Maximum City

by Suketu Mehta

  Then in today’s paper: A seven-year-old girl in Jogeshwari forgot to paste the picture of a train in her notebook for homework in her art class. To teach the little girl a lesson, her art teacher went at her hands, legs, and back with a wooden ruler and then slapped her hard on her face and arm. After the thrashing, the girl quietly walked to her grandmother’s house. The next day she started vomiting blood. Then bruises showed up on her arm and patches of blood coagulated on her face. Her liver is badly injured, and the doctors say the veins in her forehead may burst at any time. If she lives, her parents, who have three other children in the school, say they may send her back. Her art teacher was arrested and released on bail the next day. He teaches at, and the little girl attends, Mahatma Gandhi School.

  The name is not an accident. What Gandhiji knew was that if the country were allowed to go, it would have been the most savage independence movement in world history. The violence begins early in life. When an adult Indian is hit, he is instantly reminded of his schooldays. The teachers at Mayur Mahal felt very free with their hands around the students; they assumed a familiarity with our bodies. “Do you know, to beat a child is actually against the law,” we whispered to each other. When a noise was heard in the back of the class, the entire class was punished, girls and boys both, with two thwacks of the foot ruler on the open palm. A good way to reduce the pain was to rub our hands on our oiled heads, and then hold the palm at an angle, so that the wood lightly glanced off the skin. The teachers often broke rulers across our hands in their fury.

  The days I would be sure of getting a beating were those on which our notebooks were checked. We were supposed to write down every word of what the teachers said in class, which was mostly what they read out aloud from the state textbooks, and write it back for them in the examinations, so that education became an exercise in repetition, “learning by heart.” The notebooks accounted for 20 percent of the marks. Something in me rebelled against the idea of taking notes to perpetuate this cycle of government-written facts. The previous day, the other students would have gone frantic copying each others’ notes. I would be woken up by my mother, and my first thought would be, I am going to get beaten today. I washed, put on a clean uniform, was given a glass of milk by my mother, and left home bright and shining so I could walk to the building where I would be beaten.

  In class I would watch the clock on the wall as if it were my greatest friend, as if it were a lover, and will the hands to speed toward the close of the period. Sometimes the teacher would forget to check the notes that day; when the bell rang, ending the period, there would be the relief of the condemned spared his execution. The next few hours were happy; then slowly, toward evening, the dread would descend once again like a heavy fog. The punishment had not been evaded; it had only been postponed.

  There was one ingenious punishment in which the teachers excelled. It was a simple piece of white cardboard, with a string around it, bearing the inscription, in large letters readable across a room, I HAVE NOT DONE MY HOMEWORK. When this was the case, you had to wear it for public display. One day I did not do my homework, and the teacher garlanded me with the board. As she did so, I wondered why there were black streaks running down the white cardboard. I soon found out. Wearing the sign, I was instructed to stand not only in front of my own class but also all the other classrooms on the floor. The door of the next room would be opened and I would walk in unsteadily and go to the head of the class. There I would turn, face forty of my fellow students, and stand silently. Children love nothing so much as to see other children in pain, especially at Mayur Mahal, where pain was so prevalent it formed part of the masonry. My humiliation was a relief from their own, so the room erupted in a chorus of mocking laughter, hooting, and jokes. In the beginning I tried smiling—as if I got the joke too and wasn’t it hilarious—but I quickly discovered what the black streaks were. They were the tears of all previous wearers of the board, and I added my own to them. When I had finished my performance in one classroom I would have to go the next, and the next, and after I’d finished all of them, I would have to stand in the passage outside the classrooms, standing and shifting against the wall, desperately trying to keep my advertised shame from the eyes of those who passed by.

  The way we dealt with all this was through laughter. Not kind laughter, indulgent laughter, but mocking, profane, evil laughter. We laughed at the teachers and reduced the female teachers to sex objects; big-titted Miss Easo got dubbed—what else?—Petrol Pump. We laughed at other children when they got beaten, and after a while they laughed about it too. When I meet people from Mayur Mahal now, we recall the stinging slaps we were given and laugh about them; we remember the beatings we got in the way that children in other schools remember the school plays or the prizes they won.

