Based on vague facts. Largely fiction. Written partly in 2007 (found the first few paragraphs in my gmail account), and finished in the last two hours.
***
I picked out a maroon crayon from my box and began colouring the shirt when I felt a hand twisting my ear. I turned around to see my Geometry teacher, a short, fit man with a Chaplin moustache frowning, as his right hand turned my ear almost upside down.
"What are you drawing in my class?" he bellowed, his other hand reaching for my notebook. He picked it up, still holding my ear and examined the drawing. If he was a man with any ability to look at the larger picture, he would've noticed that I was a natural artist. He would've noticed that I had a eye for picking the right features to exaggerate and a hand that drew bold, clear lines. He would've also noticed that my lettering was sharp, readable and yet not print-like. In other words, I was an ace cartoonist.
One cant blame him for being thoroughly disgusted though. He was staring at a cartoon of our physics teacher - a tall man, with longish, straggly hair, slight stubble, luxuriant moustache, sunken eyes and a slight hunch standing with one foot off the ground with a bottle in one hand, looking unnaturally happy. The word, "Kuduka" was written in Kannada at the bottom of the page in cheery red letters.
Our physics teacher was a kuduka - an alcoholic. It was an open secret. Hell, it wasn't even a secret - he sometimes came to class smelling of cheap rum! Yet, our geometry teacher reacted just the way he was scripted to react. He tore the page off my book, folded it up, put it in his pocket, slapped me twice, told me off with an unintelligible roar and said he would let my physics teacher deal with the matter.
***
Each time I think of my physics teacher, I am flooded by this vivid image of him announcing that he wouldn't teach anything that day, and proceeding to pace up an down class with a smirk on his face, lost in thought as the class created a fish-market-like ruckus around him. (I have often wondered if fish markets were actually this noisy. Just like the tune in which school kids sang, "Good Morning, Teacher", the fish market metaphor seemed to transcend generations and geographies.) He did that often. He also sometimes announced in his lovely, deep, singsong voice, "Go to the playground! Go to the library! Do whatever you want!"
On days like this, we would get bored of ourselves. Someone would ask him, "Sir! Tell us a story." He would look around the class dreamily and say, "I know no stories!" At twelve, we found it hard to believe that a teacher would no know stories. So, we probed, "Sir, what countries have you seen?" This is where our physics teacher had an advantage over every other teacher in our school. The rest of them read stories off books and told them to us. He had lived those stories.
"I was in Vienna for five years, working in a laboratory there," he would start and then proceed to tell us about the wet, cobbled streets, the old European construction, the art, the sculpture, the coffee shops, the waffles, the pancakes, the ice coffee (to a twelve-year-old growing up in small-town Karnataka in the nineties, coffee that was not hot enough to burn a hole in your tongue was quite a novel concept). He told us about this old man who walked the streets in the evenings in Vienna selling balloons. "He was the nicest man in all Vienna," our teacher told us, "He had this dirty beard - it looked like that broom!" he said, laughing loudly. "I used to talk theoretical physics with him. He never understood much, but he listened to me with great interest." Each evening, my teacher walked with his old man around Vienna, selling balloons and discussing physics. Each day the old man took the teacher to a different part of town, an unknown corner, a new bar, through a different bylane. The old man also made lovely sketches with a broken pencil in an old notebook. My teacher asked him many times for a sketch the man had made of the road on which my teacher lived. "I never part with my drawings," he said. When my teacher had to leave Vienna, he took the old man's address. "I wrote to him. Twice or thrice. And he wrote back. But after that, I didn't get any replies from him for seven years." We feared the worst. The man must have died, we thought. "Then, one day, there was this huge parcel for me from Vienna. When I opened it, I saw this framed sketch of that road I lived on! The glass had been broken in transit, but the clarity of his vision remained intact." With it, our teacher told us, there was a note, "My father died last evening. In his will, he gave this away to you." 'You still have that drawing?" we asked. "It must be somewhere in my room," he said.
There were more stories - of how he found himself in South America with invalid papers and didn't even know what country he was in, of how he hurt himself trying to imitate a kangaroo in Australia, of the magnificence of the Grand Canyon ("Nothing even remotely as humbling!"), of seeing a Gandhi monument in South Africa, of winning a bottle of champagne in a roadside fair in Portugal, of Casablanca, of the pyramids of Egypt, of the Middle East, of China, Japan, Canada and even Iceland.
