Ambi's Tryst with the Tyrantess

 Terms and Conditions

Ambi was, at the ripe age of four, already a shrewd negotiator. When school was first mooted in 1970, he did not throw a tantrum — he made a demand, delivered with the gravity of a treaty clause: he would go, but only if Aditi, the Tamil girl in the neighbourhood, went too. Without her, the township could keep its school. Aditi, an inconvenient eight months younger, had not yet earned her admission papers. Ambi, wholly unmoved by the academic calendar of the then school Board, simply refused. Negotiations stalled. The matter was tabled for a year, and nobody — least of all Ambi — seemed in the least bit sorry about it. His elder brother Kumaran, meanwhile, had made his own peace with school two full years earlier, and went off each morning entirely unbothered by his younger brother's diplomatic standoff.

That year, in fact, was pure gold. Mornings began with breakfast, then straight across the street to Aditi's for a morning of uninterrupted play, until the factory siren blew at noon to announce lunch — at which sound Chella would come scampering across like a woman late for a fire drill, to haul her son home in time. The three of them would sit down for lunch without Kumaran, already at his desk. The afternoons were worse for her — Ambi flatly refused his nap, so Chella would trot back across a second time, cap in hand, and beg Narayani, Aditi's endlessly fond mother, to absorb the boy for a few hours. Narayani almost always said yes, with a smile that suggested she did not mind the regular intrusions. On the rare day she had somewhere to be, she'd warn Chella in advance, and Chella would then descend on her son with the no-nonsense fury of a woman who had been made to walk across that street once too often. At five, punctual as a temple bell, Ambi returned for coffee — poured into a great "Eversilver Davara", a wedding gift from his Nana, with Chella's initials engraved on its belly, as though even the vessel needed to prove whose house this was. School, meanwhile, could wait. And wait it did.

 Admission, and Betrayal

It waited until 1971, when Aditi finally turned admissible and Ambi, a man of his word even at five, agreed to attend.

The family lived near the west end of the township, barely five hundred metres from a spot the township simply called Nursery, and when the time eventually came, it was the “Hospital” stop — serving every child in the zone — where Ambi would board each morning. A bus made its rounds each morning, scooping children out of the township's various zones and depositing them at the only English-medium school within its boundaries — a school that sat, rather ominously in hindsight, in the shadow of a hill called Bhalu Pahad, the Bear's Hill, a good two kilometres off towards the east end of the township. Ambi and Aditi boarded together each morning at the “hospital” stop, opposite the turnstile, thick as thieves, and the routine held without incident for several months.

Then the school did the unthinkable. It split them into different sections.

Ambi took this the way a shareholder takes a hostile takeover. He marched to his father Raman and reminded him, word for word, of the terms under which he had originally agreed to this whole "school" enterprise. Raman, employing the great fatherly art of the vague promise, assured him it would be sorted "in course of time" — four words that have bought grown men decades of peace from their five-year-olds, and bought Raman about a week.

The Tyrantess of Section B

The universe, having separated the two children, then decided to rub it in. Both KG sections, mercifully, were run by Tamil-speaking teachers — Ambi arrived at school fluent in exactly zero of the languages actually in use there — but the mercy stopped at language. Aditi got Ms Julie, a woman built entirely of patience and warmth. Ambi got Ms Uma, who was not. Ms Uma ran her classroom like a small, furious kingdom, brooking no deviation from her pupils, let alone outright mischief, and had discovered in herself a most particular gift: an unerring instinct for the inner thigh, and the exact quantum of pinch required to make a small boy see stars. Ambi, desperate, appealed to Ms Julie directly: “Miss, enna please unga classla admit pannunga” — could she not simply take him in? Ms Julie laughed, patted him off, and told him it would all work out. It did not.

A Hunger Strike, and Its Consequences

Diplomacy having failed at the teacher level, Ambi escalated straight to the top — his parents — and when even that produced no instant results, he did what any self-respecting five-year-old with a grievance does: he declared a one-day "bhook hartaal". No food, no school, and no negotiating with terrorists — except that Raman negotiated anyway, promising not only to speak to Ms Uma but to have a word with her husband too, her "Veetukkarar," for good measure. Suitably flattered by his own father's willingness to go to the man's house over this, Ambi called off the fast and turned up at the bus stop the next morning full of swagger. Aditi, noticing his absence the day before, asked where he'd got to. "That wicked woman is about to be taught a lesson by my father," Ambi informed her grandly. "If she tries anything again, my dad will ensure she stops coming to school."

