The Tuition Master

Jayashantha JAYAWARDHANA

With his shiny briefcase in his right hand, Mr. Laksiri got off the bus without haste and walked down the tarmac running parallel to the long bus-stand and turned to the road leading to the 'Vidura English Academy' where he taught English. He brushed past tall maana that grew on the shallow ditches on either side of the narrow road and craned their blades towards the walkers` faces. In his mid 30s, Mr. Laksiri was a tall slender guy with close-cropped hair receding slightly at the temples. His face small and rotund was clean shaven and had a small thin-lipped mouth closing over even white teeth. A sharp observer would certainly detect a touch of arrogance about the line of his mouth. Dressed in a light blue shirt with long sleeves, he looked more like a company CEO than a tuition master. Because he knew dress could make a strong impression on the superficial young people, particularly the girls, he dressed well. And he had earned the two nicknames, kukula and koba from his male students because of his bias towards girls. These sobriquets were used interchangeably to refer to him in his absence.

Mr. Laksiri reached the grove of bamboo trees and looked down at the pair of black shoes he had put on and wiped off a film of dust on his left shoe with a handkerchief he took from his left trouser pocket. They had been so thoroughly burnished with coconut oil (he had already found that shoe polish was not half as effective as coconut oil in lending shine to a shoe) that he could have used one of them as a mirror to shave himself when there was enough sunlight.

He a wise walker who watches his surroundings keenly. As he ambled on, he spotted some 15 yards ahead of him two girls in a happy chatter with a guy. Obviously, they were good friends. A moment later, he made out who they were. Kavya and Nirmala were two of his pet students from his class. The guy was Saranga whom Mr. Laksiri always regarded with suspicion. Ergo, he was scarcely happy to see the trio together. In reality, he felt a twinge of jealousy when he saw them there. Married as he was, he was still fiercely jealous of his attractive female students. However, he had never bothered to consider whether they liked him to be their guardian angel. After all, aren`t good teachers supposed to protect their students as well as teach them?

It is always good to have what one does not like seeing behind him rather than ahead of him. So, he quickened his steps and overtook the trio who greeted him, 'Good Morning, Sir' He greeted them back in such a tone that he might as well have said, 'Go to hell!' But, they were too cheerful to be put off by his churlishness. Or they simply attributed it to a family problem. They were amused to see him violently push back a couple of maana blades bending over his trajectory.

Punctuality, they say, is the politeness of kings. Sharp at nine o`clock, Mr. Laksiri, turned up at the class, and started a lesson on 'adjective phrases', which he had prepared the night before. He was such a great scholar in English language that he called the authors of A/L General English textbook mad and despised the very notion of Sri Lankan English. Mr. Laksiri was such an ardent advocate of the Queen`s English that the senior-most Professor of English at the Oxford University himself would hardly have spoken with greater authority on the subject than him. And he always looked down on his students for their inferior grammar skills.

A good student is supposed to pay serious attention to his teacher even when he keeps rambling. While he was explaining what an adjective phrase was.

He saw Saranga whispering something in his neighbour`s ear and both of them smirk. A habitual paranoid, Mr. Laksiri suspected they were chuckling at him. That suspicion mingled with his resentment in the morning literally blew the lid off his bottled-up fury and made him launch forth such an epic tirade as King Lear himself never managed to do even at the height of his rage.

'What are you two asses doing whispering secrets there while I teach here? You rascals are having little talks among yourselves! You goddamned numbskulls, I will crush you flat! You filthy pigs distracting the attention of the whole class and interrupting the lesson....' The entire class stood petrified as the terrible talented invective spewed out of his mouth. The broadside lasted for over half an hour, and Mr. Laksiri coined several new obscenities in that space. Saranga and his friend kept as silent as if they never heard it.

Little events that follow a great event count little, if at all. After the hurricane Laksiri had blown over, the day passed without much event. At one O`clock in the afternoon, Mr. Laksiri, the star of the day, dismissed the class and began to make for the bus-stand.

