The Tooshun Teacher

Children in India study all the time. They go to school five and a half days a week and average 235 days a year, in comparison to about 180 days for American schoolchildren. What they do have in common are the extremely heavy backpacks. My cousin Ushaben would send the servant along with the kids to carry their backpacks to school. Talk about coolie luxury.

There is enough homework given to ensure that any spare time at home, even weekends, is spent doing more of the rote learning and busy work. Ok, I admit the general knowledge instilled in us has come in use for yelling out answers during Jeopardy. We studied so much, even late into the night, that my father actually had to threaten us that he was going to turn off the lights if we didn’t stop studying. Yes, it was a bizarro world back then. After he carried out his threat, we would just turn them on again after he left the room and continue studying. And yes again, we were real nerds. There was no need to console us with ‘Oh well, if you don’t study, there is always the Working at McDonald’s' option that I would offer my own kids.

We learned addition, subtraction, division and multiplication...in first grade. Most sixth graders in the school where I work do not know their basic times table. The only ones I excuse are my special ed students. I once asked a young girl with SLD (Specific Learning Disability) that if her mother gave her one piece of candy and then gave her one more, how many would she have, only to have her wail,  "My mom doesn’t allow me to eat candy!!” They don’t fare much better with spelling either. Three eighth graders wrote 'Homwork' in their agenda. When I corrected one of them, she had the gall to argue ‘But this is Math class’. And people ask why we rank 25th in the world. I’d tell you why, but that’s for another rant...I mean, blog.

Anyway, since my father had no time and Ba could not speak English, we needed to have extra ‘tooshun’...as it is pronounced in India. We had a tuition teacher for English, one for Maths (what we call Math) and one for Hindi to help us with our homework.

The first instructor my father hired was a combination of governess, teacher, disciplinarian ... and Emily Post.

Silloo Jilla was a pretty, young Parsi girl whose father gave her two options when she graduated from school: stay at home or become a teacher. It was a good thing for us that she chose the latter. She remembers holding Varsha and me as babies on her lap, while she taught Nina, who was barely five years old. She continued to teach us after getting married and had two children of her own. While she was pregnant, we went to her house after school. The house would be redolent of eggs and loban - the incense used by Parsis to dispel bad energy (and makes a wonderful insect repellent). The wonderful, heady aroma and the memory of the smoke emanating from the swinging afarganyu still takes me back to those evenings spent in her sitting room.

She taught us how to sit (Back straight!), how to stand (Shoulder’s back!), how to walk (Head high!) and how to behave (Please! Thank you! Excuse Me!). Nina was the ideal student, and was a pleasure to teach, which was good for Sillooauntie, given the energy spent on taming the two younger junglees.

Hearing the doorbell, Varsha and I would hastily throw a dress on our petticoats (young girls don’t go around in white slips), scurry into our chappals (young girls don’t walk around barefoot) and slick down our hair, which didn’t take long, given all that oil Vishnu administered to our tresses every morning.

We did our homework with her, recited poems by Wordsworth, soliloquies by Shakespeare, memorized our ‘times tables’ (multiplication up to twelve) and even learned how to eat with a knife and fork. Vishnu had also been instructed to save any food left on our plates and we were then made to eat it in front of her. Inedible when hot, it was nastier cold, and whereas Varsha often escaped because she had mastered the act of gagging well enough to earn her an Oscar, I would sit for hours, teary-eyed and miserable, strategically placed far away from soft-hearted Ba, lest she intervene on my behalf.

It is to Sillooauntie, however, that we owe the love of the English language and much more. All the supplementary intellectual stimulation has created in all three of us an addiction to reading and a profound thirst for general knowledge.

Some years ago, on my way to the airport to fly back to the States, on a sudden impulse, I asked the driver to stop at her building, near Babunath Temple. I guess she did not recognize me, given that I had stopped putting oil on my hair and had gained quite a few pounds. After introducing myself and thanking her for all her guidance, I sat there, teary-eyed once more, but out of gratitude.