I was nine and my brother eight when he entered our lives. I cannot remember my first impression of him but I do remember that within a week of tutoring us, Oja Birendrajit had won over our hearts, and has stayed there forever. That tall, fair, guffawing, paan-chewing old man who showered us with so much love and affection that he soon became the grandfather we never had and left on us an indelible mark.
Engaging with private tutors for children young and old was common in those days and perhaps is till today. Hindi was a weak point, and so we had Hindi tuitions from a well-respected tutor on Sundays. It was through him that my parents met Oja Biren and promptly engaged him for our daily tuitions. His job was simple enough – go through our lessons with us (preferably be at least 1 chapter ahead of the class) and ensure our homework due the next morning was done and checked. And so in the winter of that year, Oja started to tutor us. He would enter our gates at dusk with the slightest ring of his bicycle bell, torch on the other hand, and bringing with him the unmistakable smell of paan that would linger around our study table long after he was gone.
“Nivedatta”, he spoke with a distinct British accent, always twisting my name in a delightful way, “what are your dreams?” (He’d always converse with us in English and often asked us such questions.) My nine year old, convent-going, heavily-missionary-influenced self once declared grandly, “Oja I want to grow up and become Mother Teresa.”
“Ha ha ha,” he guffawed, “that’s a nice thought, Mother Teresa..,” he repeated, “Ha ha ha.. but you’re the only daughter! Your parents won’t be very happy with that,” he said. He coughed a lot in between the guffaws. I did not understand why he said that but I remember being most disappointed at how Oja responded to my noblest dreams of working for the poor and downtrodden, taking them out of the shackles of poverty and suffering. I mean who wouldn’t want to be Mother Teresa, I thought. “You should become a doctor,” he counseled. “Become a doctor,” he told my brother too, “and cure people.” Neither of us had such medico aspirations. Mine meanwhile changed from Mother Teresa to that of a hallowed Indian Administrative Services officer and that made him happier.
Oja would tell us tales of the British in Manipur, about William Pettigrew who started the Pettigrew School (I think Oja was a teacher in this school at some point in his life.), about his younger days when he played hockey for India in the Olympics and several others that enchanted us every day. (Alas, my memory and facts do not coincide. He must have told us of some other championship that in my memory is something as grand as the Olympics). Every day he also brought us little treats – different types of boroi fruits, small red borois, bigger green borois, ripe ones, unripe ones, sometimes mixed with over-ripe almost rotten ones, tasty fried pakoras of potatoes and onion rings, crunchy fried mangan (peas) and other fruits always wrapped in a small piece of newspaper. He would take them out of his pocket like a magician, much to the delight of two pairs of wide expectant eyes (sometimes three, depending on whether or not our 4yr old kid brother was hovering around us) and lay them on the study table for us to savor while he enraptured us with his stories of the brave, stories of warriors, stories of patriots and stories of sporting exploits. He often read out to us poems by Tennyson and Wordsworth from our English books made to sound as though the brook flowed past our house, gurgling down the leirak.
We had had daily tutors before him and after, and those are stories for another day, but Oja Biren was special. He wasn’t bound by school text books and mundane everyday lessons as much as he wanted us to open our minds and go with him on a journey to the fascinating world that lay beyond the few chapters enclosed in our course books. He knew how to draw us close to him, he knew how to build trust, he knew how to engage us and he knew how to fire our imaginations. He fired in me the hunger to discover through stories a world I could not have imagined otherwise. He fired in my brother a lasting passion for sports. Oja once gifted him his own imported, obviously expensive, Yonex badminton racket, an adult professional version, with tight strings that made our old wooden, ever slightly loose-stringed children's ones pale in comparison. Every now and then, he also got us crisp, stiff, lightweight shuttle-corks. The bold black YY on the racket made us such proud owners, and the “Made in Japan” tag made it an object of intense envy in the neighborhood. No kid in the entire leikai had a Yonex, graphite rimmed, lightweight adult badminton racket! And so a few months went by and Oja became a dear friend to us.
At the end of each session, we walked with him till the culvert outside our gate, past our neighbors’ houses loathe to end the chat and stories continuing from our study table. One day in one such walk he told us he had fallen off his bicycle the previous night near that culvert and I felt a pang of worry.
