Late one afternoon in 19.., pedestrians on Casa Major Road in the sleepy town of Chennai, or Madras as it was then known, witnessed the curious sight of an inky-fingered schoolboy being chased down a tree-lined avenue by an irate schoolmaster brandishing a foot ruler. I should know, since I was the schoolboy while my assailant was a swarthy, ferret-faced, pencil-moustached sadist who gloried in the name of Harris. School had just re-opened after the summer break and the campus buzz dealt exclusively with an act of foolhardy derring-do perpetrated by a few old boys nursing a grudge against our namby-pamby Principal.
Having passed through those same leafy avenues and moved onto higher and nobler things, like college, a selection of our alumni had returned on Parents Day not to honour the Principal but to improve his appearance by giving him a facial with a few well-directed rotten eggs.
They had come, you could say, like Shylock, to claim their pound of flesh. One minute there was this impressive, solemn, gowned figure holding forth from the podium about the virtues of a healthy mind in a healthy body only, to be reduced to a hapless, bumbling figure of fun in the next, while dabbling at his streaming glasses and brushing the smelly yolk off his lapels.
What guts, we thought, what a ballsy display of bravado: surely this was the stuff heroes were made of - without a doubt these guys were either going to jail, or becoming Black Cat commandos. In this surcharged atmosphere, when my classmate Mihir idly dared me to road test my chewing gum in the well-oiled curls of Jeyapal, seated in the row ahead, only a coward would have dithered. Leaning forward, I teased one ringlet with the well-chewed wad of gum and smirked knowingly at Mihir, which proved to be my undoing. "Stick it through one of his curls and take it out the other side," he goaded, in a guttural whisper.
"Okay Mihir, you may be the only guy in Std 9 with a moustache, but I'm the man with nerves of steel," I boasted as I attempted the delicate maneouvre. I was concentrating so intently on the task in hand that I hadn't noticed the absolute quiet in the classroom: Harris was on the prowl. There was no love lost between us owing to my ill-timed efforts to improve on the spelling of his name on the blackboard: Harrass…hairy ass etc
Schoolboy rumour had it that Harris, a crotchety bachelor, nurtured a secret crush on the plump, oily-headed Jeyapal. Either that, or besides the “love that dared not speak its name”, they both shared a passion for coconut oil. I had almost got the wad of gum clear of his hair when the fool shook his head impatiently, the gum held firm and the rest as they say, is history.
Impulsively clutching at his locks, he only succeeded in entrenching the forces of Wrigley's more firmly in their battle against tresses fortified by Parachute coconut oil. Jeyapal's howls and the thwack of Harris' ruler, descending on my arm in violent revenge for the ignominy visited on his "pet", were more or less simultaneous.
Seeing the veins standing out on his forehead and the spittle gathered at the side of his mouth, I decided the only prudent course of action was flight and hot-footed it down the aforementioned tree-lined avenue, consoling myself with dark thoughts of what I'd do to Harris once I was through with school. “Just you wait, you SOB, I'll come back and shave off your moustache and make you eat it. I'll fix you, just see if I don't.”
Childish schemes of revenge were racing through my mind even as my body developed angry red welts from Harris's ruler cuts. I'm hazy about the details but I dimly remember being asked to “bring my parents” and write a lengthy imposition. Corporal punishment, back then in the dark ages, was as much part of school-life as i-phones and Nike trainers today.
But time the great healer, softened the blow and my college days, exciting though they were, were unsullied by any Harris-bashing escapades. The passage of time and a measure of maturity put paid to those childish schemes of revenge.
Recently work took me to Chennai and I happened to run into an old acquaintance. “Whatever happened to old Harris?” I enquired idly. “Croaked boss, left the school when someone complained, then croaked quite suddenly.”
