The Tutorial

Mihir, having conquered the B.A. examination with that peculiar Bengali combination of ambition, anxiety, and ancestral expectation, was now seated upon the vast verandah of unemployment, not knowing whether to enter the temple of scholarship, the bazaar of service, or the crematorium of respectable idleness. At precisely this providentially purposeless hour, the daily Anandabazar produced, like a conjurer from a turban, an advertisement from Kalpa-Khali. A B.A.-passed private tutor was required for the only son of a venerable household. Board and lodging would be provided. Salary: thirty rupees a month.

Thirty rupees! Mihir did not read the advertisement; he saluted it. Food would arrive without arithmetic, lodging without litigation, and thirty bright rupees would march into his hand every month like a disciplined regiment of silver-faced soldiers. He could send a little home, read for his M.A., attend an occasional cinema, and perhaps even see a football match without first mortgaging his conscience.

Yet a small mosquito of memory buzzed near his ear. Had he not seen this same advertisement before, in this same Anandabazar, wearing the same respectable face and hiding, perhaps, the same domestic catastrophe? Yes, surely. Last year too it had appeared. He had longed then to apply, but the alphabet of destiny had withheld the necessary B.A. It was evident that the boy must be a small, scholarly cyclone. Candidates, attracted by salary, had advanced like heroes; upon meeting the pupil, they had retreated like historians.

But Mihir was not fashioned of such collapsible clay. Poverty had annealed him; examinations had hammered him; hostel food had tempered him into a metal not easily bent by juvenile stupidity. He would teach the boy if necessary by grammar, geography, persuasion, punishment, metaphysics, or martyrdom. Thirty rupees were not an ornamental trifle. For that sum one might transform a donkey into a gentleman, or, if circumstances insisted, a gentleman into a donkey. The employer, after all, had not advertised thirty rupees merely to beautify the newspaper. Besides, in those days a rupee possessed a personality. It did not enter the pocket as modern coins do, with embarrassment and small talk; it arrived with boots, moustache, and administrative authority. Thirty of them together could feed ambition, oil a student's hair, calm a mother's anxiety, and still leave enough copper courage for a Sunday cinema.

That afternoon Mihir presented himself at the address, carrying his B.A. certificate like a miniature constitution. The master of the house, however, did not so much as glance at the document. He examined Mihir instead, slowly, gravely, almost zoologically. Montu, the advertised catastrophe, stood nearby and made a face of such compressed tragedy that Mihir felt he himself had become the certificate, stamped, sealed, and personally legible.

At length the gentleman said, “Son, would you kindly remove your shirt?”

The question descended upon Mihir like an unexpected university ordinance. He had prepared for inquiries about Macaulay, Milton, metaphysics, and perhaps the Mutiny; he had not prepared for a textile examination. In the respectable economy of middle-class modesty, a shirt was not cloth alone. It was reputation with buttons. Yet the old man's voice had the polished menace of hereditary furniture; it admitted neither appeal nor adjournment.

Mihir blinked. Was tuition to begin with disrobing? Could the family not be instructed while he remained socially clothed? “Have you brought it?” the gentleman asked.

“No, no,” said Mihir hastily, and took off his shirt. For thirty rupees a man may unbutton many principles. If necessary, he thought, he might even become the son-in-law.

“Do you exercise?”

“A little, here and there.”

“Good, good.” The gentleman looked contemplative. Mihir grew alarmed. Perhaps exercise was disqualification. Perhaps the family preferred delicate tutors, edible to bedbugs and obedient to fate. Why had the man not asked the year of his graduation, his division, his university, his intellectual ancestry?

“I shall ask only one more question.”

Now, thought Mihir, scholarship will enter. He clutched the certificate in his pocket, ready to explode into First Class with Distinction.

The gentleman surveyed him again and said, “Your body is not at all bad. What is your weight?”

Weight! So this was the viva voce! The whole edifice of collegiate education, the late-night lantern, the borrowed notes, the solemn invocations before examinations, the ancestral sacrifices made in rice and rent--all had culminated in this commercial weighing of a tutor. “Nearly two maunds,” said Mihir, with the dignity of an agricultural commodity.

“Excellent. You should last some days, I hope. What do you say, Montu? Will this Master-moshai endure?”

Montu nodded judicially. “Yes, father. Master-moshai has plenty of blood.”

The sentence, though biologically reassuring, was not pedagogically comforting. Mihir felt less like an educator and more like a goat being appraised before a sacrificial festival. Still, the salary glittered before him, and glitter has defeated greater philosophers than Mihir. He swallowed his alarm with the solemnity of a man swallowing inferior quinine: distastefully, dutifully, and with complete confidence that the disease outside was worse than the medicine within.

