‘Ted is a cat. Mick is a rat. They are pals.’ Like Gregor Samsa, another great soul who shares my initials, I awoke from uneasy dreams one lockdown morning to an onerous responsibility: making Kattabomman write these sentences in his English notebook. As if getting him to write at all wasn’t tough enough, I had to make him write them in ‘cursive’.
To call my handwriting ‘illegible’ would be high praise — it needs grace marks to even meet the qualifying threshold to be recognised as ‘handwriting’. More often than not, people — and even art connoisseurs — mistake it for modern art. To make matters worse, the legibility index plummets whenever I try ‘cursive’. So all my life I’ve carved out each letter separately. But now, I had to teach Katta cursive writing.
“Read the first sentence,” I said.
Katta stared at the page for a very long time. Then he began to read.
Extravagant flourish
“Ta-eh-da-Ted…is… a… ka-ah-ta-cat.” English is not a phonetic language. But apparently, at the KG level, it’s taught as if it’s one. So Katta voices the sounds first, and then combines them into words. Don’t ask me how he’ll read words like ‘like’. Anyway, reading is a different story. This is about writing.
He began strongly. Managed to get till “Ted is” without any incident. But halfway up the curl of the cursive ‘a’, in attempting an extravagant flourish, his pencil fell. He bent down to pick it up. But it had rolled away to a nook that could not be reached unless I stood up, moved my chair, and retrieved it myself. And there’s no way I was doing that. My reasons are not easy to explain but I’ll try.
Since time immemorial, parents have been victimised by what I call the Oops-I-dropped-it manoeuvre. Google tells me all kids aged 4 to 10 years do it, and it drives me nuts. The moment you sit down with a kid for ‘home work’, or even for the tedious practical joke that we call ‘online class’, the kid will commence his/her Oops-I-dropped-it manoeuvre. This entails dropping, one by one, all available writing implements under the table until every single pencil, eraser, sharpener, sketch pen, crayon, ruler and matchstick have been safely deposited in an invisible cranny that no normal-sized adult can ever reach without smashing their head against a heavy piece of furniture. I don’t know about your ward but this is a trick Katta plays on me every single time. But I wasn’t falling for it again.
“Take another pencil from the box and get on with it,” I said.
Parallel universe
But the new pencil’s lead was loose. When it touched the page, it broke. Katta began to sharpen this second pencil (let’s call it Pencil B). But his fine motor skills are still a work in progress. So the pencil kept rolling. The sharpener kept rolling. But not a dent on the pencil. It was like pencil and sharpener were carrying on a socially distanced flirtation at my expense.
I snatched the pencil and sharpener from him, did the needful, and handed back the pencil. He brought it down on the page with such force that the newly minted lead broke once again.
Keeping the lid firmly pressed down on the cuss words bubbling up inside, I sharpened another pencil (Pencil C) in stoic silence. Katta looked on, increasingly apprehensive. I gave him Pencil C and said, “You break this or drop this, see what happens.”
I could sense tears were in the pipeline, but we got through ‘cat’ without further mishap. By now, I was past my own threshold of tolerable boredom. After reading them so many times, I was beginning to find the sentences — especially ‘Mick is a rat’ — ideologically problematic. Why are we still using western names like Mick? Are we serious about Hindu Rashtra or what? Why can’t we use names that reflect our ancient culture and heritage?
“Wait,” I said, as Katta began elaborate preparations for constructing the ‘M’ of Mick.
I rubbed out Mick and wrote, “Loganathan is a rat.”
Katta looked up, blinking in puzzlement.
“Read the sentence,” I said.
“La-oh-ga-ah-na-ah-ta-ha-ah-na …is..a…ra-ah-ta.”
“Now combine the sounds and read the sentence,” I said.
“Mick is a rat.”
I nearly dropped the pencil.
“Fine,” I said. “Write it.”
He picked up Pencil C and began to write ‘They’. But his ‘h’ looked like ‘b’ and ‘y’ looked like a tape worm crawling out of an ‘e’ that looked like a ‘c’ with teeth in its open mouth.
“What are you doing?” I said. “Erase everything and write again.”
He promptly dropped the eraser. As if on cue, Pencil C rolled off the table. I heard it clatter on the floor. When I bent down, I saw neither eraser nor pencil. I am convinced they’ve both decamped to a parallel universe — through an empty socket on the wall that’s actually a wormhole — and living happily on a planet populated exclusively by pencils and erasers dropped by five-year-olds.
G. Sampath, author of this satire, is Social Affairs Editor, The Hindu .
sampath.g@thehindu.co.in
