Chembu’s Independence Day

“Vorai, Chembu!”

That, of course, was Mr. Chitti Babu, our P.T. Sir, yelling out to a boy whose name he had forgotten. But forgotten names never came in the way of Chitti Babu Sir’s calling upon someone that he had an errand for, alongside a pointing finger. His first recourse usually was to blow upon his shrill whistle, the one supposed to aid him in keeping all of us unruly boys and girls in sync during our Saturday morning drills. But since the whistle only got a vague general response from the whole class and not from the specific boy he had an errand for, he’d call for the water mug, a.k.a. chembu. Come to think of it, I guess he was addressing all the mugs in the class and wasn’t particular which mug responded to him.

His shout usually caught us boys in a quandary. On one hand, responding to his call meant respite from the monotonous exercises for the duration of the errand he wanted done. One the other hand, his errands were usually even more deadening than the exercise positions he would have us hold for what felt to us like hours at a stretch.

There was a third angle to being picked out. It meant that we definitely didn’t qualify as one of his favorites, like S. Giridhar was thanks to his sometimes-mercurial prowess with the cricket bat and ball. Or like P. Jiju, who refused to be treated as one of his favorites but was given preferential treatment anyway.

P. Jiju was one of those freaks of nature who was extremely good at math, science, languages, was probably the best football player in the school and also better at cricket than even S. Giridhar. He eventually went to work at a semi-conductor manufacturing company in Silicon Valley when this company called Intel was riding on a global boom around personal computer ownership.

So anyway, being called chembu and being called upon by Chitti Babu Sir with that epithet considerably lowered your standing in front of your whole class.

On this specific occasion, the embarrassment was to be with the entire school as audience. For we were rehearsing that morning for the upcoming Independence Day commemoration performance in front of Gen. K.V. Krishna Rao, the Chief of the Indian Army.

Our school, SRKV, was run by the Ramakrishna Mission with land donated by the Army and with support from the Army from time to time in different ways. One of our favorite ways was when we would all be bundled into the backs of army trucks, sitting battalion style facing each other, and trundled up to Bison Cinema, the open air theatre built for the enjoyment of the Bison Guards regiment in nearby Ramakrishnapuram. We were getting schooled in the arts, after all.

I have always been, in general, quite uncoordinated when it comes to making all my limbs work in unison. But my awkwardness would be shown up in full glory when, like on this occasion, I was asked to participate in lezim, those convoluted fitness drills based on the Maharashtrian folk dance by the same name. There were some, extremely few, boys who managed to not knot their limbs all around themselves. I was not one of those fortunate few. And there were less than a handful who actually enjoyed lezim. These were probably the ones who were extremely secure about their boyliness. Because if there was any part of the class that was completely at ease with lezim, and mighty good at it, it was the girls. The strength, the grace, the coordination, the melody of it all seemed to come fairly naturally to them. Not so much to me.

So when Chitti Babu Sir’s searing gaze caught me in their searchlights, the stentorian cry of Chembu! directed at me seemed like a heaven send.

“Yessir!” I cried.

“I’m ready to be whatever kind of chembu you want me to be,” I thought to myself, “as long as I can de-lezim-ize myself.”

There was another reason for my crying out with such readiness. In the anti-lezim laziness business, there were two others in the class who were the gold standard: A.P. Raghu and E.R. Venkat.

You may wonder why I remember and name them along with their initials. Back then, initials served two purposes. In South India in general, but especially in the Telugu- and Tamil-speaking states, last names were uncommon. And it was common to find others with the same first name as yours. We had two Giridhars, two Raghus and two Venkats in our midst. Hence, knowing your A.P. Raghu from your M. Raghu was important. As also your E.R. Venkat from your N. Venkat. Initials also separated us South Indians from the last name-spouting North Indians. (You have to remember this was before we were old enough to decipher a person’s place of origin from their last names.) Thus, you knew you could never confuse Pawan Kumar Saxena or Sunil Mehra or Vijender Pawar to be South Indians. And so, even though there was only one Jiju in the class, knowing he was P. Jiju told you he was not from the parantha-eating parts of the country.

Anyway, back to A.P. Raghu and E.R. Venkat.

A.P. was just a natural at energy conservation. Why move if you’re not forced to, was his motto. This included physical or mental motion. If he had bothered himself to be familiar with Newton’s laws of motion, he would have pointed to the Law of Inertia as the source of his logic.

