The Bullies and Pedophiles

Chapter 5: The Bullies and Pedophiles

I never thought that I would ever write about them.

Not because they were totally unknown to me, but I thought they were never part of my life experience as a child growing up in that picture perfect village. I could be wrong in assuming that.

As I had written earlier about my obesity causing all the trouble for me at school, I came to realize that there were bullies in every school who just spent their time making fun of other children and were able to get out of trouble by their jokes and popularity.

There was one such fellow in my class. Apparently he was already there before I and other students joined. The class consisted of all the fifth graders moved from various elementary schools. I moved from the elementary school along with three or four good friends. They all knew me.

The boy who was already in the class was repeating the year. Because of this, he knew everyone. He lived close to school and knew the alleyways near the school and all the senior students and teachers.

He knew my father as a teacher in the school. My father had many nephews and nieces as his students during the prior years. They all called him a name meaning like “little uncle.”

I did not know that it was my father's nickname among the senior students. But over the first few weeks I came to know that they are all making fun of me with my father’s nick name.

This was not a derogatory name and it did not bother me. But the fact is that whatever nickname you call someone, the effect is based upon the reason behind calling that name.

So this was bestowed upon me by the boy in the class. When I was sitting in the class, he kicked the bench multiple times to make my pen come out of the book or to cause difficulty in holding book in my hand. This torture continued along with drawing on the place where I sat, so that when I stood up, the writing would be visible over the dark trousers I wore.

My teachers paid no attention to these things and no one bothered to tell them.

Interestingly in the class, the bully picked on me only- at least that was what I felt at that time.

One day the teacher was late to arrive in the class during a post recess period.

  The boy continued with his usual past time of throwing paper arrows towards my head and broken chalk pieces while singing a latest movie song. Many of my class mates were just laughing and giggling while watching my helpless plight. This continued for few moments. Then the boy climbed up on the desks, jumping from one to another and placed himself on a bench facing me.

I was so mad. I stood up, and seeing my face, he knew that this was taking a different turn. Without showing his surprise, he started teasing me with names, and was also probably thinking that I was a coward and having my father working in the same school, I wouldn’t dare to start a fight in the class room.

But he was wrong. I walked towards him, pushing off my desk with my own books on them.

I saw my friends hurriedly retrieving my books, the pencils, erasers, the bits and bobs from the geometry instrument box fell open on the floor, and rearranging the fallen benches behind me. I felt the power, the gathering momentum in my mind. I was not sure, however what I would’ve done to him or what could happen to me once this fight was over.

I kept moving towards him, who by this time realized that something might go terribly wrong in that fifth grade class room where all the thirty children staring at him, being cornered, trapped between a desk and the wall beside.

He then thought his plan, the last resort.

“Come on…””come on… fight with me you ****”

That was the last sentence I could let him finish.

I lifted up the bench at one end, sliding him to the ground. He fell on his back, could not get out as trapped between the furniture. His sandals flew to the corner, which then someone kicked to far, so that he could not get it.

Then I saw him crying. That was surprising that  the greatest bully I knew till that time was crying infront of the class.

I did not have anything else to do.

The whole class took over the onslaught, throwing chalk pieces and paper arrows at him.

I heard him saying that he was going to complain to my father about this. I was somewhat shaken by this whole incident and he just uttered my greatest fear of all.

However he did not read my mind.
 I just walked to my desk. I kept my head straight

Everything was quiet, except other children calling him nicknames.

It was finally their turn. I just made it easy for them.

Against all odds, I realized that he became my close friend in the following months. He forgot about that incident and we never spoke about it.  It was a great change. He never bullied me. He never bullied anyone for that matter.

I was not sure that a concussion changed his mind.

It could be that he was somewhat insecure in himself and was overwhelmed by the new students coming to his class where he felt he was the “dumbest person”

Over the coming months, I learned lot of survival tactics from him. We did not resort to any bullying or join any gangs. 
He told me about the pedophiles near the school.