Our love and affection for him grew with each passing day but so did his coughing fits. My mother also complained that he spent more time telling us stories than making us do our homework in that limited hour of tuitions. She was worried we’d fall behind in class and our homework wouldn’t get done! And when his coughing did not stop, my parents started to get more than a little anxious.
One Sunday, my parents and my Hindi tutor were in a discussion that sounded like a grave adult thing. Soon, Oja Biren stopped coming. My brother and I were taken to the hospital, where doctors took our x-rays, and nurses poked us for blood samples. We couldn’t understand what was happening around us. And we missed Oja Biren. To us, he simply vanished without a word. Something had happened -something serious. I could sense it.
That something turned out to be Tuberculosis. The day my parents found out that Oja was afflicted with the then deadly and feared disease, he was politely asked to discontinue. I was silently upset with my parents, and hurt that we were being tested for TB too after I understood what was going on. To my mind, there was no graver act of betrayal to Oja than to test us for TB! My nine year old self resented my parents' actions. Thankfully my protective parents knew better and much to their relief, no virus had been passed on to us. But I somehow had a premonition that Oja was going to die.
Several months passed and we got busy with school and our lives. We had also gotten a new tutor, a pleasant middle-aged stocky man who made us do our homework. Once a month or so, my mother took me to the All India Radio station for the Sunday morning children’s program. I would recite a poem or read out a story. There were many kids in the studio room. Some of the musically gifted ones with tablas and harmomiums were always given preference over the poets. Our lifeless listless pieces of papers were no match for the glistening, gleaming tablas and harmoniums. So, we had to fight to sit close to Eche Kamala, the anchor. Her gaze would sweep across the large studio room and she’d ask for the next performance and the next and the next. I was painfully shy in those days. Once, I gave up my chance much to my mother’s consternation and disappointment later. I had sat quietly, almost stubbornly, slowly crumbling and crushing the paper which had my carefully chosen and neatly copied poem from Palgrave’s "The Golden Treasury" to a tight ball in my hand.
Then came a Sunday – I remember that Sunday as if it were yesterday. That Sunday, I was brave. That Sunday, I wasn’t going to let my chance pass me by and I was going to fight for it if it did not come to me. My mother who knew Eche Kamala also gave her a hand signal pointing to me from across the studio room that clearly said I am her daughter. So that day, Eche Kamala called out for me, introduced me on air and I went to the microphone and said,
“Today I am going to recite The Brook by Alfred Lord Tennyson,” and boldly went on, on live radio,
“I come from haunts of coot and hern,
make a sudden sally,
And sparkle out among the fern,
To bicker down a valley….
…..
I chatter over stony ways,
In little sharps and trebles,
I bubble into eddying bays,
I babble on the pebbles….
… I join the brimming river
For men may come and men may go
But I will go on forever.”
“Thank you” I said as I ended the poem.
I was triumphant! I had done it! My mother was happy and we returned home. Soon after, the phone rang.
I ran to answer it. "Hello?” I said breathlessly. “Nivedatta?” the voice though feeble was unmistakable. “OJA,” I cried out. “I heard you on the radio,” he said. “You were excellent.” Tears welled up in my eyes and I choked. “So are you studying hard to become a doctor?” he asked. “Tell your brother too to do so…” by which time I think I gave the phone to my brother. I went to another room and cried.
Time went by and about a year had passed. It was April - the Manipuri New Year celebrations. It’s a day of great excitement especially for children who get to wear new clothes, buy toys, and climb the Cheirao ching (Cheirao hill). There’s a small hillock called Chinga about a kilometer from my place. For those in the vicinity, Chinga is what they climb for cheiraoba (New Year). That year, my brothers and I went to Chinga full of excitement. From atop the hill, we surveyed the land below, trying to spot our house at a distance, giggling and nudging each other, correcting each other. The path uphill were lined with toy stalls that would delight any Manipuri kid in the mid-eighties. Colorful plastic animals and birds, plastic guns, plastic dolls, cloth-made Manipuri dolls in various attires and many more that some of us picked up on our way. Filled with excitement and pleasure after successfully spotting our house and with our booty, we started to climb down when I suddenly remembered that Oja Biren lived very closeby – at the foot of this very Chinga hill. Luckily for us, the people we went with knew him very well and so we went to surprise Oja.
