Mr. Narayan's Lessons

Apart from being our headmaster, Mr. Narayan taught us Science, a subject in which I had, despite being the brightest student of our class, difficulty in gaining a respectable score. Mostly, I secured the average score of the class with a couple of geeks topping the class with their scores of ninety and a hundred.

    ‘Average marks again, Rajesh,’ Mr. Narayan would say. ‘When will your score go up?’

   ‘In the next exam, sir,’

    ‘Bah! You always say that,’ he scoffed. He would continue to rant through the class before handing me my graded paper at the end.

   ‘Study properly for the next one.’ he instructed.

   I would nod and open my textbooks the next instant like the most diligent student in the world.

   But the next moment, I would be distracted as the PT teacher would call out the boys for physical exercises. And now, for one thing, Mr. Narayan hated physical classes. As a science person, he generally and always felt that children should be clobbered and clustered in the classrooms to study the reactions of chemistry, the forces and momentums in physics or the anatomies of biology. Sports spoiled the fun of science, as per him.

  He was a dark, thin man and gently stooped forward. His hair were a neat mess of black that were greying at the temples. And he seldom smiled since that was a sign of friendliness of the boys who would start taking him casually.

    And Mr. Narayan was a strict teacher.

   The stricter he was with science, the more marks his class got. He kept a moustache, a bushy black Charlie Chaplin style of the South Indians. And always, on his forehead he had those three white finger lines indicating that he had just finished his prayers.

   He was a respected fellow in the boys’ dorm, about forty-five with no wife. She had ten died years back, taken by the dreaded cholera. Now wonder he always wore a stubborn, sorrowful, miserly look.

   After his wife’s departure from the world, he had resorted to science as a friend, teaching full time in a boarding school.

   I couldn’t wonder someone replacing the love of their life with the death of the life: science.

   His lessons were filled with innumerable boring musings of his own where he would rant and rankle about the cramming Indian Education system and how their was no scientific reasoning taught to the students.

  This he taught to us himself as against the system.

  ‘Learn how to do the experiments. Analyze the cause and effect carefully. No need to write whole paras and pages on a meagre topic.’ he would announce every day to the hundreds of ambitious of science students in our class.

  That was the reason no boy made the science journal in his entire science subject life under Mr. Narayan at our school.

  This reduced checking work, too so that Mr. Narayan could focus on checking our scientific aptitude. He had a special fondness for me, probably because I was the most responsive student in the class even though half of the time he pointed me out to answer one of his deep, analyzing theories. He expected me to have a knack for them.

  But science was far from my thoughts. Though I was good at studies, my heart was into reading novels and writing stories. Always I topped the class in essays, coming first in literary quizzes and embarrassing my teammates with my knowledge of books and authors.

 One day, Mr. Narayan called me to his office. It was a day after our third quarter marks were out. I had scored a ninety and above in all subjects except science and mathematics. In mathematics, I had eighty but I had barely scored fifty-five in science. I knew Mr. Narayan was coming through for me.

 ‘What is this, Rajesh?’ he said holding up my science graded paper.

 He was supposed to show them in the class today. I wondered why was he showing them to me earlier.

 ‘Is this the way?’ he opened the notebook to show me a rain of red ink over blue ink.

 ‘Illa, so many mistakes. Is this the way you study?’

 ‘No, sir. Sorry, sir’ I kept my head.

 ‘Aiyyo, what sorry? You should be ashamed of yourself.’

 ‘I know, sir.’

 ‘You don’t like science?’

 ‘I do, sir’

 ‘Then why so less?’

  I remained silent.

 ‘Tell me, Rajesh. Frankly,’ he warned. ‘You hate science, no?’

 ‘Its, not that, sir, but I don’t fancy science much.’

 ‘Really?’

 ‘Yes, I do not understand it much, that’s all.’

 ‘Do I teach that bad?’

 ‘No, sir. It is just that I do not have the passion to grasp it with enthusiasm. It is too much of thinking and analyzing without anything to write. I cannot work with this type of teaching methodology.’

‘Hmmm’ he rubbed his chin and thought for a moment. ‘Go, I will do something about it.'

In the last quarter, Mr. Narayan came up with a different strategy on the first day. He no longer had huge discussion on a particular reaction or force. Rather, he gave the brief introduction and explanation before asking us to write a bunch of straightforward answers from the book. He did this everyday of the week, every week of the month, every month of the last quarter till we had our final exams. He gave us a set of questions to practice but they were no longer the analytical ones where we had to wrack our brains to crack it.

 ‘What is Narayan doing?’ People asked this question to each other.

 ‘Has he lost it?’ one boy questioned. ‘I have to write so much.’

 ‘Earlier, we wrote a bunch of questions on a page. Rather that identifying a reaction with clues, we now have to explain that type of reaction in definition and examples.’ another pointed out.

 The winter season changed to the summer season. No longer did Mr. Narayan lecture us on the importance of thinking and creaming out the answer out of our brain space.

 On the exam day, the question paper had no likeness to the ones we had been taught. Rather, it was on the old pattern our teacher followed. We knew this was set by some other school master who had a higher knowledge of science.

The result came in a week. I had got a thirty now, obviously passed by grace marks now. The lack of practice for analytical questions clearly scripted my science result.

 I was once again called to Mr. Narayan’s office. This time to see my graded paper. The class had been shown the day before, when I had been absent.

 'Aiyyo, what's up Rajesh?' he asked as he ordered me to sit.

 He held out my paper. The red sea on the blue one was a heck deep.

 'Not good result, you see,' he scratched his hands as we faced each other. 'I changed my strategy, the way you wanted but still no marks,'

 'I know, my fault, sir. Your teaching was right all the time.' I kept my eyes downcast. The thirty out of hundred on my paper was redder than ever.

 'No, my child, it is nobody's fault, actually'

 'How come?'

 'Because it is not about marks but the way you approach a subject. You want to approach it with your idea of preparation and I, the way I want my students to prepare. I only wanted you to see the difference.'

 'But-'

 'Leave the marks,' he assured, keeping a hand on my shoulder. 'I do not care about them.'

 'Really, sir?'

 'Yes. Marks do not matter. And now, it is up to you how you approach science. What do you want to be when you grow up? Doctor or engineer or manager?'

 'A writer, sir,'

 'Really, that's great'

 I nodded. I never knew he would react like that.

 He then got up and hugged me tight. Oh, I forgot to mention that Mr. Narayan was my father, too, my Appa.