I had seen those men always stayed near the school entrance and whistling at girls and passing dirty comments. They had no jobs. They all failed the high school exam and just spent time gossiping and playing cards near the school. Sometimes they volunteered in the athletic days and the arts festival days helping the teachers. They stayed in the open classrooms after the school session was over, smoking Cigarettes and Marijuana. They talked about the local prostitutes and their made up stories about past trips to the city where they actually had sex with film actresses.

I was not however sure what they might do with the young boys. However they always made fun of the children’s legs which were visible below the short knickers we wore.

Some of these people knew my father as he was their teacher in the high school. When they approached me and if they noticed that my father was around, they would go away.

My father probably never knew what these people were like. If I had asked about them, my father would scold me for spending time outside the class and hanging around with those “undesirables”

Some of these men were funny, so children were always following them. They threw rocks at mango trees and gave the children mangoes. When they won the card games, they brought sweets and ice popsicles to children. They gave free ride to children on their bike to school.

However the danger lurked. I was not sure whether some of the children were abused. I knew forsure, that some children always spent time with those grown up men.

There were no societal regulations against it. Every neighbor accepted children to their house. Everyone thought that children were safe with someone they knew for years.

Interestingly over many years in that school, I came to know these gangs. I was quite sure that some people abused boys as their excuse for not going to prostitutes. Some of them were just pedophiles.

I spent my  weekends in those years playing with my cousins in the neighborhood. 
One of the uncles had built a strip of shops and there were barbershop, grocery shops, Tailor etc. 
The barber shop will have all the film magazines and newspapers to read free. When I hang around with tailoring shop, I learned the techniques of sewing. Some of the tailors worked for some time and then went with us for walks.

I enjoyed their stories and gossips about the locals. I will go home to eat lunch and then hang around if I get time to play with my cousins.

One such trip was somehow ended up in something totally unexpected. It was afternoon. One of the guys in the tailoring shop and the assistant tailor told me that they are going to the nearby town and asked me to go with them, so that they will walk me  home. It was just normal to walk with them.

When we reached near my house, while narrating the stories, they went to a building close to my house. It was Sunday and the building was closed. At that time there was not much traffic in the street. There was nothing for a sixth grader to worry about in that neighborhood. Everyone knew me. I was also near my house.

We then sat on the smooth cemented corridor, enjoying the breeze and talked about the new movies getting released. 
 In the country, it was (still) normal for men to place arms around friends or hug them, without any sexual connotations. So when this man who sat next to me placed his left arm around my neck, I did not feel anything different. However then I saw him holding my hand and placing in the middle of his groin over his clothes, I was puzzled. While talking about the movie, this was totally unexpected. I pulled my hand away, but felt that he was gripping my hand so strong as well as trying to stroke against his engorged organ under his clothes.

That was the moment I realized that the whole charade of walking with me and being friendly to me had a different meaning. I am so happy that I was smart enough to run away from that corridor of vulnerability without being hurt physically and emotionally. But I was not sure about other children of my age.

Afterwards my mission was to break their racket from preying on our friends. I never spent any time hanging around these men. Many of my friends knew who the pedophiles were. Interestingly there were stories about the local priest in the church going around with boys, but no adults seemed to end these, and talked as it was just a joke. One of our neighbors, a boy younger than me was promised a part in movies by a well-known pedophile and actor who went to make movies and made that as his easy way to get to children.

This was a chapter from

The Chicken Pox

Chapter4 : The Chicken Pox

Contrary to what I thought, it changed me emotionally and physically. 

I mean the Chickenpox.

One might think that the small craters left over my face and torso was what I am referring to.

 No; that was not the issue at all.

It was the second week of the new academic year.

 I went to get new textbooks from the bookstore two miles from my house. Possibly being excited, I decided that I should walk through the unusual ways I never travelled. It actually took more time to get home. I was somewhat tired, thirsty and had a headache. 

