Everyone looks back with nostalgia and fondness on the years in school. Those innocent years, spent between classrooms and running around in the campus, falling, getting beaten by teachers and cramming for tests — all stand green in our memory.
I completed my school about 40 years ago but those six years in the school remain fresh in my memory. The most important part of the school years is clearly our teachers — those who moulded us and encouraged us to lead lives of honesty, dedication and simplicity. We remember our teachers clearly even today; their mannerisms, their method of presentation of the subjects, their way of walking, talking, attire and even their habits. Out of all these we form nicknames for them which stand the test of time. Even today I remember vividly the nicknames of my school teachers, though I would have forgotten their real names.
Our assistant headmaster was a strict disciplinarian who wore dazzling white clothes — a full-sleeved shirt and a crisp dhoti; the creases on the shirt and the dhoti were always visible. Out of this there grew his nickname — ‘Iron Box’, alluding to the fact that his clothes are ever pressed.
Our headmaster was another disciplinarian who had a fetish for catching late comers to school. Due to this peculiar habit of his in hiding and pouncing on unsuspecting victims, his nickname became — ‘Tiger’; over the years his real name slipped into oblivion and he came to be known far and wide as Tiger.
We had a very good teacher who taught us social studies in our upper primary classes; he held his head at an angle to the rest of the body and so he was promptly dubbed — ‘45 degrees’. I knew his actual name but now cannot recollect it. But 45 degrees is fresh in memory and I can still ‘see’ my teacher, with his head held at that angle.
Our Hindi teacher (I confess I have forgotten his name also) had the habit of chewing betel leaves with arecanut and lime; his teeth and lips were always stained with the red juice and when he had just started on a fresh bout of chewing, it was advisable to keep a distance lest you be splattered with the red juice all over your shirt. He came to be called ‘Arecanut’.
We also had a teacher who was nicknamed ‘Detective’ due to his bizarre habit of arriving at a scene silently like a ghost usually to catch a delinquent boy.
We also had a colourful person as our teacher during our middle school — he was a balding man, thin and would perhaps get lost in a crowd of two. He never taught us but he was always around and our seniors had thoughtfully provided his nickname as ‘Cucumber’. We scratched our heads and came up with weird explanations as to why he was so named. One suggested that there was a faint physical resemblance to that vegetable, while another said that cucumber was the teacher’s favourite dish; another went so far as to suggest that he had acres of cucumber farm and he earned more than his salary by selling cucumbers in the market.
It was not that all our teachers carried nicknames; we had several teachers who did not have any. Our mathematics teacher who swore by geometry, was a fine gentleman who always split the proof of the theorems into two parts; at the end of the first stage he would stop and announce “now we have reached Thuckalay (a place between Trivandrum and Nagercoil) we will have to proceed next to Nagercoil”. Another teacher who infused in us the spirit of patriotism was referred to by us as ‘Navy sir’.