When I entered Secondary School we were a "guinea pig" sort of class that was the first set of Form 1s that our school had ever seen. It was a very big school located at the foothills of Trinidad's Northern Range. Our school, El Dorado Secondary Comprehensive (ElDo for short) was known for it's strong football (soccer) team, Blue Thunder. For those who know Trinidad, our school was the one you see from the hills on the way to Caura River (given fame in the chutney " A Maxi and a Motor Car"). Originally, it was a school for form 4 and form 5 students. I made one very very close friend in that school. A guy. We were 11 when we entered secondary school and we stayed in the same class group until he chose to pursue Business in form four and I went into the science group. By then however, we had already laid the foundations of an enduring friendship. Now i see that.
Sometimes, I wonder how we really did that when we used to fight and insult each other but there were times in between when we would talk. I mean really talk and it was there we began to realize that we were pretty much had the same personalities. It is rare to find a friend with whom one relates to so well. Him and I, we had grown distant for a little and then we started talking again. We were able to climb over the obstacles and step around them in order to preserve the friendship. Now, we are closer than we ever were. He is a confidant. See, Ann, my other best friend, is different. we accepted each other's friendships knowing that we were different people. It's like how Tolstoy described childhood friendships in Anna Karenina. It lasts because it was formed during the innocence of childhood.
For the past few days, I have been talking to my friend. We chat online and we can call each other in the nights to utilize free night minutes on our cell phones. Otherwise, neither one of us will ever use a phone! He knows that about me and I know the same about him. We were remembering times at school when we were being "experimented" on to see if our group (the school's first Direct Pass students) would do better than the transfer students in the CXC exams. Our teachers somehow thought that we would do better seeing that we were not transferring from a Junior Secondary School. CXC is the Caribbean equivalent of the London O Level exams. The exams were Math, English and Spanish. We were in form 4 and the transfers were form 5 students. Most of my friends were chosen to do English and Spanish. I did all three.
It was during this time that our friendship grew. In order to finish the syllabus a year ahead of time, we needed to get outside tutoring. I took math classes three times a week, spanish during my lunch break with my friends and english lessons at a teacher's house.
The English Lessons were the funniest memories of my time in school. Our teacher, a very skinny,"dry" lady offered to teach us at her house on Tuesday or Wednesday evenings for two hours at $50TT/month. In Trinidad, it was a steep price for tutoring. I was being tutored in math for 24 hours a month at $40TT/month. Our teacher's name was Kuntie. Now it's a beautiful name...outside of the English speaking world. Maybe it is a name that is only fit to be in the scriptures and should not really be toyed with outside of the Hindi meaning. Many of the students referred to her with the "ie" suffix left out of her name. Of course she was never called that name to her face. Thank goodness! we would have gotten a notebook full of lines to write for that one and probably reported to the Ministry of Education as well! Kuntie was a bit dramatic. Well not a bit, very. Kuntie really convinced us that she was doing us a huge favor on top of her exorbitant fee and many of her students were determined to get their money's worth.
She set up two tables in her dining room and the better table was given to her "angels." The other table was a piece of ply board sitting on four legs and it shook everytime we wrote. Kuntie would yell at us for making noise with the table too. It was many a time I had to hide below the table while i laughed at the happenings in her house. Our table seated the "terrors." Actually, Kuntie liked me a lot...initially. She liked the way I wrote short stories and she even told me that she could not write a short story the way i did. She graded very hard and no one got beyond a 20/25 on her stories. One day, she gave me a 23 and she entered my story in a contest. I never really told her that I used to write my stories during the lunch hour on the same day of the lessons and on the way to her home. In fact, many of her "terrors" did the same thing and their grades were always better than her "angels." Maybe we just had some vivid imaginations. For a short time, Nan came to these classes with me so she was a part of many of the jokes as well.
Kuntie had a tangerine tree in her back yard and it was laden with ripe fruits. In trinidad, we call them portugals but in the dialect it is pronounced as "pootigals." For some reason, that particular day, some of her tuesday students were joining us (they were alltogether bad) and they saw the fruits. While Kuntie was upstairs in her house, we were downstairs picking her pootigals and stuffing them in our pockets. two of the girls with us stuffed their blouses-front and back. I have no idea how Kuntie remained as clueless as she did but she never noticed all through the two hours that day. She even stopped to say at one time during the class, "it smells like portugals in here, doesn't it class." There was a collective "no" from the terror desk. Now we sat closer to the window and while she had her back turned, we were throwing the seeds and the peel outside the window. At the end of that class, Kuntie was trying to teach us what we say when people enquire about us.
"You do not say you are good. Good is one of the most hackneyed words in the entire english language. Write that word down. Hackneyed. it means overused. When someone asks, 'how are you?' You answer, ' I am well.' You do not say 'the food tasted good.' you say, 'the food tasted well.'" I don't know who asked if there is no past tense for well but all of a sudden one of the terrors at the head of the table busted out in a British accent, "the portugals tasted welded." There was an uproar in the terror table. Kuntie still did not notice. She was laughing and saying that it was stupid to say that and it was not a part of English. My friends and I were in fits! The next week though, she was upset. She told us that we had "stolen her young fruit." Another fit of laughter and someone even said that it was not young but ripe fruit.
Then there is the incident with my two best friends. Ann and S. we used to sit in kuntie's tv room while we waited for her to come downstairs to begin her class. While in the tv room, someone discovered Kuntie had cable tv so we used to watch tv as well. I have yet to figure out what Ann did, but on that particular day, she was about to get up when somehow she got tangled in the curtains and she pulled Kuntie's elaborate drapery display down, rod and all. Now Ann's reaction called for a videocam. It was totally dramatic but she was genuinely terrified. Ann stood holding the rod in her hand and she was jumping and begging at the same time for someone to come help her put the curtain back up. She was too short to reach the top and if she climbed, she would have to move the furniture and risk scratching it. We laughed first. All of us. S and I were enjoying it until we noticed Kuntie coming down the stairs. i was worried. there was a guy standing next to me who i asked to help her and he said he was not going into kuntie's tv room "before she say i mess up she carpet wit meh shoes!" S was the tallest amongst us (well over 6 feet tall) and he went in quickly and took the rod from Ann and put it back up where it belonged while Ann tried to fix everything back in place. If Kuntie had only seen us, she would have acted in her normal, anal way and caused a scene. We desperately tried to avoid that.
Now the classic one. Kuntie's bathroom door used to get locked and then not be able to open. One day, it got locked and Kuntie couldn't find the key to open the door..... and a girl had to pee. She really yelled at us for this one. She came back and her face was red, "okay, who locked the restroom door?" She looked over at our table. Really, we were innocent but she accused us anyway. Now, Kuntie wasted a lot of time cross-examining us about which one of us locked the door and looking for the key. All the while we were wondering why she didn't just let the girl go to the other restroom in her house. Well needless to say, Jeez and ages! there was a disaster right on Kuntie's dining room floor. We would have laughed if Kuntie was not so angry that day with us. That day, we had to wait until we came out of her class to laugh. We laughed all the way to the taxi hub.
Not long after, most of her "terrors" quit her class. Our exams were in June and we left in January. She had tutored us for three months. She refused to speak with us even up to the day of the exams. It turned out that the form 4s did do better than the form 5s. The "terrors" had passed all their subjects while the "angels" scored poorly or failed altogether. Maybe we did learn something after all! And even though Kuntie was the way she was, she really was an excellent english teacher.
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