There was nothing different at home in the afternoon. I spend time at home. I probably read some pages from my new text books… fascinating as they always were.

We had the usual night time card playing session. I went to bed after feeling sleepy. Somewhere in the middle of the sleep, I woke up and walked to the living room. I remembered my mother holding my hands and putting back to my bed. I had a fever that night.

Next morning everyone was poking fun at me about what I was talking in sleep and sleep walking.

I did not understand what the big joke was, anyway.

I went to school. While standing outside the school, I met some family friends. I remember one of them while sitting on his bike saw the water filled bubbles on my forehead. “Let me poke it for you”, He said.

With his sharp nails, he scratched it off from my forehead with pleasure.

The rest of the day I spent in school.

The chicken pox was on me, covering my body with all the vesicles.

I was annoyed when my father came up with his isolation plan. But more annoyances followed.

I was banned from attending school for four weeks. My father made sure that I was secluded in one of the bedrooms.

 My sister was sent to my uncle’s house till I was cleared of the infection. I was not allowed to use bathroom outside. My food was delivered in separate plates by the maid, who would be my contact to outside. Apparently she had the share of this infection in the past. I could see my mother only through the window, as the bedroom door would be locked from outside. No one would come to my room. I would only wear a white flannel towel, which mysteriously appeared from nowhere by that time.

The bed room was emptied of all the clothes and book etc. by that time. I was not allowed to read as my family thought that it would cause damage to my eye sight.

By that time the weather was hot. The vesicles on my body started to itch as if pocked with thousand tiny needles. I was not sure whether during that time everyone was confusing chicken pox with small pox and I was given all the combinations of medications from Allopathic to Homeopathy and of course, the local remedies. I was given a branch of neem tree, which I did hit the leaves over my vesicles instead of scratching them.

I remember crying for many days.

Against my father’s instructions, I did read. But those were the old newspaper used to wrap the snacks from the shop and some weekly magazines dropped through the window by my good old neighbor friend, who knew that I was just dying to read the serialized detective novel in them.

 I did not have much visitors except my uncles, my father’s brother and my mother’s brother who brought sweets. My uncle brought dissolving orange flavored Vitamin C tablets, which I enjoyed.

I had stayed in that room with only communication channel being the open window.

I was spending time like someone in a prison would do.

I pulled the cotton threads from my cloth, made wet in water, stuck over the carvings of the headboard of my bed. I made faces.

Then the vesicles started drying up after one week. I was quite used to the fishy smell from my body as I was not allowed to take bath till those vesicles crusted. I was allowed to go outside if I needed to have a bowel movement, but by that time, no one would be allowed to step on my way to outside bathroom.

I lost track of the days while being secluded in that room.

Then one day it rained. 
It rained so heavily that while standing next to the wooden window I could feel the cold soothing breeze trying to heal all the pain.

I was happy for the next two days. I did not know what was in store for me.

The local herbal practitioners had instructed that my parents get the bark of the mango tree for me.

They crushed it, to make like a Brillo pad so that it would help to scrub out all the scabs from my body when I took the shower.

There was soap, but I was not allowed to use it, but there are soap-like herbal preparations waiting for me.

I realized that this was the most painful ordeal I had. The splinters from the bark scrubbed my skin with oozing blood and some stayed tangles with my skin, refusing to leave for hours.

Finally the day came…

The door was opened and I could go to the other rooms in my house. My sister was somewhat frightened to come near me. But there was a belief that people who got scared to see the rash were the people who contracted the disease. Anyway, she did not get it, as was rest of my family.

When I started school back again, I was bullied by many children in the school. I was not sure what the reason was. For many days, There was no mirror in my room, which was purposely removed to not to alarm me. My parents knew that if I had seen my face, I would have worried.

I am sure that was true, but what I was bullied for was nothing I could know for many years.

I was called “Road roller”, “Balloon” etc. to depict the obesity I had. I was not aware that I gained so much weight during that isolation, when my parents pushed all the “healthy food” for me. I was just heaping up the calories without any exercise.