  ON CHILDREN’S DAY, I go with my wife and son to be honored by the school that tormented me for nine years.

  “This is Suketu Mehta.” Cheroot introduces me to the other felicitees as soon as I walk onstage. “He was given a literary award by Bill Clinton.”

  “No, I wasn’t.”

  “By President Bill Clinton.”

  “No, I wasn’t,” I say, more emphatically this time and shaking my head as well.

  “You were not given an award by Bill Clinton?” he asks, a trifle suspiciously.

  “No.”

  “Then who gave you the award?” asks Cheroot, a darkness coming over his face as if he’s caught me cheating on an exam.

  I think. What would the name Mrs. Giles Whiting mean to him? “A . . . literary academy.”

  Fifteen minutes later, I hear the emcee, a boy in jeans, a white shirt, and tie, introducing me to the audience. “And we are proud to have Suketu Mehta, the laureate of literature, who was given an award by Bill Clinton.”

  The poetic license of the introductions is not restricted only to me. Another outstanding ex-student is a karate instructor, whom the announcer introduces as a “sixteenth-degree black belt in karate.” There are titters in the audience, many of whom have sent their sons to this instructor to learn survival in the Bombay streets, and a teacher rushes up to the boy. He corrects himself. “Sorry, sixth-degree.” The school, which grudged a single complimentary word when we were its students, is now exaggerating our achievements beyond credibility, as if in compensation. It is not enough to have gone to Cornell for an MBA, as one of my fellow felicitees did; he was “a topper of all the Cornell MBAs.” There is a lawn-tennis champion who has accumulated twenty-one points in the lawn-tennis contests. “After one hundred points he will reach Wimbledon.” There is a “ball-bearing tycoon” and assorted diamond merchants, builders, and doctors, all lords of their profession. There is only one lady, “the Best Designer in Asia,” whom I sit next to and trade memories with while the speakers go on at length about the ills of modern education. The craft teacher comes in late, her hair glowing red with henna, in a semitransparent sari. She had us build tanks out of matchboxes glued together and plant shrubs in pots; mine all died. “She told me I can’t stitch and sew,” the Best Designer in Asia whispers to me. “I feel like telling her that’s what I do for a living now.”

  The Cornell MBA’s brother was in my class. He reminds me of this fact. “When I told him yesterday who was being felicitated, he remembered you. ‘Terrible handwriting,’ he said.” This was my singular distinction in that school. My handwriting had been screwed up when I entered Mayur Mahal, in the second standard. My previous school, in Calcutta, had taught me to write in “joint handwriting,” cursive script, but at Mayur Mahal the standard was separate letters. My hands resisted the new script and got hit with a foot ruler for doing so. So my handwriting stayed stuck in the transition stage, between joint and separate, between Calcutta and Bombay: a font, a code of its own, decipherable only by myself. It gave the teachers migraines; samples of it were sent far and wide to demonstrate the hardships of a teacher’s life. It was variously compared to modern art and to ants dipped in ink crawling across the page. On the ot
her hand, a teacher fond of me pointed out, “Gandhiji also had bad handwriting.” I took considerable solace in that observation and eagerly sought out all samples of the Mahatma’s scrawl, until I was convinced that bad handwriting was not only compensated for by greatness later on in life but a prerequisite for it. My English teacher failed to share this theory and refused to read my English essay. I would fail English, my best subject. My father got fed up and hired a handwriting tutor.

