My Little School

And a strangely ironic protagonist

My Balwadi by Rukmini Banerji, illustrated by Sheetal Thapa and translated by Madhav Chavan

This story is about a school. The kind of school little children attend. What interests me most about this book is not the book itself. It’s the arch, slightly knowing voice that the protagonist adopts, despite the fact that this is a book for very little children. And the possibility that he’s perhaps not intended to be either knowing or arch. That’s what interests me.

But we digress. What do children do in school?

First, of course, they arrive — they arrive in their dribs and drabs. Some children have brothers and sisters and other children have no brothers and sisters at all. Our protagonist has a brother.

They, all the children, go into the classroom — there are sometimes more than once classroom in a school, even a local one — and they hang up their tiffin boxes. Some children have big tiffin boxes and others have smaller ones. They are different sizes and colours, too. The children notice these differences as they are herded into their classrooms for lessons.

And what is the point of those lessons?

They are given exercises with the hope that these things teach them lessons. They are given games that are meant to be instructive and helpful. Games with abacuses and coloured paper. They are handed geometric shapes with the hope that this will give them a grounding in geometry. And they are educated in the very basics of reading and, in time, writing. They are given picture books — books like this — and encouraged to make out the letters and the words involved. Who can repeat and spell this word? That kind of thing.

But our little protagonist tells us that although the other children struggle to make out letters and words, he can already read phrases. His teacher does not know it, he says. And when later we are shown some of the edutainment planned by the teacher — she takes out puppets and makes them perform for the children — the protagonist says that unlike the other children, he knows the puppet is not really speaking: that it’s just his teacher marionetting the puppet and putting on a silly voice.

Am I alone in detecting some irony in this character? A little of the question ‘what does he know?’

No one else knows what I know, he may think. No one else among these children can see as far as I can see. Some of the school day is taken up in fun for the sake of crowd control. There is an educative, edutainment focus for some of it, of course. But our protagonist is shown participating in what he might think — if he is as sly and winking as he sometimes appears — is a farce. He drily notes that when his mother arrives to collect the protagonist and his brother, he hugs his mother first, annoying the brother quite a lot.

Am I alone in detecting some smug condescension in our protagonist? He played it brilliantly — this game of bluff and prediction. He got what he wanted, and he can smile at the infuriated gamers he has simply outplayed, left in the dust, seen off.

And now the triumphal procession back to the home. Going home in triumph having seen through the teacher’s charades, having ‘won’ the day. Back home to sleep the sleep of the righteous after possibly consuming a large and righteous dinner.

I like school, the protagonist comments, but I like going home best.

No doubt he does, I think. No doubt he does, indeed. The emperor does not need to remain long upon the site of an earthly triumph. He may leave the field of battle at his leisure, and move on to bigger and better things.

We all remember parts of our own early years at school and they were not, perhaps, scenes of unmixed victory. I tend to remember other people getting hurt instead of me, but one or two of them stick in the mind regardless.

I remember a boy leaning back on his chair — after he’d been told before about children smashing their heads in when they leant back on their chairs — and falling and cutting his face above and below his eyebrow, needing stitches. Or perhaps that was just something someone else saw and told me about. It was quite some time ago. I remember once being told off quite enthusiastically at primary school and being quite surprised that I could not — no matter how much I tired — look up and away from my shoes for the duration. Could not meet my accuser’s eyes.

I had not previously considered my shoes very interesting. They’d drawn few glances, even from me. But at that moment and time they attracted a lot of attention.

Believe me, I was surprised at this. As surprised as you would be if you found you could not lift your left arm. I did not think I was one of those people who stared at their shoes rather than take a dressing down. I was incredulous. My internal monologue was probably one of confusion, followed in due time by speculation about the causes of all of this. It turned out — at the age of seven or eight, at least — that I was that sort of person. I did look at my shoes rather than look a teacher in the eye.

My school was not a place of victory and honour that day.