I realized that I had to get new clothes, but that was together with the fact that I was also growing up.

I hated the recess when you are the subject of ridicule among the lean friends. Even though my father was a teacher in school did not help it.

The interesting fact about my family is that it was unrealistic for my parents to ever place me on weight reducing diet. 

As a younger child, I always had some sort of malabsorption and failure to thrive regardless of their attempts of feeding me. So seeing I gaining weight was as per my mother-she still believes this unfortunately-was the sign of good health.

The weight I had gained stayed with me for many more years, and its social effects.


Next:   The Bullies and Pedophiles

The Movies

Chapter 3:  The Movies

The humid evenings brought the sounds of crickets and lightning bugs along with the scent of gardenia flowers  to the house. We played cards and also watched movies in those evenings. So we had plenty of that when we were young. 
At home we used to play cards till midnight everyday . 
My father used to go to a club to play cards too. That was his favorite pastime. One night, my mother did not open the door for him because he came very late after the midnight. 
My father enjoyed  movies and I remember going with him for the second shows in the night to far away places too. 
His fascination for the movies made him build a movie house next to our house. The idea was good. The nearest movie place closed down because of unpopular films and bad management. We had a suitable land and my father had plenty of time.  My father was never good at business. He never had a slightest idea of the intricacies of the cinema business. My uncle retired from the Air Force helped my father with his time and money too.
After his movie house started making money, the old movie house reopened and became our competitor. They had more money to invest and their location was good with plenty of public transportation and we suffered badly.

It was tough time for me. 
After coming back from college, I had to work as projectionist’s assistant, ticket vendor and gate keeper. When the collection was bad and people openly criticize for bad films and damage the seats, my father just kept calm. It was too much for me to take. I had to stay till midnight after the shows were done, locked everything up and do all the accounting. Local taxes were assessed on the daily sales and record keeping was a headache. When I cameback, I would start reading for my university examinations. I wanted to get in to the medical school badly because I wanted to prove to my parents that I could do it.

I had to go in the midnight to stick posters of the movies in the streets and go to the nearest district to bring the box of films for the show. Transporting the heavy box of films was a real nightmare. Most of the bus operators would want it to be loaded on the top of the bus. I had to bargain with the porter to get it loaded, but the bus drivers would make a big fuss when I climbed to the top and getting them delayed. Even though the hard work spoilt my fascination with the movies, it was enjoyable when I later invited my college friends for a night at my house and movie next door. And actually  the movies paid my tuition and I spent less and less with the actual enterprise.

When I was very young, my father and his colleagues from the school started a private loan firm called Allied Enterprises and he was always busy with that in the afternoons. But that made him got involved in various community activities and kept him occupied. Those days I did not know what “Allied” meant. After years of business, he lost lot of money as well as my mother’s jewelry . 
One day he closed the firm down , brought all the desks and numerous ledger books and papers to cram our spare bedroom. There were so many  notes and receipts of loans; but my father did not have the money to hire lawyers to chase the defaulters. It was a constant nagging point for my mother and it also made us believe that my father was a failure in the business. He never had a time without any loans. Probably if he had never started those businesses, he could have lived more years and I would not have inherited his debts.

When we had lot of burglaries in the village , my father and his friends organized a sort of neighborhood watch with midnight patrolling and caught some local thieves . My mother cooked hot meal for the patrol gang and I used to hang around with them in the night, listening to their fascinating stories of adventure.

My father would go to the beach nearby on weekends and watch the fishermen bring the big prawns and other fishes.
 In the crowd, the fishermen would recognize my father and forced him to accept a big sac of live fish for my sake. Many times they refused to take money from him. That was the only time I actually saw and played with ice.  Probably that was the biggest reason for me to visit the beach. Most often, I took a big chunk of ice to show to my sister, but by the time we reached home, you know what happened.

