A Knight in Grimy Armour
by Kiran Ramachandran
1982. A weekday. 4.15 pm. A primary school not unlike any other in Palakkad, Kerala. I sat outside the classroom at the end of a long day, waiting for the bell to ring. It was winter and the rich, evening tableau of sunset colours was already in the sky. Behind me, a cacophony of voices rose and fell.
The last few minutes of the day in the Standard I (Year 1, to many of you readers) were usually reserved for unwinding, and by the looks of it, undermining the nation's intellectual development: looking for lost crayons; chewing on various non-edibles such as nails, the ends of collars, pencils; exchanging name labels--the colourful ‘sticker’ labels were the most prized; showing off; and just waiting to go home.
Rosy miss, our teacher, was having a chat with the teacher in the neighbouring class through the Gap. This 'Gap'-- the famous garments brand – was a thoughtfully placed, multi-purpose provision in the plywood panel that separated the classrooms. Sometimes it was a way for the teaching fraternity to pool resources - ‘Madam, chalk please... or… Sir, duster for one minute.” If the neighbouring class did not have the required item, the request was passed on to the classroom on the opposite side. (And the educational experts of today think they invented collaborative teaching.) Sometimes, the Gap was used for audio-visual aids. Zakariah sir’s arithmetic lessons, for instance, were great, but he conducted his class was like it was a funeral. Every one of his students, at some point or other, had been lulled to sleep by the soporific drone of his voice. For those of us conveniently located in the class, watching the goings-on in the next classroom through the Gap helped keep us awake!
Anyway, there I was, waiting for the bell to ring, absent-mindedly watching the little ones in kindergarten getting into their auto-rickshaws or running towards their parents. Gosh they were disgusting, those babies with their whining and weeping and runny noses… thank God we didn’t have any of this nonsense in Standard I.
Suddenly I detected something different in the sounds behind me. Somebody crying. I turned and peeped into the classroom. It was Dhanya……..the Dhanya who always got the blue star for first rank. Dhanya who always sat in the front row, being the good girl of a rich daddy who ‘went to foreign’ as often as other people went to the market. Dhanya who always had exotic things to show and share – chocolates the likes of which we had never seen before, colourful books with glossy pages. Her school bag had Mickey and Donald on it. Imagine, we had made the acquaintance of these characters through National television only recently; and she had them on her bag! Even her pencil had a small feather at the end and a little whistle – a whistle!
I went in to investigate. Dhanya was definitely weeping. In front of her desk was a little group of boys and girls watching her. I looked at her desk and saw a little lake of water and a shiny water bottle lying on its side. Dhanya was clutching a new comic with Superman flying against a blue sky on the cover. The wet edges of the book made that part of the sky look like a brewing storm. Ah! So somebody had upset the water bottle, and her things were all wet now. In a few seconds there would a pool of water at her feet.
Dhanya's best friend, Susan Chandy, hadn’t come to school that day. I looked for the class leader, Sreejith Raman. He was nowhere to be seen. In my adult years, whenever people discussed the ineffectiveness of political leaders in times of national crisis, I would think of Sreejith Raman. Rosy miss hadn’t noticed the weeping. I dared not go and inform her, because Rosy miss had a grand and sweeping policy about petty crimes. The offender, the offended, the witness, the messenger, the neighbour, someone who laughed, someone who was passing by…everybody would get her sharp pinches.
I asked Dhanya to stop crying, but she was inconsolable. It was, after all, a brand new comic. And you can’t have superheroes flying around in discoloured skies.
There hadn’t been all that much water in the bottle, but the pool was inching towards the edge of the desk like a little stream that was scared of a nearing waterfall. I looked around at my classmates. Daisy Thomas and Baisy Thomas, the twins, had identical half-open mouths. Suraj Menon had his digging finger so deep, in concentration, that any moment now it could emerge at the top of his egg shaped head--he ended up as a boring software engineer; archeology would have suited him so much better!
There was no doubt in my mind as to the plan of action. This was a girl crying. And not just any girl - it was Dhanya! I reached forward, put my upper body on the desk and slid across it, using my chest as a cloth. Dhanya examined the desk after I had finished. She seemed satisfied. At least she stopped crying. I told her kindly, “It’s dry now, okay?” Dhanya nodded weakly. She did not say anything, but through her tears she gave me a grateful smile.
5.15 pm. At home.
I ran up the stairs to the first floor flat. Amma was at the door even before I’d rung the bell. She had seen me from the balcony. When I came into view, she had a hand over her open mouth and another at her forehead as if she had a faint headache. I was bursting to tell her of my heroic deed. Before I could catch my breath, she had regained hers.
“What is this?” Her voice was a combination of whisper and shriek. She had a finger pointed at my shirt. I looked down at the multi-coloured art work that the dirt-dust-chalk-water-lunch-snot-and-what-not on Dhanya’s desk had painted on me.
“How…what did you…what…how am I ever going to get this back to white now?” She took my bag and walked into the flat, slowly shaking her head from side to side like a snake with high blood pressure.
I was confused. I had worn the colours on myself more proudly than Dhanya had worn her blue star for first rank. But Amma was not happy….?
They say that chivalry is not dead.
It is.
It was murdered.