In fact, the Ashram itself is surprising in the overwhelming sense of peace that it brings to those who enter. It is a miraculous stepping in...one minute I am in the polluted, honk-infested, and crowded N.S.C.Bose Road, and the very next, I'm walking into the scented quaintness of Aurobindo Ashram, wrapped in a dense, cool foliage, and an unmistakable air of mystery and timelessness. So many times I have walked down the corridors - long past school hours - and watched the breeze moving through the stillness. And each time, the ashram offered me something new to see, something new to know, something new to learn and discover. And it began with French.
My tryst with French and the ashram began, when I was in Class IX, a gawky, overweight teenager, who had just begun to sense the narcotic beauty of this language, and wanted to enroll herself in the courses held after school hours, in the empty classrooms of the ashram. A tall, old, man met me on the stairs as I walked to the class for the first time. I was early, and though dusk had settled into the nooks and crannies of the school buildings, there was no sign of any classes being held anywhere, and no lights except the dim yellow lights illuminating the corridors at regular intervals. The old man, balding except for a fringe of shocking white hair on the sides and at the back of his head, carried a heavy jhola that looked like it weighed a ton, and though he walked slowly and meditatively, his posture was upright, and his step sprightly. He turned and bestowed a knowing smile on me, his eyes twinkling behind his glasses, and his bald pate shining under the yellow light overhead. It was a smile that would be imprinted upon my memory in the months to come, never dulling, never casting aside its all-knowing character, and always signalling the beginning of some mirthful anecdote from his past.
He led me to one of the junior level classrooms and unlocked the door, stepping in to switch on the lights and open the windows. Another routine that was to become my ritualistic calling soon, unlocking the doors before class began, opening out windows, switching on the lights and fans, getting the chalk and dusters ready...and the rewinding of the whole ritual at the end of the class, finishing off with the clinking keys deposited into Sir's white kurta, while he slung his jhola on his shoulder and walked back to the land of Gandalfs and Dumbledores. For he was one such being himself.
Under him, our French class became like a home away from home, a club of comrades, a gaggle of giggling girls, mostly-mature matrons, and scrawny young boys, all of whom wanted to learn French for unfathomable reasons of their own. And the best thing was, there were hardly a few of us who wanted to learn French for prosaic purposes, like clearing school exams, or getting jobs as interpretors etc. We were, as it were, hand-picked by some ancient gaulish spirit, who also tinged us with his/her iridescent joie de vivre, and a touch of insanity.
There was, for instance, an itinerant South African lady who was touring the world, stopping at places only to earn money by doing odd jobs for 6 months to a year, then moving on to seek other climes. It was during her stopover at Calcutta that she was trying to do a crash course in French, though France was not to be her stop for several years to come...
Then there was a crazy boy, D, who loved French for no reason except that he loved it, and spoke to me incessantly of the overthrow of the taqht-e-faarsi, by which he alluded metaphorically to the position of French teacher at Aurobindo Ashram, a position which Sir currently held. How he proposed to do it, he never explained to me, but he seemed a man possessed by his dream of vanquishing the current holder of the taqht-e-faarsi and sitting on it himself. But of all the students that Sir had, he was probably the most genuinely respectful of the old man. D and I spent many evenings together, battling with complicated sentences and grammatical structures, the passé composés and futur antérieurs, and arguing about some silly point at length, till it became a mocking distortion of what we started out with. Then we laughed and laughed ourselves silly, connecting our successes and failures with the eventual overthrow of the despotic French monarch, that would leave us the throne and all the spoils of war (the various French books in the small library that Sir guarded most jealously)...muhahahaha...
Though D had joined much after I joined the class, there was never a distinction between our levels, and we were the same, whether we sat relearning the same lesson for the nth time under a forgetful Sir, or I took classes for the elementary level students, teaching them how to conjugate avoir and être. I did that too, and it was only the trust that Sir had in me that gave me the confidence to take these classes, despite the fact that I had only completed intermediate level myself. Sir was a child, as much as he was an old man. Like a child, he took gleeful pleasure in regaling us with stories from his childhood and youth, remarkable for the way they were entirely unrelated to the context of the lesson we were discussing. There were robbers, and wild dogs, and screaming viragos, and all the paraphernalia of romantic novels, and Sir was the protagonist of all the stories - the charming, witty intellectual, the most unique mix of brains and brawn, the indomitable victor in every fray, big or small, against robbers or rats...