Another trip I liked to do was a visit to the town to purchase the hardware for home improvement. The whole day I would walk with him suffering from migraine and nausea and eating nothing, except a cup of ice cream, the only food I ate from restaurants.

My father had a gasoline run water pump. It was the first one in the village before the electricity came to our village.  He did  rent it to people who needed  to water their coconut trees.  He had two helpers who would pull the cart with the pump and my father would hold the "foot valve" end of the long heavy black PVC hose. 
Those days I never thought it was hard work and I did not knew how much he made out of that enterprise. Later, Diesel water pumps became common in every house and he stopped the pump rental. 
But water pump was a great fascination for me. When it was working, we children play in the jet and make sand dams in the channel. We used to get lot of fishes also, when the ponds were pumped empty. When the water pumps broke down, we would call our only plumber and repairman . His house is studded with various kinds of damaged pumps. His assistant was his son, two years younger than me. He was very proud of his son and asked his son questions about the pump to impress me and my father. It was always interesting to watch the pump being repaired. My father would ask me to help the repairman. Most of the time, my father would also work as his assistant. In the end, when we started the pump, and we saw the water being pumped from the out let, our hearts would leap. 
It was always a struggle to pay the repairman the money. My father has to push it to his pocket rather than give to him in his hand. He was doing it out of respect.

When we started the movie house, he was the chief technical expert. He was the first cinema projector operator and Guru of all the operators. We called him "Aasan",meaning Master. So he had an ego problem also and treated his new assistants like idiots. Finally we had to let him go and he joined our rival business to our surprise. He had invited my father to visit the new movie house; even though my father wanted to go and see the facilities, but  his pride did not allow him to do that till he died.

The Experiments

Chapter 2:  The Experiments

The days were spent between playing in the neighborhood and at school. The seasons brought differing tasks to every household. During the days of harvest, the rooms in the house was full of grain and courtyard with fresh hay. The dry summer months were busy with tasks of watering the trees. Even though I was the only Son, there were no exceptions.My father was usually strict and overpowering;but  he never created a situation to make things worse than they actually were. 
There were only two instances I can recall about my father actually hitting me.  One was when I stayed longer ,playing at a neighbor’s house without even showing up for lunch. Another was just a thump on my head I got when I was ten years old, during a school trip. We were visiting a place called Kanya Kumari,  where the Indian ocean meets Arabian sea.
 I was with a group separate from my father’s. We visited Gandhi memorial and were proceeding to take the boat  to a temple built on a small rock island in the sea. I was just looking at some exhibits in the curio shops in the sidewalk. Suddenly I received a blow to my head and shocked to see my father red with rage probably frustrated after hours of searching for me in the island and sea side multiple times. I knew how he felt on that day. It was not my mistake, but I pretended that I took the blame for it. He was thinking about the moment when he would have to go back from the trip without me and explaining to my mother that he lost me somewhere.

 In my house,I had two draws full of bits and bobs of rubbish I collected from everywhere at home. I experimented with them and started repairing many house hold appliances like electric iron and table fans. My father was a Diabetic in his 40’s and he used to test his urine for sugar using test tubes, spirit lamp and the blue Benedict’s solution.
 I liked the colors when it was yellowish orange than green, not knowing that his glucose control was awfully bad. 
Me and my sister also played doctor and patient with the tubes of water color supplied by my aunt.

My father used to smoke heavily and we used to go to the shop to get his packs of cigarettes. We used to destroy or hide his cigarettes for my mother who always fought with him to quit the habit.  When years later , he had to quit it when he was admitted to the hospital for a big abscess on his back.

3.Movies

The Science Lab

Chapter 1:  The Science Lab

Our school had a small science lab which stayed dark and musty all the time.
 In the late 60’s they had stopped doing most of the chemistry experiments in-house because of the lack of funds. The glass wares and curiously looking jars of chemicals remained in those huge closets covered with dust.