"I won a silver medal for my research in the US," he once told us. He explained what his research was on. But beyond vague references to atoms and other really small particles we couldn't see, we didn't comprehend most of what he said. I still don't know what his research was exactly on, or what he won medals for. I heard from someone that his research hit a bad dead-end, and he was devastated. But nothing more. I asked my uncle who was a physicist if he knew my physics teacher. My uncle had never heard of him, although his colleague muttered vaguely about having read one of his papers years ago, "No one really knew if he was right."
***
My physics teacher sat in the common staff room drawing shapes on his table with chalk, pausing every now and then to write out an equation. I was summoned to explain that drawing, and I entered nervously. He ordered me to sit and wait. No student ever sat in the staff room - we respectfully stood and did what teachers asked us to do. So, when he asked me to sit, I stood at his table, head facing the ground. He looked up and said again, "Sit." I sat in an empty plastic chair.
After ten minutes of writing on his table, he said, "You draw really well." I went over that statement in my head a hundred times to see if there was any sarcasm in it. There wasn't. Two teachers walked into what was until then an empty staff room. "I'm supposed to shout at you now," my physics teacher continued without noticing his colleagues, "And tell you that you need to learn to respect your elders. I am expected to tell you that a teacher is God. But you know all that." He paused. The other two teachers looked bewildered.
He stood up and said, "Come with me."
He took me to this messy room at the back of the school where he lived. His beige shirt was drying on the rope in a corner. He would wear it the next day, and the maroon one would hang on the rope. There were books everywhere in his room - dusty volumes of physics textbooks, on heat, electromagnetism, dynamics, light, the quantum theory; detective novels of all sorts - from the Arthur Conan Doyle to Agatha Christie to all those noiry American writers (he even had a couple of Indian detective novels that straddled that thin line between detective fiction and soft porn!); lots of books on Vedanta and Bhagavad Gita (he dismissed those with, "God and I don't get along. Still, I need to know what my enemies are up to."); and some stray history books.
"All these are yours?" I asked.
His eyes twinkled as he said, "The physics books are. The others are from the school library. None of you ever go there anyway!" It was true. We only went to the school library to hide from teachers when we hadn't done our homework. The last time I went there, I flicked The Complete Plays of Oscar Wilde.
He took The Red Harvest off a chair and asked me to sit down. He made some space for himself on his bed and sat on it, leaning against the wall. "What class are you in?" he asked.
"Eighth standard..."
"Ok. So, in two years, you'll be asked to decide what you want to do for the rest of your life." He said that and went silent. I didn't know where this conversation was going. He was silent for a very long time. A lizard on his wall ran all around the room twice before he spoke again. "If you like to draw... tell them you want to draw!"
Again, he went silent. I didn't know if I was expected to leave at this point. After a while, I asked him, "You chose to teach?"
He laughed. "I hate teaching! I was doing a lot of research. People called me all over the world to speak on my work."
"Then what happened?"
"It all came to a standstill suddenly. Wrong hypothesis. No results. I was a bit depressed. I immersed myself more into work to try and salvage something. In the process, my family lost patience. My wife and daughter left me."
I was not sure I wanted to hear all this. But I was stuck. And he was extremely open about his life. Yet, I felt, strangely, like an intruder.
"So, I came back here. Trying to live as close to them as possible now. Teaching here..."
"You gave up your research?"
"It was going nowhere anyway!"
When I left his room that day (after he made me draw four portraits of himself), I felt inexplicably happy. His mood lightened very quickly and he joked about all the other teachers. I made cartoons of them for him. He filed them away in this folder he fetched from his cupboard.
***
For the next few months, we were great friends. I never grasped physics very well, but we had enough to talk about. I spent many afternoons in his room talking about literature and school politics. The summer holidays came and I went to Bangalore and Madras. The next academic year, I found he wasn't there. He had quit the school and shifted to Mangalore. No one really knew where he was or what he was doing.
I found out a week later that his wife had found a new job in Mangalore.
***
I bumped into my physics teacher in Mangalore almost twelve years later. He didn't look a day older. But I had changed beyond recognition. It took him some time to place me, but when he did, his face turned into the brightest of smiles. We talked and laughed about many things in a nearby restaurant over dosa and coffee. He only told me he worked in a college there teaching physics to post-graduate students, "The library here is better and is more unused!"
"What do you do now?" he asked.
Almost guiltily I told him I worked for an investment bank. "I still have your drawings!" he said, "I look at them every now and then..."
He didn't volunteer any information about his wife and daughter, and I didn't ask. But he seemed very happy - much happier than he was in my school.
When we parted, I asked him for his address or phone number. He just said, "Nah. Remember me like this. Eccentric and happy. Who knows when I'll turn eccentric and sad again?"
***
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