THE LAST LESSON

My first encounter with education culminated in a voluntary defecation mechanism that expressed my dissent at the mention of the play school principal’s name in a wordless universe. And so I found myself lost in the world of water colours, pebbles with painted beetles, spray paints and hand made paper in Sattva .A free progress school based on the ideologies of the mystic Shri Augasthya.

All of us 3 year olds were asked to paint or laugh or play or swim in the round class ( that doubled as a swimming pool after lunch ) to assess if the child was tuned in to the vision. A school with no tests, no books, no uniforms where classes were called ‘Red’, ‘Blue’ or ‘Receptivity’ and teachers were called ‘Didi’ or ‘Bhaiya’, where you learnt about Guatamela by cooking Bunuelos and mathematics by making mud houses on trees, wasn’t exactly what education meant to the average Delhite.

Suvarna Didi my first teacher was a stream of joyous devotion that flowed into the fields of our urbane childhood, bringing with it the incense of marigolds from her native village in Orissa. When we spent many a winter night glued behind telescopes in odes of starlit wonder, she would make a fire and gather us to tell us tales from her village – of mythical beasts and ghosts and worlds from days bygone.


Every morning we sat in the meditation hall and wondered why this mystic Agasthya never ventured from his cave, behind the Peepul tree. He was never seen and would never be, from what little we could gather. The cave and the sage were the only ‘ forbidden’ topics of our childhood.

One day she took me aside and looked deep inside my eyes as she oiled my hair and said
’ Abuu Ji, always remember that you’re special. Even though you forget your shoes and go to the school bus bare feet and can’t tie your own shoelaces. There’s a secret I have always known about you. I shall reveal it to you, the day you make something that’s truly yours and yours alone. ’ The magic of that memory stayed with me for a long time. My childhood didn’t. Times passed by, the steel of the century I lived in, endless calculations, the rock bottom of poetic conception – the fact that its all money and only money, dug their sharp fangs into me.

I was now graying, a bitter man with wounds of alienation and failure gnawing at me from all sides, and worse a hunger, that I couldn’t place. A possession took hold of me – I left my home and my family and went back to the tree at Sattva with yellow and black pastels that I sprayed in catharsis at the same old mute Peepul tree.

A figure in white emerged, Suvarna Di – untouched by time like an old photograph. ‘Abbu Ji’ she said, eyes gleaming ‘ The time has come.’ She took out a yellowed piece of handmade paper and placed it in front of me. I saw a majestic vertebrate, striped in gold and black, proud and fiery. I looked at the tree. His eyes stared back at me. Suvarna Di put a finger on her lip and motioned me to follow her, behind the peepul tree into the forbidden cave of childhood. It opened on its own, illumined. Unreal. I saw sculptures of different mammoth mammals with two legs, three and four all leading to two forms of supreme poise – one with two legs, a tall upright spine and clean sculpted features and the other – the majestic four legged form in yellow and black that was caged inside of me.

AGASTHYA BUZZED ‘ABUU, LOOK!’. HE LIFTED HIS WINGS AND MOVED TOWARDS A RED KNOB, HIS PROBISCIS SUCKED INTO IT TO EFFECT A PRESS. AND THE TWO LEGGED MAMMAL SHOT AN ARROW THROUGH THE MAJESTIC BEAST’S HEART CRASH! BOOM! BANG! THE WHOLE INSTALLATION OF DIFFERENT SCULPTURES TURNED INTO A HEAP OF DUST.

Agasthya and Suvarna Di flew towards me to bestow the crown of the enlightened mosquito upon me.