“A body at rest will remain at rest unless an outside force acts on it, and a body in motion at a constant velocity will remain in motion in a straight line unless acted upon by an outside force.”

He would probably be exhausted even just thinking about the second option. So he contented himself with the first and lived it as much as he could.

E.R., on the other hand, was an artist. He was languid, not lazy. He didn’t dislike action so much as he eked as much out of as little as possible.

I guess though, on this occasion when I pipped them to be chembu of the day, their natural talents meant they were slower off the blocks than I was.

Providence, though, is such a wonderful thing. It can make a good thing way better than you can imagine it to be.

Just as I was walking up to Chitti Babu Sir to report for chembu duties, a first-class fracas broke out in the ranks. I very much doubt Gen. K.V. Krishna Rao would have been proud of it.

P. Jiju, ordinarily of a calm disposition, had been moved enough to take martial action. And his competitor in the ring was S. Giridhar. Now, S. Giridhar considered himself a bit of a Turram Khan (the original being one of the few 1857 revolutionaries to come out of Hyderabad) when it came to cricket in the school. He was not tall or big, but he had somehow contrived to very effectively copy the bowling action of the legendary Caribbean pacer, Malcolm Marshall. Maybe the famous arced run-up was enough to strike fear in the batsmen facing up to him, or maybe he was just about good enough to be the best in school cricket. And his addi maar guddi debba (roughly, “swing and if you’re lucky, you’ll hit the ball a lusty blow”) style of batting had established his reputation, in his opinion at least, as the best in the school.

But all this was before P. Jiju was casually called upon to play cricket one day. He was usually disdainful of cricket and much preferred the pace, skill and footwork of football. In a short game, he showed he could whip up a fearful pace from a short run-up (like a certain Wasim Akram) or bowl leg or off-spin as he pleased. And his batting would have pleased the likes of Sunny Gavaskar.

What brought about the fight between a normally unflappable P. Jiju and a more quarrelsome S. Giridhar?

While Chitti Babu Sir’s attention was occupied with summoning the chembu of the day (viz., me), someone suggested that we should choose P. Jiju as the captain of the school cricket team. S. Giridhar got mad at this.

“P. Jiju? He doesn’t know the A of Cricket. He should stick to his maths books and focus on getting the one mark he missed in the last exam because of which he couldn’t get 100/100.”

Now, P. Jiju didn’t really care for S. Giridhar’s opinion on most things and would have continued to ignore him. Except what came next.

“But that’s nothing,” S. Giridhar continued. “Have you seen his little brother P. Jinu? You should see him tuck his tail and run when I’m bowling to him. Hahahaha! Where is P. Jinu? Hey P. Jinu! Have you found your tail yet? Do you need help looking for it? Hahahahaha!!!”

Now, I’d barely ever seen P. Jiju even acknowledge the presence of his brother in school ever, but he was definitely not going to have some pretender make fun of him in his presence. With all the righteous anger that comes from being a big brother, he marched up to S. Giridhar, and without wasting any time in verbal arguments, gave him one mighty shove that sent S. Girdhar sprawling to the ground.

There was a shocked expression on the face of Lakshmi Menon, who also happened to be the daughter of our class teacher, Ms. Vinaya Menon. Anamika Chatterjee seemed like she was enjoying the spectacle, having put her lezim down to cheer S. Giridhar on (I think she liked the rowdier elements in the school more than the studious ones).

That was enough for all the rest of the school to break into an unruly mess.

And into this melee waded in Chitti Babu Sir, blowing his whistle madly, trying in vain to restore some order with a desperate series of “Phee! Phee!! Pheeee!!!!”

It took a few minutes to separate S. Jiju and P. Giridhar, that’s how entangled they had become, clutching each other’s shirts as if they had been born attached to them.

Now ordinarily the school playgrounds where P.T. class usually happened were quite a distance from the office of Mr. T. P. Rao, our school principal. But such was the raucous ruckus that happened that the whole student population that had been on the ground for the Independence Day rehearsal erupted in noise. That level of noise was loud enough to reach the ears of Mr. T.P. Rao.

As a result, the entire rehearsal was canceled. Chitti Babu Sir, P. Jiju and S. Giridhar were summoned to Mr. T.P. Rao’s office.

And in all of that confusion, I ended up with independence from two things well before Independence Day. No lezim exercises. And no chembu-ing either!