Real Terror

Real terror

Have you ever been hauled up before the principal? Remember the wait outside the principal’s office? Do you have nightmares about not having prepared for the test and facing the teacher without having done the homework? How many prayers did you send up hoping that some misdeed won’t be discovered by the authorities? That friends, is the real terror.

 

I vividly remember those days of early youth.

I was a laidback kid, and preferred reading story books to boring school texts, and evenings were too precious to waste on homework. My father was busy with his work and his bridge and golf, and mother with her social life, music, books, films and cultural activities, and though they were doting parents, they didn’t bother too much about schoolwork, as I managed reasonable grades in the exams, finding the schoolwork quite easy.

Therefore my classwork was often incomplete, and my homework usually undone.

I managed to escape detection by an ingenious method. After the copies were collected, they would be piled up on the teacher’s desk by the monitor. I would simply sneak out my copy from the pile when the teachers back was turned. Thus my exercise books escaped the scrutiny of the teacher.

Then one day my luck ran out. The teacher, a Miss Tapp, did not leave her seat and started correcting our homework in class after giving us some work to do. To further complicate matters, while she was correcting the copy before mine, a gust of wind turned some pages of my exercise book. When her turn came to check mine, she was surprised to find some old incomplete uncorrected work. She quickly turned the pages, getting madder by the moment. I was watching her intently, quacking in fear.

She looked up, eyes flashing like police beacons, and ordered the monitor to get my schoolbag, which he gleefully did. I was almost faint with fear. After seeing the same crime committed in all my copies, she called me over, her voice icy with menace. I crept up in a daze of terror, walking like a zombie.

She made me stand on the platform, holding one of my ears, and displayed the proof of my crime to the class with the other, much to the amusement of the whole class.

She was at a loss for words at the enormity of my crime, and the fact that I had escaped so long undetected. The sheer impudence stunned her, and she thought that such a capital crime deserved a higher bench to give a proper punishment.

I was shivering in anticipation to the caning that would follow, but instead was relieved to see her sit down and write a note.

She put the note in an envelope, and told me to go and see the principal with it.

Now the temporary respite turned to absolute panic. The Principal was the notorious Father Paul, whose caning was legendary.

In a funk, I sneaked into the school toilets and wondered how to escape this mess. The envelope was sealed, but I managed to pry it open, and read the contents. It made spine chilling reading. My crimes had been described with relish. I felt faint imagining father Paul’s reaction. Expulsion seemed a `distinct possibility. I next imagined the effects at home and how hurt my trusting parents would be. I wondered if they would disown me. The thoughts made me cry.

In the meanwhile, seeing the delay the teacher sent the monitor out to find me. Seeing him I quickly rushed out after flushing the letter down the toilet. I told the monitor that I received a caning and was cleaning up in the loo. The monitor gloatingly took me back and narrated that I had received a caning to beat all canings, and that I was crying in the loo. My face made this believable, and nothing further was said.

After that every day was a terror of anticipation as to when my perfidy would be discovered, and I prayed fervently on the way to school to all the Gods in all the religions I knew about that my ruse should not be discovered.

Luckily, our teacher may have been almost as much in awe of our Principal as I was, and never checked back. But not knowing this, I was on the verge of nervous breakdown.

Another new terror added to my woes, nearly driving me mad. I discovered that the teacher had written a letter to my parents. I had avoided getting my diary signed by my parents on the grounds that my dad was abroad and my mom illiterate, and PTAs by keeping my dad abroad and making my mom be in Purdah, so correctly guessing that I am lying through my back teeth, she had sent a letter by post.

Now every day I would check the mailbox in our building, and touch my head to every temple church gurdwara and mosque we passed, praying that I intercept the deadly missive before it reaches home and ruins my life.

The letter was intercepted, read, and burnt to ashes, and my crime remains undiscovered to this day.

However, closer monitoring in school made my grades improve dramatically, and made my parents and teacher both quite happy with me, the crime was forgotten and I slowly returned to my normal self.