  The tutor was a mousy little man with a mustache and thick black glasses who was a drawing teacher in a Gujarati school. He was also, I discovered after our first session, a devoted Communist. He declared that he would first teach me the fundamentals of drawing in order to improve my calligraphy. To that end, he directed me to sketch out two hands clasped in a handshake, demonstrating Indo-Soviet friendship. In later lessons, he had me write lengthy essays on Indo-Soviet friendship, so that I could practice my handwriting. My father the diamond merchant realized that my writing wasn’t showing any signs of being any more legible. While he was out every day trying to expand his capital through oppression of the diamond workers, his only son was being systematically indoctrinated in class conflict in his own home, at his own expense. He kicked the handwriting teacher out. My handwriting stayed as tortured as ever, but I knew a lot more about the Soviet Union.

  Onstage now, Kanubhai, the eighty-two-year-old managing trustee of the school, with a white Gandhi cap on his skull, is forced repeatedly to get up and receive the salutations of the endless felicitees. After each name is announced, someone prods his back, and, startled from slumber, he darts forward and up from his chair, deposits the valedictory shawl around the honoree, and sinks back gratefully into his chair and his stupor. The doctor on my left leans close to me. “I examined him only last week. He’s not in good health at all. I’m worried.” It would not look good if Kanubhai breathed his last on Children’s Day; on the other hand, it would be somehow appropriate.

  After the ceremony, we walk off the stage, looking for the way out. I have an overpowering urge to leave. But we are shepherded into a back room from which there is no exit; I have to be there with my wife and child, while plates of samosas and sandwiches are thrust at us. I am tense. I do not want to look at the past, not here, not with these people.

  “Hi, Suketu,” someone says. I turn around to see a short dark man with an unfortunate face, which at this moment is all smiles, standing in front of me. “You don’t remember me.”

  I do, instantly. “Urvesh?”

  He shakes my hand. I should have gone down on my knees and begged forgiveness. A quarter of a century ago, I had hurt him in the worst possible way; and the memory of that shame still lingers.

  Urvesh was a little squeak in our playground at Dariya Mahal who delighted in pitting the bigger boys against each other, which he did with great success. He would carry tales, first in the ear of one dada, then the other tough, and get them fighting. Urvesh was small and pockmarked, and he had been the subject of many beatings before he learnt this survival tactic. One day his mother died. His head was shaved. I got in a fight with him very soon after, and I was searching for a way to truly hurt him. I had beaten him up many times before, but he never cried; he had learnt to never cry, as small boys do. So I shouted at him, “I know your mother’s croaked!” There was an awful stillness in the small playground. Then my best friend, who until that moment had also wanted to give Urvesh a good kicking, slapped the back of my head—hard. Urvesh had said nothing, nothing at all. Out of all my ghosts, why should he be standing in front of me, right here, now?

  But Urvesh remembers none of this; he is eagerly talking to me. He tells me he still lives in the neighborhood and is in the diamond market. He has a wife and children. How could he forget what I did to him when he was most vulnerable? After all, I haven’t. I don’t know who else might come up to greet me, and I am also afraid of the converse—that I will be left alone, ignored. The room is closing in on me and I look desperately for the exit. My son has finished his sweets and asks for a samosa. I grab his hand and lead him and my wife from the room, out to the street to look for a taxi. I am more nervous than in my meetings with the gangsters. There is real danger here. I know I should stay, should try to see who still remembers me, has stories for me. But it is too close. Even outside, I’m not safe. A woman comes up to me smiling. She lives in my building; she is the sister-in-law of the man who had parked his car in my space. She says she didn’t know I was a student at Mayur Mahal. I smile, mumble something, and herd my family into a taxi.

  BUT I MUST GO BACK to the school. It contains nine years of my ghost time; I must come to terms with it. I go when I can’t avoid it any longer.

  As I ascend the stairs on my second visit, my heart is already thumping. I have to stop for a moment, in front of the display Lincoln’s letter to his son’s teacher, on the mezzanine floor. They still have my old mark sheets, my records. I will look at them. I am brave enough now. In the administrative office, the peon reluctantly digs out my record of leaving from a 1977 register. I see my name, with the entries. CASTE: Hindu Bania. Under the column titled PROGRESS, all the students down the page are awarded Good except for one Not Good and mine: Satisfactory. Another entry is under CONDUCT, in which mine was deemed Good.

