a tribute to a closed chapter

Nanochip and I went down to Kalpa this morning. I'm departing the country tonight, so this was the last opportunity we had to visit to the old place. I'd been meaning to visit since the very beginning of the trip, but unforeseen (and sometimes foreseen) circumstances conspired to thwart me every time. Until today. For one thing, I'd resolved not to go anywhere near the school except with Nanochip or - failing that - Kaul, but Nanochip arrived in the city only last week, and Kaul, being Kaul, could only be relied on not to keep his word. As of a few days ago, Kaul dropped off the radar entirely, which left me not a little irritated, since the only one, in my view, who has any right to exercise the Seattle Freeze over people is I, and we aren't even in Seattle, for crying out loud.

So Nanochip and I walked through the gates this morning with all the dignity and bearing of absentee landlords come to pay a rare visit to a forgotten property. We were gratified to see the security guard, who has been with the school ever since its inception over a quarter of century ago, standing dutifully at his station. As fate would have it, we chose to descend on the school during exams, so that teachers who would otherwise have been slacking off in the staffroom were instead busy slacking off at their various proctorial appointments. The new principal, who had shot directly from Coordinator of the Primary Sections (or whatever the position was called) to her current position, bypassing the poor Vice-Principal entirely, told us as much through her thin blue lips as she blinked at us from under the overhang of her stiffly starched sari that she wore draped over her entire person like a cocoon, resembling variously a vampire, a pupa, or a Russian doll. She was gracious enough to grant us an audience the moment we told her that we were alumni and unhesitatingly gave us permission to meet our old teachers.

The next person we met with was the Vice-Principal, who had been my English teacher. Back in the day I held the distinction of being the only student to elicit a perfect 25 from her on the essay section of Paper I - a feat that I repeated more than once since. She had been known, if I recall correctly, not to give out scores above 20. Whether that's true or not is irrelevant. A reputation once wrought cannot be unwrought as easily as love. Today the Vice-Principal greeted us with her usual soft-spoken and aristocratic geniality. After that we went upstairs to discover good ol' Z lounging around in the staffroom with a geniality that was decidedly less aristocratic. She had been known in our time for her off-color humor and her habit of bitching openly behind the backs of teachers who had annoyed her. "If you don't turn in your homework, I will sit on you and fart," she once said to Nanochip in the eighth grade, threatening to lower her not inconsiderable bulk into Nanochip's lap. "Fuck Anjali," she confided in us when that superficial English teacher had done something to offend her. We took a picture with Z and greeted the Hindi teacher Rachana on our way out of the staffroom without asking to take a picture with her.

We then sailed down the corridor, spotting familiar and unfamiliar faces proctoring exams in the various classrooms. We made eye contact with Sheila but did not have the decency to stop and say Hi. We spotted Sir Rita flashing her baleful basset hound eyes upon her hapless students and giggled like schoolgirls as we recalled nicknames for teachers that had almost left our memories entirely. We did eventually turn around and greet all the teachers we had passed so inconsiderately, which caused curious students to look up from the exams they had been busy copying from their neighbors to see who these twin beacons of literature were who seemed to be on such familiar terms with the teachers they knew and feared so much. We made eye contact with the Gelid One, who was sitting dourly in a classroom at the far end of the corridor, training her unblinking fish-like eyes suspiciously on us, but did not stop. We were ready to depart, having graced our alma mater with a fleeting half-hour of our presence and decided that enough was enough.

Unfortunately, we didn't get the chance to see our old class teachers (Nanochip might be of a different mind on this point), presumably because they were busy proctoring the pre-finals for the tenth grade. The thought of gatecrashing the pre-boards down in the lunch hall did cross our minds, but the indecorousness of such an act ultimately appealed to our consciences, and we decided against it. We did, however, stop and take a picture with the immortal Chariot, who had baffled even God when she had joined as our new PT teacher, waving her old wrinkled "fits" in the air as she commanded students in her spartan sari to do exercises that she must have lost the ability to do in the mid '40s.

So much time has passed, so much time. It's been eight years since we left Kalpa, and yet the memories seem so fresh. We had almost climbed to the pinnacle of Mt. Stupid back then and as a result had held our genius and sophistication in vastly higher estimation than age and maturity later revealed they merited. My vision of myself is incomplete without the epaulets on my shoulder that signified my holding the office of Captain of Literary Activities. We were so brazen and fearless and iconoclastic in those days, laughing openly at participants in a Shakespearean recitation competition that we were moderating on one occasion and throwing teacups and textbooks and light bulbs and sweaters and dusters and notebooks out the window on every other occasion and recording our confessions on the last day of classes in a paroxysm of glee. That was a definite high point in our youths. I imagine my fifteen-year-old self, whose incoherent puerile thoughts have been recorded on this very blog, would take one look at the cautious proper adult I've become and vomit himself to an early grave.