My father was one of the teachers who was in charge of the lab. So I could always go inside that gloomy room and stare at the human skeleton hanging in the corner next to his table.

 My classes started only in the afternoon  because of the lack of class rooms in the already congested school. 
It was my chore to bring lunch from home for my father. I hated that work even though it continued for almost four years till my father got transferred to another place. The lunch box was so hot and bulky ; sometimes the gravy scalded my hands.

After walking nearly half a mile in the sun traversing the neighborhood and the alleyways, I finally would reach the school almost on time for my classes. My feet ached with blisters from the hot sand and fingers molded into the shape of my father’s lunch box.

My father’s colleagues were always there to greet me with their sarcasm; they would open his lunch box and made fun of me . They liked my mother’s cooking and all of them shared his food. When I could not take his lunch, our maid, who was deaf and dumb, did take it and she would come back and describe the way my father’s colleagues dealt with questioning her. One of her favorite master piece was  the way they put their hands above their heads to describe BEEF to her.

The science lab had only one window and no electricity. Sometimes I had to open the door myself to put his lunch box on the table when he was teaching. I remember the day when the door closed on me and all I could see was the single skeleton hanging in the glass cabinet.

I had full access to the books they had in the library. No one was issued any science library books. No one actually wanted it. It took me few months to completely finish reading all of them.

I was fascinated with the text books my father brought home. In those days we did not have any other source of technical  information. I used to help him with correcting his students’ test papers. After many years, I developed critical thinking and my father possibly trusted me in my abilities.

 My father was known in school as moderately strict, but very well respected for his fund of knowledge and helping nature. Few of his colleagues exploited his faculties. I remember him going to school on weekends and staying late everyday to complete jobs because his head master left early without finishing his work.

When I came back from the school, I set out to play with my friends in the neighborhood. It was a village where everybody knew everyone. If I did anything naughty, before I could reach home, my parents would have been notified by someone.

My father always wore white. I could see his white shirt like a spot from the very end of the empty fields in the evening when he was on the way home from work. After a shower, he will lie down in his deck chair (“Easy chair”) with legs up. My mother used to call it “lazy chair” and  it had his body odor.

 His main job at night  was teaching my sister who was two years older than me. I watched funnily when she made the same mistakes and got scolding from my father.  Sometimes I wondered why he was pushing her so much. My father did not pay too much attention to my education other than occasional episodes of English Grammar teaching- which I hated- those days.  It was one of the books he actually brought for me as a present : The Wren & Martin’s. He had a certain fascination with that book , that, it was his Bible when he had a doubt when teaching me grammar, he would say “Why don’t you now turn to the page in the Wren & Martin.”

I am sure that he was getting good feed back from my teachers about me. But he never actually showed that he knew that. He forced my sister to join for the general knowledge quiz competition at the school; and without his knowledge, I participated and defeated  many of the senior students, he did not say a word.  I overheard him asking my mother,” From where he got all these answers from ?” Years later, when the news reporters called him to interview me when I got the University rank, I could  see that he was surprised in my achievement.


2. The Experiments

Living Your Dreams

PREFACE

Parents have dreams about the future of their children. 
I lived up to their dream; even though it meant years of adjusting  to something I never wanted to be.

Now looking back , I feel I was wrong in fighting against their will, even though I finally got defeated, I do not have any regrets.

I am not bold enough to think  that my children will chase their parent’s dreams.

To My Children,

This is about your grandfather whom you have never met; and about the various moments I remember vividly when he was around. I do not know when his birthday was and the day he died; as we never celebrated those days. I started thinking about him today after I had a stand off with my nearly teenage daughter for refusing to swallow a medication pill.

Surely, I have gone older...

Memories make me younger at least at my heart.

Keep reading

Good Luck

Few chapters of this autobiographical book is pre-published here in these blog pages. 

Chapter List

1. The Science Lab
2. The Experiments
3. The movies
4. The Chicken Pox
5. The Bullies and Pedophiles