  My academic career in this school peaked in the fifth standard, when I came in first, then tanked steeply, so that by the time I left my class rank was comfortably in the double digits. Shortly after the state examination results were out, the photos of the toppers would appear in the newspapers, in ads for the coaching classes where they had toiled night and day. They wore thick glasses and looked enervated from frequent masturbation. BHAVESH SADASYACHARI, ALL-INDIA NUMBER 6. None of them were smiling at their triumph. They didn’t look like they’d smiled in a month. And they were almost all of them destined to be parked on bureaucrats’ chairs, in government and in corporations, to make life hell for all the rest of us who goofed off in school, went out dancing, and generally had been arousing their envy from kindergarten.

  The peon calls me into the supervisor’s room. Verma Sir is getting a large bundle of notes from two girls. I remember his teaching geometry in his south Indian accent: “Ven yex meets vuy. . . .” After greeting me, he explains the notes. “They’re to pay the staff. The parents contribute, because all our money is going to Surendranagar, where we have a school for destitute girls. Other than four or five teachers like me, who are rich through tutorials, we don’t have money for the rest of the staff according to the scales of the Fifth Pay Commission. So the parents give whatever they can. . . .” He is not suggesting anything, but I guess the purpose of his long explanation of the school’s finances, and I say, “Perhaps I can make a donation.”

  “It is enough that you have come!” he responds at once. “Your very presence is itself a donation!” He walks me around the school. The first floor is now all entirely staff rooms, except for one where a group of girls are singing a patriotic song, led by a teacher sitting on the floor with a harmonium. We walk into different classes, and the students stand up abruptly at our entrance, in a body. They remain standing till Verma Sir tells them to sit down. “This is Suketu Mehta,” he introduces me. “He is a full-time writer. He was given a medal by the U.S. President.” I correct him again. “Who gave you that award?” he asks. I give up. The presidential origin of my award will forever stick to me in this school, like an irreversible computer error. “It was . . . the U.S. government.” This satisfies him. “He was given a scholarship by the U.S. government.” The class bursts into spontaneous applause. Embarrassed, I walk out. This approval is as unendurable as the school’s earlier punishments.

  In another class, he asks the students if they have any questions for me. “He has published many novels,” he informs them. I ask if there is something I can teach them. “Geometry!” they shout. “Geometry!”

  I ask to see an English class, and we go into one and sit in the back. The teacher is leading the class through
a poem from the “Balbharti” state textbook: Tennyson’s “A Farewell.” On the board are two words: Somersby and Lincolnshire. The girl next to me has her book open to the poem. “Flow down, cold rivulet, to the sea, . . .” The crevices and crannies of the letters are filled in with blue ink. Above the title she has written Terminal—her knowledge of the poem will be tested in the terminal exams—and has drawn a smiley face next to it. The illustration on the page is a rushing stream, and the girl has written Varsha on the English body of water, thus Indianizing its name, explaining it to herself, making it less forbidding.

  “The poet is speaking to the river,” the teacher explains to the class. “This is a figure of speech. It is called an apostrophe.” I did not know this. I will have to look it up in the dictionary later. I am still learning new things at Mayur Mahal. The classroom is almost exactly the same as when I used to sit in it. The same badly painted walls, the same speaker above the same blackboard, which boomed out patriotic and religious songs and admonitions from the principal each morning. A calendar on one wall marks the passage of time for the children of abstemious Jain and Hindu parents, compliments of Standard Wine Stores. The same scarred and pitted wooden benches, like the one I am sitting on, with its gutter for writing implements, ballpoints now acceptable. Out of the windows on one side of the building, a view of the leafy compounds of the mansions of Malabar Hill. “Flow down, cold rivulet, to the sea, . . .” The teacher is explaining what the poem is about. “If you change your residence, if you leave the memories of your school life, of childhood, how it would be to have to adjust to a new school, a new life.” A poet is bidding good-bye to his country, the country of childhood.