‘I was left behind as my class fellows were marching on…’

In his new novel Return to Jammu, author V. Raghunathan writes about a man’s search for his roots, as he retraces the steps back to his childhood in the cantonment towns of Jammu and Ambala.

So one morning, with my infant sister in one arm and my tiny hand in the other, she towed me to the school and spoke to the headmistress, who was gracious enough to let me attend the nursery informally, as I was barely two. From then on I was no longer just Bala, but S. Balan, with an initial of my own, like grown-ups! In those times, the major talents required for entry to the nursery class were demonstration of reasonably good toilet training and the ability to sleep on demand. I was fairly accomplished in both departments, particularly in the latter (a talent I haven’t lost yet). Between bouts of sleep one was expected to eat snacks and play some games. But I turned out to be a master sleeper and happily slumbered through the year—it helped me attain the reputation of being the least troublesome kid in the class. In short, I found the demands of nursery quite manageable.

It was lower kindergarten, or LKG, that held some challenges. At the end of the year, that is, by March 1958, the Class of Nursery relentlessly marched forward to LKG. But the headmistress decided to hold me back as I was too young and sleepy to be promoted. And especially because I had been admitted only informally in the nursery, she thought I could sleep some more in the same classroom before being kicked upstairs. This meant that all my “friends” had moved on and I was to start schooling all over again with some strangers. This was a clear affront to my personal dignity and I had to do something about it. So I bawled even louder than I had when I first wanted to go to school with Urmila.

Father, a happy-go-lucky man, had developed quite a talent for avoiding the avoidable responsibilities of a rather early on. Having been more or less a stranger to any sort of discipline much of his life, he wasn’t about to subject himself to the requisite discipline of domesticity, which matrimony customarily demands. The only discipline he had known was the non-voluntary type, of the Indian Army. Ergo, he was usually not of much help at home, forget about babysitting a bawling kid even on weekends, convinced as he was that his debt to fatherhood was repaid in EMIs or equal monthly instalments, as he handed his monthly pay-cheque to my mother (of course, this I figured over the years and not at that time). With a modest income and a family of three young children to slog to clothe and feed, it was some task for my young mother to keep me out of her hair.

Unable to cope with my renewed nagging and tantrums with a year-old Supriya tucked on her hip (with Supriya in turn having two of her fingers firmly tucked into her mouth), mother approached the headmistress once again and pleaded that instead of having me sleep in the nursery she might as well allow me to sleep in the LKG, which was merely the adjacent classroom. The suggestion was enthusiastically endorsed by the class teacher, Ms Dyer, an Anglo-Indian, who simply loved to have chubby me (the upshot of my udder-milk days) sleep in her class, as I had been by far the best toilet-trained of her charges and rarely gave her any trouble, as to give trouble one has to be awake a lot. In any case, she had charge of nursery as well as LKG, and she didn’t mind where I slept.

But boy! Was the LKG syllabus tough! It included the English and Hindi alphabet, quite a few advanced rhymes from the Radiant Reader (nursery rhymes were passé), counting up to twenty and even some addition and subtraction with large numbers like 9+8. It seemed as if they had only left out integral calculus. But fortunately they still allowed ample time for sleeping, which was of course my core competence.

Come March 1959, and it was that time of the year when my class-fellows were marching on to upper KG, or UKG, and I was to be left behind again, being long on sleeping and short on
learning.

I promptly resorted to my time-tested non-violent Satyagraha—bawling. By now mother had become wise and the headmistress had grown weary. You guessed it. I was moved to UKG. But this time, though I was barely past four, Mother got tough with me. She was embarrassed making an annual appearance before the obliging headmistress pleading on my behalf. If I was going to bawl to continue being in the same classroom as my original nursery batchmates, I might as well earn my keep there, was her stand.

If the LKG syllabus was tough, you should have seen the UKG curriculum, what with double-digit addition, subtraction, and multiplication tables going up to even 5, or was it 10—can’t quite remember—not to mention some tough-looking texts in English and Hindi in smaller and smaller fonts, with smaller and fewer pictures. It was all getting too much for me. So my poor mother took to tutoring me after school and often pressed Urmila, poor thing, into the same challenging assignment. Fortunately for me though, they didn’t have any examination for UKG. Examinations would start only from grade one, which would come only after one crossed the steep hurdle of UKG. My enthusiasm for school was waning rapidly. I exhibited little promise of any early academic
excellence.

Extracted with permissions from Return To Jammu, by V. Raghunathan, published by HarperCollins Publishers India