The Man We Loved To Hate.

That year in high school we had struggled through a succession of substitutes – each one teaching us at random whim, resulting in a hop-scotch through our textbook. We were confused and irritated and vented our feelings by misbehaving - creating havoc with paper darts and chalk missiles. The boys dipped the girls’ plaits in ink bottles and the girls tied the boys’ shoelaces together under the desk.

We had become such an unruly class that the principal had once wrung her hands, literally made that ineffectual gesture, and blurted, “I have never seen students so irresponsible or poorly behaved. And you set the example?” The jeering laughter that greeted the pronouncement had her retreating post haste. We knew we were safe from punishment in the anonymity of universal bad behavior.

One day we were well into the first quarter of the lesson with no sign of authority. The class clown had drawn a caricature on the board: a thin bespectacled man was wielding a pointer at some twenty odd faceless students. A speech balloon above his head said: E=MC². Another large balloon with dotted lines indicated thoughts emanating from the students collectively: WE=Most Confused².

Clamour reigned supreme; knots of students had pulled out their chairs to talk to each other. Some more ebullient souls in the back row had their feet up on the desks and their chairs tilted to gravity-defying levels.

The door imploded and a tall man took two impetuous strides to the blackboard. We needed nobody to tell us this was the latest in a long line of instructors; we little knew he would be the worst.

I swear he was the size of a pro-basketball player. Even allowing for memory distortion, he must have been over six feet tall; in India that is towering. He was dark, glistening walnut-wood, which was apt; all demons in our folk tales are dark. He had this bristling thick moustache, what villain was complete without one? Add piercing black eyes that bored through our tender consciences and one knows why the class hushed in one indrawn shocked breath.

“My name is Unnikrishnan, you can call me Unni.”

Yeah, right. That would be like consorting with the Devil. Sir.

“Yes, Sir.” That was a chorus from the class; our refusal to take him up on the offer was the least of the things that irritated Unni Sir.

We had a random useless knowledge, rattling off definitions and formulae but unable to explain further. It might have been the legacy of that unending line of substitutes but Unni Sir felt we were deliberately trying not to understand.

He had thick black Medusa curls and a sharp patrician nose with slightly flared nostrils. I have reason to remember, for he clutched the former in his despair at our ignorance and those flared nostrils were displayed every time we made a mistake.

Not that he expected us to watch for these displays and guess his displeasure – no, he was not one given to hiding his feelings. He’d just curl his thin lips in a one-sided sarcastic sneer, “Were you born ignorant or have you labored hard to become so?”

Another of his favourite quips: “Do teenagers remove the ‘teen’ from their ages? Why are you all acting like five-year olds?”

He’d have us numb with fury, unable to think of a suitable retort at that moment; sullen in knowing that we could not have delivered it to a teacher anyway.

Our assignments had bold red strokes of disgust across each page, with underlined comments: ‘draw a proper ray diagram not a picture of rice cultivation in China. ‘ Or ‘repeating one fact five times will still get you only one mark. Facts, not words, matter.’

We seethed against the rapier thrusts, but what could one do when the other had all the power? Then too, he had an eagle eye for spotting impending rebellion, no sooner did two heads lean towards each other to whisper a plan than he would send a chalk rocket whizzing at the culprits with unerring aim. The chalk stung no doubt, but being found out stung even more. He never missed too; he kept a pile of these bits near to hand and with time never needed to actually throw one to remind us who was in charge.

We retired our rubber band and paper pellet catapults, said good-bye to ‘planes made from torn-out pages. We returned the white mice to the Biology Lab and captured no more frogs from our gardens.

Unni Sir was unfazed when he found a creepy-crawly in his tiffin carrier

a set of five steel containers placed one above the other and held in place by a frame and handle – popular to hold Indian meals

. The previous teacher similarly treated had turned an interesting shade of green and had eschewed meals in school.

Unni Sir just fished out the inoffensive creature with a pencil, observing it from narrowed eyes. “So the only creatures to like food cooked in coconut oil must be Mallus

A semi-derogatory abbreviation for Malayalees – people from his home state of kerala

and miilipedes?” His bellow of laughter turned the joke against us. It went against the grain to know he even shared the failed prank with other staff; Cook served us avial

a mixed vegetable curry, a favourite with Malayalees

the next day with a placard mounted: “Mallu-Milli” Curry. We couldn’t swallow a mouthful of that redolent stew, try as we did; we felt the whole school sniggering at us.

We were not stupid, the previous teachers had told us exactly what answers to write and we had done well. Why could this virago not detail the subject similarly? But, no, he would just give us the basics and expect us to jump to conclusions. Hullo, it took Einstein years to come up with that stuff, how can we get it in a couple of months?