Whatever memo Raman had sent, Ms Uma appeared not to have received it — or had received it, read it, and consigned it to the bin. The next day after lunch, she greeted Ambi with a warning, delivered in crisp Tamil: "Nalla thinnuttu panni madthiri alaya thaan nee layakku, pallikku varama ne uruppudave mattey" — roughly, that you are fit only to eat to your fill and wander around like a pig, playing truant, you will come to no good. Ambi, done with diplomacy altogether, shot back that his father knew all about her wickedness and would deal with her personally.

This did not land well. Ms Uma slapped him, then went to work on his thighs with her signature technique until he broke down completely, wet through with fright, and bolted for the gate, howling. The chowkidar, Bahadur, caught him in the corridor before he'd got ten feet away and marched him straight back into the lioness's den. By now thoroughly wrecked, Ambi cried himself hoarse, then cried himself to sleep at his bench — and was, for reasons the family has never been able to satisfactorily explain, simply forgotten there.

Alone at the Gate

He woke on his own, hours later, to a silence that should have alarmed him sooner than it did. The classroom was empty. The corridor was empty. He staggered out to the gate, bag in hand, to discover that the entire school had quietly packed up and gone home without him — bus, teachers, chowkidar, the lot. Only the Maali remained, watering the plants, oblivious to the boy standing at the gate. The sun was dipping toward evening, sometime around half-past-five, and Ambi stood alone at the gate of a deserted school, two kilometres from home, doing the maths a five-year-old does in exactly no time at all: nobody is coming.

Following Rupa and Subhra Home

Salvation, when it arrived, came in the Godsent shape of two senior schoolgirls walking down the road away from the gate toward Bhanja Mandap, the township cinema. Ambi took off after them like his life depended on it — which, as far as he was concerned, it did — falling twice on his knees before he'd closed the gap enough to tuck in behind them, uninvited. Rupa and Subhra, as he'd later learnt their names to be, clocked the small apparition trailing them and exchanged a few lines of Bengali, amused, at his expense — they seemed rather familiar to Ambi, as it happened, since the two families lived only a few blocks apart. They were, it must be said, at exactly the wrong age to be an assurance to Ambi — too young to feel any tenderness for a strange five-year-old, and quite old enough to be out walking home alone themselves on a warm evening. So they did the only sensible thing two pre-teenage girls saddled with an uninvited toddler, ambling behind, can do: they ignored him, and kept walking, hoping he'd peel off somewhere.

He did not peel off. He followed them past the outer road moving away from the cinema, skirted the frog pond, and struck out across the open sports maidan — unfenced, ungoverned, and entirely too large for a boy already sneezing and heating up his way through a cloud of his own making — toward the circular junction off the central market road, where the hospital road met the way to D Zone. The girls walked further down the “Hospital Road”, running parallel to the H Zone Blocks, meekly followed by an anxious Ambi. At the bunker shop opposite the Chaudharys', the girls dropped down a kaccha path toward lower ground. Ambi, eyeing the gradient with the suspicion of a man asked to sign something without reading it, chose the only dignified option available: he sat down and slid the rest of the way on his backside, arriving at the bottom intact but comprehensively redecorated — blue shorts, white shirt, and every inch of skin between, now the same uniform shade of township dust.

By Sector VII the roads had turned friendly again. Rupa and Subhra, spotting their small shadow finally peeling off toward his own lane, allowed themselves a visible sigh of relief and pressed on towards Nursery without so much as a backward glance. Ambi, filthy, spent, and running purely on instinct, staggered the last stretch to the third lane, too weak to walk any further, faltered and collapsed on the road close to the junction of the lane. Watching this from his veranda, Chinnappan, a bachelor who lived below Ambi’s home, frantically ran down the road, picked him up and promptly deposited him upstairs at Raman’s.

The Reckoning

The next day brought delirium and a fever fit to alarm the whole street; Dr Mishra prescribed three days of bed rest, and Raman, uncharacteristically indulgent, actually granted them. Ambi's only complaint through the entire ordeal — slap, pinch, abandonment, forced march across a maidan, and a raging fever included — was that Aditi would not be around to keep him company while he recovered.

He went on to endure Ms Uma, thigh and all, right up to the second standard, by which point he had made a private peace with his fate — the way children of that era generally did, back when even the parents were hesitant to haul up or complain against a schoolteacher.

The Hillranger writes from Dharmarajapuram, where the siren has long fallen silent, but old habits of waiting linger on...