Authors, Bengali -- 20th century -- Biography; Tagore, Rabindranath, 1861-1941
There was also an hour when we would be told all about human bones by a
pupil of the Campbell Medical School, for which purpose a skeleton, with
the bones fastened together by wires was hung up in our schoolroom. And
finally, time was also found for Pandit Heramba Tatwaratna to come and
get us to learn by rote rules of Sanscrit grammar. I am not sure which
of them, the names of the bones or the _sutras_ of the grammarian, were
the more jaw-breaking. I think the latter took the palm.
We began to learn English after we had made considerable progress in
learning through the medium of Bengali. Aghore Babu, our English tutor,
was attending the Medical College, so he came to teach us in the
evening.
Books tell us that the discovery of fire was one of the biggest
discoveries of man. I do not wish to dispute this. But I cannot help
feeling how fortunate the little birds are that their parents cannot
light lamps of an evening. They have their language lessons early in the
morning and you must have noticed how gleefully they learn them. Of
course we must not forget that they do not have to learn the English
language!
The health of this medical-student tutor of ours was so good that even
the fervent and united wishes of his three pupils were not enough to
cause his absence even for a day. Only once was he laid up with a broken
head when, on the occasion of a fight between the Indian and Eurasian
students of the Medical College, a chair was thrown at him. It was a
regrettable occurrence; nevertheless we were not able to take it as a
personal sorrow, and his recovery somehow seemed to us needlessly swift.
It is evening. The rain is pouring in lance-like showers. Our lane is
under knee-deep water. The tank has overflown into the garden, and the
bushy tops of the Bael trees are seen standing out over the waters. Our
whole being, on this delightful rainy evening, is radiating rapture like
the _Kadamba_ flower its fragrant spikes. The time for the arrival of
our tutor is over by just a few minutes. Yet there is no certainty...!
We are sitting on the verandah overlooking the lane[12] watching and
watching with a piteous gaze. All of a sudden, with a great big thump,
our hearts seem to fall in a swoon. The familiar black umbrella has
turned the corner undefeated even by such weather! Could it not be
somebody else? It certainly could not! In the wide wide world there
might be found another, his equal in pertinacity, but never in this
little lane of ours.
Looking back on his period as a whole, I cannot say that Aghore Babu was
a hard man. He did not rule us with a rod. Even his rebukes did not
amount to scoldings. But whatever may have been his personal merits, his
time was _evening_, and his subject _English_! I am certain that even an
angel would have seemed a veritable messenger of Yama[13] to any Bengali
boy if he came to him at the end of his miserable day at school, and
lighted a dismally dim lamp to teach him English.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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