My chest was already closing in tight as we reached his house. I should have been happy to see him again, but I missed him so much and the thought of losing him suddenly made me sad. He saw us approaching, recognized us and I clearly remember him saying, “I have been expecting you.” Perhaps he really was waiting for us all those months? I now wonder.
The warm smile that greeted us still lingers in my memory. He was the same – tall, fair, gaunt, but frailer. His was a very modest house, Oja’s. We, my brothers and I and all the others we went with sat on a rickety old bench that appeared to have come off an abandoned bus, the coir stuffing coming off at the edges, underneath his tin roofed house. I remember bright pink bougainvilleas hanging from the roof. There was a plain wooden study table opposite the bench and he sat on the chair next to it. He didn’t hide his happiness at seeing us and hollered to his wife behind the door to bring us some tea.
Seeing Oja after all these months had me all wet eyed and I avoided looking at him directly. I just could not. I turned around and spotted a boroi tree a foot behind me. Memories of the boroi fruits he brought us came rushing to me and I couldn’t control my tears though I quickly dabbed it with my hanky. We chatted for some time and Oja brought out a hockey stick. “This is the Olympic hockey stick,” he said proudly and gave it to my brother. It was white with heavy marks, testament to its once active days. My brother was elated! I on the other hand was too grief stricken. In the end, I went weeping to him. He hugged me, understood my grief and said not to worry. He plucked some boroi fruits and gave them to us in a piece of newspaper. We had the tea and soon left his place. I turned back, to take one last look and saw him wave at us, smiling.
And that was the last time we saw Oja Biren. He died a few months later and took a small part of us with him. My parents went for his shraadh ceremony. Perhaps they thought we were too young to go so we didn’t. To this day, more than two decades later, when tutors have come and tutors have gone, he has lived on forever…
Our beloved Oja RK Birendrajit who changed our lives. That tall, fair, lanky, guffawing and paan-chewing Abraham Lincoln-lookalike tutor of ours.
Engaging with private tutors for children young and old was common in those days and perhaps is till today. Hindi was a weak point, and so we had Hindi tuitions from a well-respected tutor on Sundays. It was through him that my parents met Oja Biren and promptly engaged him for our daily tuitions. His job was simple enough – go through our lessons with us (preferably be at least 1 chapter ahead of the class) and ensure our homework due the next morning was done and checked. And so in the winter of that year, Oja started to tutor us. He would enter our gates at dusk with the slightest ring of his bicycle bell, torch on the other hand, and bringing with him the unmistakable smell of paan that would linger around our study table long after he was gone.
“Nivedatta”, he spoke with a distinct British accent, always twisting my name in a delightful way, “what are your dreams?” (He’d always converse with us in English and often asked us such questions.) My nine year old, convent-going, heavily-missionary-influenced self once declared grandly, “Oja I want to grow up and become Mother Teresa.”
“Ha ha ha,” he guffawed, “that’s a nice thought, Mother Teresa..,” he repeated, “Ha ha ha.. but you’re the only daughter! Your parents won’t be very happy with that,” he said. He coughed a lot in between the guffaws. I did not understand why he said that but I remember being most disappointed at how Oja responded to my noblest dreams of working for the poor and downtrodden, taking them out of the shackles of poverty and suffering. I mean who wouldn’t want to be Mother Teresa, I thought. “You should become a doctor,” he counseled. “Become a doctor,” he told my brother too, “and cure people.” Neither of us had such medico aspirations. Mine meanwhile changed from Mother Teresa to that of a hallowed Indian Administrative Services officer and that made him happier.
