The Precocious Philosopher, Outwitted

I have been fortunate to bring up two grandchildren. The elder one has more and more reasons to poke at the younger one as they grow up. At the sound of the younger one's cry, the inquiring and imposing looks of elders, including me, fall on the elder one. Sometimes, even before our gaze finds her, she has already shouted, “I didn’t even touch her!” But most of the time, we know perfectly well who was responsible for the cry.

This carries me fifty-six years back to an incident in school — the same fifty-six that is associated with the chhappan bhog (the fifty-six food offerings) at the Puri Jagannath temple.

When I was in sixth standard, in Dormitory No. 1, Joseph Mathew’s (690) father had come to visit him that evening. When the House Master was moving around the wing, he casually asked Joseph why he was not giving him any of the sweets his father had brought. Joseph replied, with some sadness, that somebody had taken them. A furious Vitekar Sir made everyone kneel down beside their beds and began his questioning. His angry voice instantly transformed the dormitory into a courtroom.

He started with the boy at the first bed:

“Where were you in the evening?”

The boy replied, “I was in the garden.”

He moved on, and the replies from boys for whom English was an alien language fell into a pattern — “I was in the garden” or “I was taking a bath.” With every bed he crossed, my anxiety increased. Each answer sounded hopelessly inadequate. Surely, I thought, a guilty boy would say “I was in the garden.” I needed something more convincing. Those extra seconds became my rehearsal room. Each boy was explaining a full hour’s absence in four or five words, and each of them was going to be questioned further.

I mulled it over as the House Master progressed from bed to bed, until at last he looked at me. I replied, “I did not even know when his father came.”

Some unintended stammer crept in, as I had conjured up these nine words with much difficulty. Before I could let go of my breath, he turned and announced,

“All of you get up and get on with your work. Ramesh, you stay kneeling down.”

He continued walking back, majestically. Crestfallen, I could not hold my emotions. None of the boys, including Joseph Mathew, asked me anything about it further — and that hurt more than the innocence I had been attempting to convey, as emphatically as a boy with a native-language background could find the proper English words. I knelt there wondering how my carefully crafted innocence had become the strongest evidence against me.

In my present role as a grandfather, I watch the occasional innocence of my granddaughter with amusement when she utters similar words. But at the same moment, my respect for the House Master only grows. He was a better psychologist than the precocious philosopher! Only much later did I realise what Vitekar Sir had noticed instantly: the innocent answer questions; the guilty often answer the accusation before it is asked.

Every one of us, I suspect, carried a Vitekar Sir out of the school — some sharper-eyed than others, all of them, in hindsight, right more often than we liked to admit. If this jubilee brings us together again even for an evening, I would not be surprised if most of us find we are still, in some corner, kneeling by that bed.

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