One is not sure whether those who schooled in the distant past would have shaped differently if their teachers had not carried the menacing canes to the classrooms, an act frowned upon now by the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR). It is a hypothetical situation open for debate but my teachers who could not be spotted without one in their hands in the classrooms revealed a bit of their character by the type of canes he or she carried.
The shapes of the teachers and the canes they carried were invariably in inverse proportion. The leaner the teacher the stouter the cane that was carried by him and vice versa. Our high school was founded in a place that looked more like a rainforest with trees of every description that could supply sticks of any size and shape. In addition, the town had plenty of bamboo marts holding shiny, smooth canes that could lash the posterior of an errant boy stingingly.
Our mathematics teacher who terrorised us with his mental sums would make a dramatic entry into the classroom, with his cane preceding him held at 90 degrees to his thin frame. Like coming events cast their shadows before, the swirl of the cane would reveal how grumpy he was that day. As a teacher having a passion for numbers, he would increase the number of lashes on the boys in arithmetic progression commensurate with the mistakes committed. Some of the lashes even now hurt when I plonk down on a hard seat.
A character of different mould, our grumpy drawing master, a reedy thin individual came to the classroom without any cane or stick. But that was only a deception. His first task after entry would be to select a student to go and fetch him a fresh stem from a tamarind tree. The victim would rue the day because he would be the first to be punished with the stick he brought, a cross he had to bear. If the stick he selected was thin, he would be thrashed for being partisan and kind to his classmates. If the stick was stout, he would be struck for being heartlessly unkind to his friends. He taught us to draw three dimensional pictures and the slanting shades of a burning naked bulb. But we never made out how such works of art could be drawn after receiving three of the juiciest on the open palms.
The English teacher was of different calibre. A bespectacled sophisticated woman in starched white sari, always smelling of Cuticura, she would always have in her possession a 12-inch wooden ruler resting on the table. The ruler may be wooden but her expression would never be, registering varying emotions of surprise, patience, awe, anger and so forth. While teaching rhythmic poetry in her crooning, singsong voice she would wave it as if she was conducting an orchestra. When she eventually retired, she left the ruler in the teachers’ room — perhaps to remind her colleagues that it served as an object to conduct the class — not punish.