Oja would tell us tales of the British in Manipur, about William Pettigrew who started the Pettigrew School (I think Oja was a teacher in this school at some point in his life.), about his younger days when he played hockey for India in the Olympics and several others that enchanted us every day. (Alas, my memory and facts do not coincide. He must have told us of some other championship that in my memory is something as grand as the Olympics). Every day he also brought us little treats – different types of boroi fruits, small red borois, bigger green borois, ripe ones, unripe ones, sometimes mixed with over-ripe almost rotten ones, tasty fried pakoras of potatoes and onion rings, crunchy fried mangan (peas) and other fruits always wrapped in a small piece of newspaper. He would take them out of his pocket like a magician, much to the delight of two pairs of wide expectant eyes (sometimes three, depending on whether or not our 4yr old kid brother was hovering around us) and lay them on the study table for us to savor while he enraptured us with his stories of the brave, stories of warriors, stories of patriots and stories of sporting exploits. He often read out to us poems by Tennyson and Wordsworth from our English books made to sound as though the brook flowed past our house, gurgling down the leirak.
We had had daily tutors before him and after, and those are stories for another day, but Oja Biren was special. He wasn’t bound by school text books and mundane everyday lessons as much as he wanted us to open our minds and go with him on a journey to the fascinating world that lay beyond the few chapters enclosed in our course books. He knew how to draw us close to him, he knew how to build trust, he knew how to engage us and he knew how to fire our imaginations. He fired in me the hunger to discover through stories a world I could not have imagined otherwise. He fired in my brother a lasting passion for sports. Oja once gifted him his own imported, obviously expensive, Yonex badminton racket, an adult professional version, with tight strings that made our old wooden, ever slightly loose-stringed children's ones pale in comparison. Every now and then, he also got us crisp, stiff, lightweight shuttle-corks. The bold black YY on the racket made us such proud owners, and the “Made in Japan” tag made it an object of intense envy in the neighborhood. No kid in the entire leikai had a Yonex, graphite rimmed, lightweight adult badminton racket! And so a few months went by and Oja became a dear friend to us.
At the end of each session, we walked with him till the culvert outside our gate, past our neighbors’ houses loathe to end the chat and stories continuing from our study table. One day in one such walk he told us he had fallen off his bicycle the previous night near that culvert and I felt a pang of worry.
Our love and affection for him grew with each passing day but so did his coughing fits. My mother also complained that he spent more time telling us stories than making us do our homework in that limited hour of tuitions. She was worried we’d fall behind in class and our homework wouldn’t get done! And when his coughing did not stop, my parents started to get more than a little anxious.
One Sunday, my parents and my Hindi tutor were in a discussion that sounded like a grave adult thing. Soon, Oja Biren stopped coming. My brother and I were taken to the hospital, where doctors took our x-rays, and nurses poked us for blood samples. We couldn’t understand what was happening around us. And we missed Oja Biren. To us, he simply vanished without a word. Something had happened -something serious. I could sense it.
That something turned out to be Tuberculosis. The day my parents found out that Oja was afflicted with the then deadly and feared disease, he was politely asked to discontinue. I was silently upset with my parents, and hurt that we were being tested for TB too after I understood what was going on. To my mind, there was no graver act of betrayal to Oja than to test us for TB! My nine year old self resented my parents' actions. Thankfully my protective parents knew better and much to their relief, no virus had been passed on to us. But I somehow had a premonition that Oja was going to die.
Several months passed and we got busy with school and our lives. We had also gotten a new tutor, a pleasant middle-aged stocky man who made us do our homework. Once a month or so, my mother took me to the All India Radio station for the Sunday morning children’s program. I would recite a poem or read out a story. There were many kids in the studio room. Some of the musically gifted ones with tablas and harmomiums were always given preference over the poets. Our lifeless listless pieces of papers were no match for the glistening, gleaming tablas and harmoniums. So, we had to fight to sit close to Eche Kamala, the anchor. Her gaze would sweep across the large studio room and she’d ask for the next performance and the next and the next. I was painfully shy in those days. Once, I gave up my chance much to my mother’s consternation and disappointment later. I had sat quietly, almost stubbornly, slowly crumbling and crushing the paper which had my carefully chosen and neatly copied poem from Palgrave’s "The Golden Treasury" to a tight ball in my hand.
