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One monsoon evening, as I sat watching the clouds, a bogie went past with a rhythmic dhadak… dhadak… sound.
I was in the eighth standard then. It must have been fifteen or twenty days, or perhaps a month, since I had moved from higher primary school to high school.
There was a lesson about the poet’s imagination of clouds. White clouds were compared to the grey hair of an old woman, and so on. Our Kannada Non-Detailed lessons were taught by Shri M. Rajagopal. After the lesson, he asked us to write a two-page essay.
As for me, whenever I looked at clouds, I had a habit of forgetting the rest of the world. My mother would often scold me for it. If I found anyone willing to listen, I would point at the clouds and say, “That looks like this… that looks like that…” and bore them with my observations. I never imagined that I could actually write about them. Now that I had the opportunity…
I wrote.
And wrote…
And wrote…
I filled nearly eight pages.
Proudly, I placed my notebook along with everyone else’s. For someone who struggled to fill even two pages on other subjects, feeling proud was only natural, wasn’t it?
The same teacher also taught us English. He had given us some writing work in that subject as well. Lost among the clouds, I had not done it. The first period the next day was English.
By then, he had already corrected the Kannada essays. My notebook was at the very end of the pile. After returning everyone else’s notebooks, he picked up mine and walked over to me.
I thought he was going to praise me in front of everyone.
Instead, right before my eyes, he struck out a few portions with his red ink pen and said, “I asked for two pages. You’ve written eight. Rewrite this in just two pages and bring it back.”
Like every parent thinks their own child is special, I was unwilling to part with any of my ideas. On top of that, I had been embarrassed in front of the whole class.
My eyes filled with tears. I lowered my head. The Netravati flowing from my eyes came down and wet the desk.
Perhaps he felt sorry for me.
In as gentle a voice as he could manage, he stroked my head and said, “Look, no matter how much you know, in an examination you should write only as much as is required. Writing more won’t earn you extra marks. That’s one thing you must remember. Secondly, if you keep writing endlessly about a topic you know well, you won’t have enough time to answer the entire question paper.”
At that moment, I felt a mixture of anger, disappointment, and sadness.
Yet even during my postgraduate studies, I would remember him.
Had he not done that that day, perhaps I would have spent my life writing endlessly about the subjects I loved, and in the process dealt a blow to my own future.
Who knows…
By Veena Shanbhogue
Translation and Preservation by Sumanth Shanbhogue
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