Mama, Where is My Chhatrella?

The moment of truth, the hour of reckoning, is here.

Ever since his birth, from the time he fixed us with a toothless grin, a grin that transcended with effortless ease every other joy that we had ever singly or collectively experienced, to the first tentative steps he took after several tumbles on the carpeted floor, to the first garbled word that he uttered -- everything that had happened in his four year old existence was leading up to this big moment.

You see, folks, my son, Ritwik, is all set to go to school.

I am told by my parents that the first language I picked up as a child was Hindi. Growing up in the very cosmopolitan Port Blair in the Andaman and Nicobar islands, we lived in a neighbourhood which was populated almost in equal numbers by Bengalis, Tamils, and Keralites. The prevailing lingua franca was a gender-bending Hindi that I have never heard spoken anywhere else.

My parents never fussed very much about the first school I went to because in Diglipur (North Andamans), my father’s next posting after Port Blair, one wasn’t exactly spoilt for choices. One day a man had walked up to my father, seeking permission to start a primary school in the island. My father wasn’t very impressed by the academic credentials of the man who had come up with the idea, for he carried with him documents which to my father’s untrained eye looked forged. But he relented, because at that time the island didn’t have any primary school.

Dad was no crystal ball gazer. So, he had no clue that one day his own son would be a student of that hallowed institution he had helped start under somewhat dubious circumstances. Among my few memories of that school is the headmaster walking with a bamboo stalk as tall as me, which he used with fair degree of regularity on the backs of several of my classmates but never once on the son of his benefactor.

I have no complaints about my first school. The medium of instruction was Bengali. Thank God for that! I can read and write in Bangla, my mother tongue. Though English was taught only from the fourth grade, my mother taught me at home, which kept me in good stead in later years.

I have often asked my parents why they ever left the beautiful Andamans and moved to this godforsaken city of nine months of summer. Their answer? Better schooling for me.

So, you see, it is in my genes -- this quest for better schooling. And now my parents and the other parent of my son have joined forces to ensure the best possible education is not denied to the youngest Chakravarty.

The Great Debate in the Chakravarty household for sometime now has raged around which school should Ritwik go to. The three major participants in this debate are clear that they want to have a significant say in Ritwik’s schooling and with good reason too. My father has always seen himself as the patriarch of the Charavartys and in most matters (including this one) he is quietly confident that he knows what is best. My mother was a school teacher for thirty years and is of the opinion that she has an inside track on how school admissions work. My wife... well, she’s the mother of Ritwik and who else can know what is best for the child?

As the relative merits of Springdales (“it is not too far from where we live”) are weighed against that of Delhi Public School ("oh it is a nice school, but do we really want our child to grow up and send dirty MMS of his classmates?”) in heated discussions on the dinner table, there is a general unanimity on two counts.

First, that the best school is easily St. Columbus. “Arun Jaitley is from there”, says my BJP-very friendly dad, and my wife adds happily: “Shah Rukh Khan is from Columbus too.” (Now, to me, they are two reasons as good as any why Ritwik should NOT go to Columbus.)

And, second, Ritwik needs to be proficent in English. Konwledge of the language is an absolute must, if one has to study in Columbus or any of the other sainted institutions.

I don’t remember a lot of my life in Diglipur. One of the few things I do remember, was a pleasant Sunday morning when my mother was busy packing our stuff. A month before that, my father had received transfer orders to Delhi. As soon as the orders arrived, my mother immediately started on my English lessons, worried that my lack of proficiency in the language could hold me back during admission. Since she left for work early in the morning, the task fell upon my Dad to give me a crash course in English.

On this morning , as my Ma guided the team of packers, she smiled at me and asked how were my English lessons with my father going. I said they were going just fine. She asked me what all I had picked up. I stood up, walked to the middle of the room, and beckoned my mother to join me. She was slightly surprised, then came and stood next to me. I smiled at her and said “I go.” And then moved to the door, where I told her, “You go.”

She clapped her hands and said “very good… now what else have you learnt?”. I looked a bit lost, and said “But this is all Dad has been teaching me over the past month.” She looked at me incredulously and said, “You expect me to believe that? That for one month your Dad has just done this.. this ‘I go, you go’ routine and nothing else?”

It became suddenly crystal clear to me that Dad’s teaching efforts had fallen way short of my mother’s expectations. I stood there and shrugged helplessly, feeling vaguely defensive about my Dad’s English teaching skills.

As I filled in my mother about my recently-acquired knowledge of English, my father quietly sat in the verandah and sipped another cup of tea, blissfully unaware of the woes that were about to visit him. I watched from the window, he took the tongue-lashing that followed rather manfully. He sipped the last of his tea, folded the newspaper neatly and kept it on the table before him, looked at my mother with a dead pan expression and said “I go”, as he walked out of the house.

A few hours later I could hear his jaunty footsteps return. I looked out of the window of my room. He stood there on the porch, looking at peace with himself, secure in the knowledge that the storm had blown over. At that moment, I felt immensely happy that this man was my father and I was his son.

Almost four decades later, history is about to be repeated in the Chakravarty household. Another mother is spending sleepless nights about her son’s proficiency in English and how that could be central to his admission in a school of our choice. I am Bengali, my wife is Sindhi. To Ritwik’s credit he has picked up a bit of both the languages. But he feels most comfortable in Hindi. He understands English, but other than occasional monosyllabic responses, prefers to speak only in Hindi – a situation that my family is desperately trying to remedy.

As he is bombarded with English words, poems, lyrics and songs, poor Ritwik is very confused. For, most words, immediately after they have been spoken, are almost immediately translated in triplicate, and often at a pace that is bewildering for a four year old mind. Thus, a chhaata (Bengali) becomes chhatri (Hindi) and then quickly is described as umbrella (English). The level of Ritwik’s confusion is evident in his response.

So, the other day when it rained, and my son wanted to go to the nearby park, Ritwik almost stepped out into the rain, then backed off and somewhat breathlessly asked his mother : “Mama, where is my Chhatrella?”

My parents looked devastated, my wife looked stricken, the dreams of a St. Columbus school admission melting away quickly.

As for me, I tried my best to imitate the calm look on my father’s face on that balmy Sunday Diglipur afternoon many many years ago.