditional wedding costume, unlike for the first wedding. She decided to take one day at a time, instead of overwhelmingly preloading the new chapter in her life with great anticipation of a romantic fairy tale. She realized that life was not a fairy tale.
A patriarchal society gave way to a society of equal representation in Kerala. Females were well represented in various walks of life. They were no more ignored and no more confined to the four walls of a home. This transformation was partly to do with the widespread affluence and partly to do with the diminished size of the family. Smaller family size meant that there was no need for a mother to stick around to look after a large brood, making her attached to the home like a fixture, and forcing her to fulfill the role of family gatekeeper forever. Being married to a man, bearing children, bringing them up, and dedicating her entire life to husband and her children were no more priorities to many women. This fact released females from the clutches of a male dominated society, where she was expected to be subservient to her husband and children from cradle to grave. And this showed. Women were uninhibited, unlike in the days of the old. There was no code of society to demand obedience from women. They were seen as free as men, if not more. Divorce was unheard of in the days of old, whereas in the current society, it was widespread.
Affluence has made deep inroads in the society—it has made a dent in the class system, and it has made people independent, especially the women.
During a snack time prior to the wedding dinner, I got to talk to the young men and women at the function. I was fishing for their outlook on life and their political leanings. The age of socialism was pretty much gone. They called it “baggage of the old generation” and claimed it got the nation nowhere. The so-called friends that we got through socialism, such as the Soviet Union and China, proved to be not all that great, as proven by times of adversity like the India-China War, when the Soviet Union took sides with China, and the India-Pakistan War, when China took sides with Pakistan. The current generation was attracted toward capitalism with its associated freedom in decision making and abundant opport
unities to be self-reliant. The culture of hard work seemed to have taken root. Political philosophy was intertwined with favorable capitalistic views triggered by widespread affluence.
The third boat in the boat train was chosen as the venue of the wedding function. It was the mid-train boat. A chapel was erected, and a group of five priests appeared at the podium to bless the bride and the groom. The bride’s father and mother, Toms and Sharada teacher, walked her down the aisle. The bride looked a splitting image of her mother Sharada teacher from long ago, when she was teaching us botany class. The bridegroom Jason eagerly waited for Elsie at the altar. Wedding music played. The crowd showered rose petals on the bride
After a long ceremony punctuated by lots of prayers, kneeling, sitting, and standing up, it was turn for the pair to exchange vows. Jason told Elsie, “I, Jason, promise to love you as my wife. I promise to love you until death do us part.” Elsie’s vow was simple like Jason’s, except with a twist. She told Jason, “I, Elsie, promise to love you as my husband. I promise to love you until divorce does us part.” There was stunned silence in the church, followed by widespread gasping from the audience, upon hearing the divorce word. The priest stepped in promptly to avoid any unpleasant remarks from the audience. He declared, “Now I pronounce you husband and wife.”
Cheers followed. The assigned volunteers and loving relatives along with friends showered ticker tapes on the newly-weds. The new husband and wife embraced each other, and kissed for a long time. I thought they might never stop! I reminded myself that long ago, even touching each other was looked down upon while the bride and the groom were in the church, getting their marriage blessed by the priest. The vigilant priest used to keep an eye on the pair getting married making sure no hanky-panky took place between them. Kissing was out of question.
The friends of the bride and the groom gave speeches. There were music and dance. Gifts were given to the couple. There was drinking and more drinking. There was dancing followed by more dancing. That was it—the whole function in a nutshell. No dowry, no obligatory money or presents from the family, and no getting blessed by the elders. Everything of the old was shelved. The bride and the groom left as soon as the function was over, and everyone was on his own.
Amballore House Page 16