A true story

In The Zahir, Coelho spoke of telling one's history in order to basically let go and allow for growth. There are many things from our past that keep us tied in one spot and prevent us from ever getting to where we really should be and for a while now, even before I started reading The Zahir, I was thinking of a particular time in history that does not bring back happy memories and I was weighing the idea of to blog or not to blog but finally I said, "What the heck, here goes!"

Primary School days: Standard Five. April 1993-March 1994.
We are preparing for the Common Entrance Exams in this last year in primary school. The school was built by the Sanatan Dharma Maha Sabha (SDMS). My teacher has taught the Std. 5 class for almost five years and his results are getting worse as each consecutive year passes. When Vin passed his exams, there was a total just shy of 40 students out of the 100 odd students that wrote the exam. Furgie writes her exam the year after and the results are worse. Thirty-four students out of about 100 pass the exam. I will say the number for the year I wrote Common Entrance a little further down in this blog. Now, there is a saying that when something goes wrong the first time, maybe it wasn't your fault. When it happens again, you start paying attention but it still may not be your fault, but when the same thing goes wrong for more than five consecutive years, you are definitely the problem.
There was a very common mentality in these schools amongst the teachers that the students were always to blame. And if that was not enough, the parents even blamed their kids for not doing well at school. This is not the same like in priveliged schools where some kids do not know the value of an education. No no no, in the primary school I went to, most of the students were poor and lived on the hills of the Northern Range and in the valley. An education was the only way for them to transcend their current state. Today I will call names.
My school was Five Rivers Hindu and it was later renamed, Pundit Teluckdharry Memorial Sanatan Dharma Maha Sabha Five Rivers Hindu Primary School. I laughed the first time I saw all that. To start with, I always disliked the character that was/is Sat Maharaj. He does not represent Hinduism, in my opinion, neither does he represent Hindus in Trinidad. He is racist, arrogant and a chauvinist. Attending a Maha Sabha school made me aware of the criteria to become a teacher in a primary school.
See, if you had Brahmin name, or if you could give a donation to the Maha Sabha, you could be a teacher in one of the schools. That was it. You did not need a degree, not even an Associates degree in welding or something. Nothing! All you needed was to attend High School and have the right last name. In my primary school, everyone who taught there, with the exception of one teacher, had a Brahmin last name. That's because she was a Presbytarian.
In Hinduism, a Brahmin is someone who has become one with the Absolute and has attained a higher state of consciousness. OR a Brahmin is one defined by the caste system that really has no place in society and is one of the most discriminatory social structures in modern days. I say modern because at one point in time, in the BC era, it would have been useful in keeping order within society. All ancient cultures had a caste system. However, we have come far from those times and I guess people like to think they are more special than others. Therefore, in order to create an elite, people were made to feel inferior to those on the top. So back to the Maha Sabha. I am guessing my language will deteriorate from here but oh well. As always, I get angry when I think of Standard five, the Maha Sabha, and their structures.
I saw what amounted to near torture in those schools. I believe that the teachers should be put on trial and jailed for their methods and I think that they psychologically affected a lot of students and diminished whatever self-esteem they had. Oh, by the way, the biggest crook of all of them was first and foremost, Rogers. The principal. Followed closely by Mathura, the standard five teacher, who was a little piece of incompetent and possibly impotent sexist pig who really made his students suffer. Everyone who passed through his class knew of the whip he used. In Vin's day, it was "Ole King Cole." In Furgie's days it was "tickler." When I was in his class, it was "anita." The blasted A**HOLE! Vin told us of when he would come in class after the lunch break and say, "Ahh, I just eat some rice, dhal and bhaji and I feeling strong enough to beat some ah allyuh!" Then he will pick up his whip and walk up to a random student and bark out, "two twos." He was testing multiplication. Of course, when barked at, one who is scared sh*tless will first freeze. Even if the student knew, he/she would be so afraid to answer that the three seconds will pass and Mathura (the old dog) will start singing, "Ole King Cole was a merry ole soul and ah merry ole soul was he......" Whap whap! Lix like fire!
Rogers was almost reported to the police for torture once. He had a habit of locking kids in a dark room and leaving them there for hours on end. If you're a kid, this would be terrifying. One day, he made the mistake of locking Vin in the room. And on top of that, he forgot him in there so Vin stayed in there for almost the whole day. My mom was in school the next day and I not sure how things went but I am pretty sure Rogers was yey close to being on the receiving end of a sweet sweet cut*ss!