And when the anecdote ended, he beamed at us with his wickedly glinting eyes, while we narrowed ours in disbelief, not knowing which parts to believe (for he had so many years behind him, and such a knack of painting pictures, we were almost transported to the scenes he described) and which not. Sir, we complained, what a pack of lies! Hotei pare naI (C'est impossible!) And he smiled at us again.
And then we'd get back to our lesson, while the valiant giant in front of us suddenly transformed into a forgetful old man, forgetting what he'd been teaching us, and starting again with the first paragraph on the first page (where we'd have finished page 4 before the story began). But none of us ever told him he had forgotten. We relearned our lessons twice, thrice, and many more times, and were always the wiser for it. And he was always the more loved, the more respected...
Then there was the girl S and the girl M. S, M, and I, we shared a great rapport, even though we were significantly different in years. S was the oldest, our didi and M was a good few years my senior. I was the youngest, the gawky, overweight teenager. S, M, and I became great friends with J, a witty young man, Sir's favorite student, and a prodigy of sorts. Smart, well-spoken, well-dressed, friendly, good-looking - he had all the qualities that could charm ladies and so he did, though, as it turns out, unintentionally. M and I were soon besotted, and while I was the nymphe, still too stupidly young to be of any consequence in the relationship woes of adults, and S, the crone (in jest, of course) too old to play these games, M was the maiden, just the right age for spurring wild imaginations and loose tongues, into spinning tales of young love. J came to teach us French (for he had a flair for languages, and had mastered French at a very tender age, taught by Sir, of course), he would come to Calcutta during the summer holidays and the puja holidays, and would take classes with Sir. Soon, I was inscribing his name all over in my personal diary.
Fateful was the day I found out that M had graduated to employing more womanly wiles - roses, suggestive cards, introducing her parents and friends to him, walks in the rain, movies together... my gawky little heart broke and swore vengeance in vain. I turned away from M and J as if they were poison, and concentrated solely on my studies, my French, and my gang of school friends. Eventually, they were forgotten, for that is the blessing of young age, when forgetfulness comes easy, as does healing of hurts.
But the hurt occasioned by that heartbreak was to heal much later, almost 7 years later, when I met J by chance, long after he had stopped coming to the Ashram, and long after I had discontinued French myself, owing to the growing pressure of education. I met him while I was doing my PG, surprised, discomfited, unsure of how to react, and yet happy in some unexplainable way. My happiness compounded as our friendship grew, and we met each other more and more often,for movies, lunches, long talks... The icing on the cake was when I was told how he had never felt any stirrings of the romantic kind for M, and how she had succeeded in making herself progressively unpleasant, till, at last, he cut off all ties from her, and asked her to go and do whatever deluded females do to themselves...Or at least, I hope he did :) In polite terms, of course. We're all gentlemen and gentlewomen here.
To go back a few years, I continued going to the Ashram even after M and J stopped coming. At that time, I was happy they did not come. Sir continued with his lessons, D and I continued discussing the taqht-e-faarsi over French grammar. We did our homework, our classwork, took examinations, and plodded slowly towards a better understanding of the language. I taught briefly after finishing my intermediate level, and Sir slowly suggested that I join Alliance to complete the advanced level, and take the examination to get my diploma. It was a difficult going - managing my classes on the one hand (I was in College at that time), attending classes at the Ashram, giving tuitions for my pocket money, and also going to Alliance. I had to let go of something. The ax fell.
I initially decided to keep visiting and teaching elementary French, at least once a week. However, that demanded a serious commitment, and Sir, all-knowing Sir, decided that it was not a great idea for me to juggle to this extent. He asked me if I preferred to finish my diploma at Alliance and then come back and start teaching again. The idea seemed sensible to me. Soon enough, my visits grew infrequent, and I stopped coming altogether, deferring it to the point when I could return with my diploma, and return with the intention of teaching seriously.