Then came a Sunday – I remember that Sunday as if it were yesterday. That Sunday, I was brave. That Sunday, I wasn’t going to let my chance pass me by and I was going to fight for it if it did not come to me. My mother who knew Eche Kamala also gave her a hand signal pointing to me from across the studio room that clearly said I am her daughter. So that day, Eche Kamala called out for me, introduced me on air and I went to the microphone and said,
“Today I am going to recite The Brook by Alfred Lord Tennyson,” and boldly went on, on live radio,
“I come from haunts of coot and hern,
make a sudden sally,
And sparkle out among the fern,
To bicker down a valley….
…..
I chatter over stony ways,
In little sharps and trebles,
I bubble into eddying bays,
I babble on the pebbles….
… I join the brimming river
For men may come and men may go
But I will go on forever.”
“Thank you” I said as I ended the poem.
I was triumphant! I had done it! My mother was happy and we returned home. Soon after, the phone rang.
I ran to answer it. "Hello?” I said breathlessly. “Nivedatta?” the voice though feeble was unmistakable. “OJA,” I cried out. “I heard you on the radio,” he said. “You were excellent.” Tears welled up in my eyes and I choked. “So are you studying hard to become a doctor?” he asked. “Tell your brother too to do so…” by which time I think I gave the phone to my brother. I went to another room and cried.
Time went by and about a year had passed. It was April - the Manipuri New Year celebrations. It’s a day of great excitement especially for children who get to wear new clothes, buy toys, and climb the Cheirao ching (Cheirao hill). There’s a small hillock called Chinga about a kilometer from my place. For those in the vicinity, Chinga is what they climb for cheiraoba (New Year). That year, my brothers and I went to Chinga full of excitement. From atop the hill, we surveyed the land below, trying to spot our house at a distance, giggling and nudging each other, correcting each other. The path uphill were lined with toy stalls that would delight any Manipuri kid in the mid-eighties. Colorful plastic animals and birds, plastic guns, plastic dolls, cloth-made Manipuri dolls in various attires and many more that some of us picked up on our way. Filled with excitement and pleasure after successfully spotting our house and with our booty, we started to climb down when I suddenly remembered that Oja Biren lived very closeby – at the foot of this very Chinga hill. Luckily for us, the people we went with knew him very well and so we went to surprise Oja.
My chest was already closing in tight as we reached his house. I should have been happy to see him again, but I missed him so much and the thought of losing him suddenly made me sad. He saw us approaching, recognized us and I clearly remember him saying, “I have been expecting you.” Perhaps he really was waiting for us all those months? I now wonder.
The warm smile that greeted us still lingers in my memory. He was the same – tall, fair, gaunt, but frailer. His was a very modest house, Oja’s. We, my brothers and I and all the others we went with sat on a rickety old bench that appeared to have come off an abandoned bus, the coir stuffing coming off at the edges, underneath his tin roofed house. I remember bright pink bougainvilleas hanging from the roof. There was a plain wooden study table opposite the bench and he sat on the chair next to it. He didn’t hide his happiness at seeing us and hollered to his wife behind the door to bring us some tea.
Seeing Oja after all these months had me all wet eyed and I avoided looking at him directly. I just could not. I turned around and spotted a boroi tree a foot behind me. Memories of the boroi fruits he brought us came rushing to me and I couldn’t control my tears though I quickly dabbed it with my hanky. We chatted for some time and Oja brought out a hockey stick. “This is the Olympic hockey stick,” he said proudly and gave it to my brother. It was white with heavy marks, testament to its once active days. My brother was elated! I on the other hand was too grief stricken. In the end, I went weeping to him. He hugged me, understood my grief and said not to worry. He plucked some boroi fruits and gave them to us in a piece of newspaper. We had the tea and soon left his place. I turned back, to take one last look and saw him wave at us, smiling.
And that was the last time we saw Oja Biren. He died a few months later and took a small part of us with him. My parents went for his shraadh ceremony. Perhaps they thought we were too young to go so we didn’t. To this day, more than two decades later, when tutors have come and tutors have gone, he has lived on forever…
Our beloved Oja RK Birendrajit who changed our lives. That tall, fair, lanky, guffawing and paan-chewing Abraham Lincoln-lookalike tutor of ours.
No comments:
Post a Comment