There were no apple trees conveniently at hand to give us Newtonian inspiration, no immersions in baths to give us Eureka moments, just that tapping foot and the disapproving glint to goad us to occasional flashes of brilliance.

For we tried hard - we had to show him we’d not be cowed down by a chap with a curling lip. To give him credit – even the Devil must get his due – on these rare occasions a twisted smile would appear and he’d give us a barely perceptible nod of approval. Just one quick nod as if to say, ‘yes, yes, that is correct; but don’t get all puffed up, you’re bound to slip up sooner than later’.

We spent our spare moments devising tortures for him, things we would do if we only could. Oh, what the Spanish Inquisition would not have done to have been privy to our strokes of genius! Machiavelli was a feeble conspirator compared to us. For now, he held us helpless in his thrall, but our machinations were for that vague future when we would be out of his grasp. It helped us submit for the present to his sadistic plans.

Misery has its limits, we knew and took heart in that - for our final examinations were barely two months away.

When the Ides of March rolled around it took no augur to predict our future held grave portents. We had come to an uneasy kind of understanding with Unni Sir, realizing that he had a lot to teach us, we learned to shut up and listen. We knew now how to figure the formulae from the basic principles, we knew how to apply and improvise if we forgot one or the other. We kept our answers short and succinct. We labeled answers with the correct units and tabled points for easy reference. Why, it was really easy, he didn’t have to make such a big issue of it.

We got a vague glimpse at the kind of person he was, some glimmering of the human part, one day. Our class was split into two sections, Arts and Science. Our group had a few girls but the majority was with the other. The law of averages dictated that they had more ‘hotties’, so any interruption of the class by them was welcomed with a loud cheer. Or used to be, in pre-Unni- Sir days.

Heads might have turned with alacrity that day, but Ayesha’s lilting request to fetch a notebook met with no audible approval of a chance to watch her sashaying across the room. Unni Sir looked at her with stony disregard and growled, “You other fellows must stop interrupting. We are studying here.” I think Ayesha set a record for the Two-Aisle-Dash-Book-Grab event. We saw his single- minded conviction that only Science was study.

For the exam, there were two Physics papers; with a break of one hour for lunch. Naturally, none of us planned to eat any lunch, we wanted to spend the time cramming for the second paper. I knew my own stomach was contracted and twisted, wrapped around the swollen pump that used to be my heart – now so large that is pressed upon my tongue. Who can swallow?.

We streamed out of the hall after the first paper, clutching at the nearest person to compare answers.

“Did you use SI units or traditional ones?’

“Which element is the 105^th?”

Our voices clashed and crossed and we feverishly turned to our books; fighting a rising panic that we had got it all wrong.

A stentorian bellow halted us, it was Unni Sir. What is he doing here, going to lambast us for doing it wrong, I suppose? And what does he have in that cloth bag?

We couldn’t believe our eyes, he was smiling at us, at least his lower lip was – curling upwards in a most unusual manner. He actually looks cute in a Malayalee film hero-ish way, tall dark and …

holding bananas? These Mallus are bananas

Kerala abounds in banana and coconut plantations, these two food items are central to their life."

- literally!

He passed them around, two to each pupil. He peeled one half-way and thrust the creamy flesh into my face. Juice lubricated my thick dry tongue and I reached out in sudden hunger.

“Just nibble, don’t gobble. Pretend it is an ice-cream cone.”

Yes, Angel-in-Unni-guise.

He also produced coconut water, sweet and refreshing; the drops trickled down my chin unheeded as I took one enormous swallow.

He then sat down with the paper and did a rapid fire analysis of our answers, encouraging those who had erred, reinforcing those who had it right. Time swirled into a black hole of questions and a bell announced that we had five minutes to get back to the exam hall.

Just a couple of firm pats and a murmured, “You can do it, guys. I am so proud of you.” Then his receding legs measured the hallway, we were on our own.

No, no, we won no laurels that day, none of us ‘topped’ or ‘aced’. Neither did any one fail. We all attained moderate success, nobody scoring less than sixty-five percent. For a class that had uniformly failed to clear thirty percent in the first test he set us, that was something.

We never got a chance to thank him, he went on to some other job, after all he was a substitute. We did not even realize he needed thanks; by the time results were announced, much of the warm gratitude of the exam day had faded.

It is only now that I realize that in the short time he had to bring us up to par, the velvet glove would have been useless, it needed the hard sting of an iron hand to cow high spirits and wayward behavior.

So, thank to the worst teacher ever, for bringing out the best in me. In all of us.





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