Alliance Française de Calcutta was a culture shock for me, coming from the homely environs of Aurobindo Ashram. A very business-like exterior, that led to a more business-like interior, where everything screamed French, from the light fixtures to the decorative sculptures and loud Parisian posters. It was not just the French language, it was the whole culture replicated in the brilliantly lit little rooms with their starched curtains, white walls, and modern polished seats. The music that echoed softly was French, the perfumes were, perhaps, French. The voices spoke in French, argued in French, even laughed in French. And all around, inviolate, was the feeling of alienation that seemed to surround me like some devious glue, restricting my movements until I felt suffocated, helpless, and extremely francophobic for the few months that I was there.
It was not the fault of the place. It was the fault of my expectations, my dreams that had been cocooned in the safety of Sir's brandishing swords and grand chateaus, in the familiarity induced by junior level classrooms covered in multi-colored chart papers that showed familiar things like Great Indian leaders, wild and domestic animals, multiplication tables, and origami. And now, the loud men and women who pandered to the French customs and cultures despite their rather evident shortcomings in terms of attitude, accents and grammar (well, some of them were actually good, to be honest, but a good few were pretty bad), who fluttered complacently like gilded butterflies among the poster-framed walls of the Alliance, as if their forefathers had been French all along, and they were actually French trapped in Indian bodies by a gross error of Providence - they scared me endless, and left me lost and lonely. In the four months that I was at the Alliance, I did not make any friends, and the first excuse I had to discontinue, I took it and bolted.
My excuse, however, was genuine. The classes at Alliance were beginning to clash with my college hours, and after a few honest attempts at doing both and ending up half an hour late at college every morning, I decided to not play around with my future. I quit Alliance but with a solemn vow that I would pick up French where I had left it, and see it till the very end. The language had only tightened its hold over my imagination despite all that I had been through, and I was more in love with it than ever before.
PG followed UG, and in my last semester during post graduation, I landed a plum job in Hyderabad. My joy knew no bounds. I wanted to be free, sample the pleasures of financial independence, and indeed, independence of every sort. And I had every intention of joining Alliance in Hyderabad, sooner or later, and completing my destiny.
Man is wiser only by hindsight, they say. Three years in Hyderabad, marriage, Chennai, Gurgaon... so much has happened since the days of my carefree laughter. So many things have changed, myself not the least. Calcutta itself has changed, its provincial attitude become more rigid, its shared joys and community celebrations become more ephemeral, its optimistic youth grown dark. When I return to Calcutta these days, visiting my parents for a week or ten days, sometimes, I am perplexed to find my memories not in conjunction with reality. And more often than not, a sort of sadness seems to descend upon me when I realize how much of a distance there has been created between myself and the city I have always loved and known as home...and how much of it has been of my own doing.
I am wary of reality. It is a vicious trap set by the sane, to thwart the insane flights of fancy that our minds are capable of. And it is boring, no matter how much our literatures exhort its perspicacity. No insane man can enjoy reality. And if you are bound to reality, you're bound to life as it is, and can never imagine life as can be. Not many may agree with this view. And several may think of it as escapism. I do so myself. I am an unregenerate escapist. I'd rather live believing in my own fantasies, than give in to the manacles of reality. And, I also believe that I am not the only one indulging in this blessed vice.
Un jour, vous verrez la serveuse automate, s'en aller cultiver ses tomates, au soleil...
Thus goes a song I had learned in school and sung on stage. I have not forsaken my affair with French, even though there has been so much more to it than just an attempt at learning a foreign language. And the very fact that there has been much more to this experience, makes it priceless, and will always connect me to some of the best memories of my childhood days, whenever I read a passage, or even a sentence in French.
I wonder what happened to Moulik Sir (for that was his name)... when I went to Calcutta last time, I passed by Aurobindo Ashram a couple of times, and I noticed the "learn french" board still up there. But I wonder if he is still around, or if the class has been taken over by some joker who'll make packets of French and shove it down throats, like they do everywhere else.
I wonder...but I do not have the guts to go inside and inquire...I'm too scared of what I'll find. I'd rather stand at the door and let memories wash over me like it was just yesterday that we laughed under the frangipane trees, or traced chalky lines on wooden desks...
(last two paragraphs are taken from my email to J, and are the inspiration for my post here)
1 comment:
I loved the picture you painted with your words.I could almost smell the chalkboard in your classroom at the Ashram and see the bright lights at Alliance when I read your essay.Very well done indeed.
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