Okay, back to Mathura. He made a compass. Out of some very durable wood and it was a big compass. Thick too. He would beat the boys with this wood. In front of the whole class. If it wasn't humiliating enough to be hit with a compass and in front of all your friends, the boys were beaten on their butts. I saw a boy beaten one day to such an extent that the wood snapped and splintered. That didn't stop Mathura though. He got a new compass and was back to his old routine. One day, Mathura had a line of boys that he was beating. They were jumping around the classroom. That's how hard he was hitting them. When he reached one boy, the boy started to cry, he went down on his knees and started to beg, "please please, sir, don't beat meh!" Mathura was laughing and every other student was in shock. This was a ten year old boy. Eleven would be pushing it. If you are wondering why parents never confronted Mathura, well that's easy, they never knew.....You see, students couldn't go home and say that the teacher beat the life out of them because the parents would say that the teacher was right and maybe their kid didn't know the work being taught.
There was a girl. She was so skinny but for some reason, because everyone in the village knew her grandmother and used to make fun of her, Mathura saw it fit to hit her extremely hard. I used to sit in front of her in class and one day, Mathura was beating the whole class. There was a pundit's (or so-called pundit) daughter in the front desk that was favored and she was exempt from all the lix. The rich students were too. For the rest of us, it was lix like peas! Now anyway, I thought that I was hit hard because I could see the red imprint of the wood across the palm of my hand but then I looked back and I saw how Mathura was beating the girl behind me. I felt so sorry for her. After about the third crack of the whip on her left hand (many of us used to put out our left hands so that we could still write with our right hands), she put out her right hand and Mathura continued hitting her. Her entire palms were criss-crossed with the marks from "anita" and she didn't shed one tear. When the impotent bastard went past her, she just sat down, smiled at me, and kept holding her hands on her lap.
Now, psychologically speaking, that girl failed the exam. When you are beaten that much, you only learn one thing: Fear. You begin to think that all men are like that and there is nothing more to expect. I recently learnt from my oldest friend (who had also passed all these days with me in Five Rivers) that this girl was married and she had children. When I heard that, all I told her that I only hoped that the girl was happy and that her husband was a good guy.
So on that same day, there was another guy whose sister had failed the exam when she wrote in 1992 and she rewrote the exam in 1993 and passed for a 3 year school. A Junior Secondary school. She went to school with her younger brother who was in my class. Keep them in mind. I will come back to them shortly.
Mathura wasted so much time that he was unable to finish the syllabus. In order to remedy this, he decided that he would give an hour extra lessons for three days but he would charge every student $10/week. When I was in Standard five, the brother was in my class. He used to bring tomatoes from his grandfather's garden to pay for the lessons. No one knew of this until one day, while beating the boy mercilessly, Mathura saw it fit to tell the whole class. I really have a problem with people who laugh at other people's poverty.
Now the cream on the cake. When we registered for Common Entrance, we had to fill out a slip in block writing and send it to the Ministry of Education and they would in turn, send us our official Common Entrance slip with our name and exam number. Okay, so the official slips come back. Keep in mind the very very efficient ministry of education we have in Trinidad. They manage to misspell one of the girl's name. It's her last name and Mathura is at his table insisting that we need to have our names spelled properly. The girl shows me her paper and it is definitely misspelt and she doesn't know what to do. I tell her that maybe she should tell Mathura. I regret it. She goes up to him and she tells him that the Ministry spelled her name wrong. Mathura looks at the paper and slaps the girl......right across her face..... and I am dumbfounded. She walks back to the seat and she does not cry either. This girl is the youngest of four siblings. Her father was dead and her mother was old and without a job. Without stating the obvious, she fails the exam.
When I wrote Common Entrance, 31 people passed out of 92 students who wrote the exam. It was the most disappointing results in the school's history and the teachers were quick to blame the students. I passed for a seven year school and I cannot credit any of it with Mathura. Neither can Furgie or Vin, who also passed for decent schools. Maybe it was because Mathura knew that he needed to "bat in his crease" with us after the incident with Rogers and Vin. The only thing joyous in passing common entrance was know that I would be out of Mathura's class and as Furgie said, "I would not need to endure another year of torture at his hands."
About two or three years after we left the school, the Standard Four teacher was appointed to teach the Standard five class and the passes began to increase. If primary school were to be compared to the wheels on a car, i would say that we were running on three completely flat tires and one donut!
We were told to respect our teachers but in order to be respected as a teacher, one needs to do the duty of a teacher. Therefore, when I think of all the teachers in Five Rivers Hindu, I can only think of four teachers in that whole school who were fit to be called teachers. They have my respect. As for Mathura and Rogers, time is a just punisher and no one escapes it. You do good, it comes back to you, when you are supposed to be a teacher and you fall into the categories of Mathura and Rogers, as we say in Trinidad, "crapaud smoke yuh pipe!"