The academy was located in Pannala while he lived in Makandura, some four miles from Pannala. Because it was very rarely that buses travelled from Pannala to Makandura, he would take a bus plying to Dankotuwa or Negombo to travel home. As he waited for a bus to go home with his back against a short wall in the bus-stand, he saw Saranga, his friend and two more guys whom he did not know speaking with gesticulations some 25 yards from him, which scared him almost to the point of disorientation as he began to see a very logical relationship between their behaviour and what had happened in the class some three hours earlier. When Saranga`s friend pointed at what he thought must be him, he began quaking with fear. He knew they were going to beat him. It was only a matter of time before his days would be done.

At a certain moment, people take the true estimate of their opponents and realize how formidable they are. Saranga was so tall and so muscular that Mr. Laksiri thought he alone could floor him with one punch on his face and one kick at his privates. 'Four of them together would practically beat me to death!' he thought to himself in panic. Already, he had almost died in fear of their revenge. The other two guys looked like thugs from the area, and were, obviously, more muscular than Saranga and his strong-looking friend. He looked about himself in desperation. There were some 50 passengers at the bus-stand, most of them women and schoolgirls waiting to go home.

As a matter of fact, when a man is in such great danger, he rarely sees anyone he knows near him. In that crowd of 50 odd passengers, he did not recognize a single friend or an acquaintance. Or was it that there were people whom he knew in that crowd, but they had appeared total strangers to him in his panic? "They will knock me down and flog me to death in the broad daylight," he thought with fear rising still, "how can these womenfolk rescue me from these brats?"

Panic, it is understood, overpowers reason. Now that they were starting to move in his direction, he almost soiled his pants. So frightened was he that when he considered the easiest possible option left for him i.e. to run away, he found his very feet stamped to the concrete platform where no trees took root let alone legs. Looking for the proverbial last straw, he spotted a bus slowly driving off the bus stand, but in the other direction. 'So much the better!' he thought and ran past his potential assailants almost brushing Saranga`s right shoulder whose eyes were on a pretty lass who had been standing just a yard from Mr. Laksiri and whom he had never noticed. Saranga, preoccupied with casting a good pick-up line, barely noticed Mr. Laksiri`s headlong rush towards the moving bus or him jumped aboard it as it sped away.

Prevention, of course, is better than cure. Now safe inside the bus though, Mr. Laksiri kept watching the road behind, panicky as ever, as the bus sped away. Not for a single moment did it occur to him that the gang of four had only been talking about the girl next to him; rather, it was sure as death to him that they had planned to beat him up for humiliating Saranga for that trivial reason. It was when the bus had travelled good ten miles that he could collect himself enough to take stock of his surroundings and realize that he was travelling in the wrong direction. At the moment, the conductor, a cantankerous man in his early 50s, came to him asking where he was travelling to. Embarrassed, Mr. Laksiri asked almost innocently, 'Where is this bus going ayya?' His question to the conductor was like a spark to a sack of gun powder and set the conductor off. A thermo-nuclear explosion could hardly have been more devastating. And Mr. Laksiri could not recall a single occasion where he had suffered greater humiliation while he wondered if it was Nemesis. After giving him that good tongue-lashing, the conductor, however, was kind enough to tell him that the bus was heading for Giriulla. Not that it did not occur to him that he should get off then and there and catch a bus to go home; but, he thought it advisable not to provoke the other further and bought a ticket to Giriulla without asking any more questions.

One has to be proactive rather than reactive in coping successfully with uncertain events. As he was about to get off at Giriulla, the thought struck him that it was safer for him to delay his return. And a puzzled conductor gave him a ticket back to Pannala on their return trip after some two hours. Arriving at Pannala in the twilight, he found a Negombo-bound bus coughing to life. After stealing quite a few glances in all the eight directions and those in between them, Mr. Laksiri, ran towards it, swift as a projectile and boarded it hurriedly. He returned home, exhausted, at about seven O'clock in the evening without the grocery items much to the annoyance of his wife who had insisted him on bringing them that morning. As the irate wife began to slam him, he slipped into the bathroom quiet as a mouse.

Even by the wee hours that night, he had not decided whether he should go to the Vidura English Academy ever again.

..................................

<< Artscope Main Page