The gentleman delivered his verdict. “A few days may be expected; many days would be miraculous. Ultimately, everything is in the Lord's hands--”

“Not in the Lord's hands, father, in Sri Char--”

“Silence! Must you contradict even Providence? See, son, you must teach him manners along with lessons. Answering elders, laughing excessively, replying where silence would be cheaper--these aristocratic defects must be corrected. You are appointed from today. Salary thirty rupees, payable on the first. But one condition: if you do not complete the full month, even by one missing day, not a paisa will be paid.”

Many tutors, he explained, had arrived with courage and departed with experience after ten or fifteen days. Montu added helpfully, “One remained eleven days; another somehow survived twelve, but after that even he could not continue.”

“Enough. Bring your belongings. Begin teaching this evening. Montu, show Master-moshai his room, and tell little Ram to spread the bedding.”

Everything sounded suspicious, but suspicion itself became small before the magnificent arithmetical mountain of thirty rupees. All his life Mihir had paid at the end of months--college fees, mess bills, newspaper dues, the barber's mournful balance, and the tea-shop's accusatory slate. Now, at last, a month would end by paying him. The calendar, hitherto an extortionist, would become a benefactor. The thought was so revolutionary that it swept doubt into the municipal drain.

Before evening he arrived with his bundle. The room pleased him immediately. It possessed a polished old dressing table, a small bookcase for his books, a study table, and two chairs arranged with pedagogic solemnity. But the sovereign miracle stood beside the wall: a cot, a mattress, and upon it a freshly laundered sheet shining white as moral intention.

These were not merely gentlemen; to call them gentlemen would be ungenerous understatement. They were connoisseurs of civilisation. In Mihir's previous lodgings, bedding had been less an article of furniture than a philosophical argument against comfort. Mattresses there had memories of ten generations and the thickness of defeated papad. Here, however, whiteness gleamed, pillows swelled, and the cot stood like a mild domestic throne awaiting the coronation of sleep.

Mihir had never imagined that destiny would place him upon a cot. He lay down at once. Ah! softness, that secular substitute for salvation. He had eaten already, no work remained, and perhaps even teaching could wait. He would sleep like a newly appointed prince until eight in the morning.

Montu entered with books. Mihir said, “Come, let us study on the bed.”

“No, sir. I cannot sit there.”

“Why? Such a noble bed!”

“You are my elder, Master-moshai. How can I put my feet on your bed? Father has forbidden it.”

“Very proper,” said Mihir. “Then the chair shall receive us.” Sitting down, he added, “Your bedding is superb. Soft, very soft. Now show me your book. Do you know what beans means?”

Montu shook his head. It meant ignorance, though with Montu all gestures required translation.

“Beans means borboti. Borboti is a vegetable. We cook it, eat it, and survive it. Now make a sentence with beans.”

Montu shook his head again, this time indicating competence. After prolonged internal agriculture he announced, “I had been there.”

Mihir stared. Here, at last, stood the cemetery of previous tutors. In that one sentence, grammar had been garlanded, cremated, and thrown into the Hooghly without proper rites. He had heard of boys weak in English; this one appeared to be strong against English, an active revolutionary in the republic of syntax. “What does that mean?” he asked weakly.

Montu was offended by the simplicity of the question. “It is very plain. There my borboti was. I had been there--my borboti was there. In polished Bengali, it would be: There my--”

“Stop. I had been there means I was there.”

“But, sir, you said bean means borboti. Then I was borboti there. Kindly settle this vegetable.”

“You were perhaps many things,” said Mihir, “but bean and been are not the same. Observe the spelling. This been is a form of the verb be--”

“Understood!” cried Montu. “Be means appearance, and form means shape. Therefore been is the shape of appearance. I know.”

“You know?”

“Yes. Father said this morning, after you left, that our new Master-moshai has quite a form. Then I understood.”

Mihir abandoned the corpse of logic. “Leave my form. Beans means borboti. A sentence: Peasants grow beans. Farmers cultivate borboti. Now do you understand?”

Montu nodded.

“Do not shake your head so much; it may become independent. You do not possess my form. Now make another sentence with beans.”

Montu's lips moved for some time, but language refused to come out. Mihir sighed. “Take another example. Our Thakur cooks borboti. Here cook is both noun and verb. Now make one.”

The matter now seemed, to Montu, crystal-clear. Enlightenment descended upon him not gently, like moonlight, but suddenly, like a coconut from a municipal tree. His eyes brightened with the dangerous confidence of the half-taught. “We are all human beans,” he declared.

“What? Are we human-borboti? Borboti-man? Man-borboti?”

“Why not? Father always says human beans.”

Mihir put his hand on his head. He had been sitting already; only the hand newly arrived. Day after day, month after month, must he wrestle with this vegetable civilisation? No wonder tutors vanished. Teaching was one thing; grammatical exorcism was another. He too would flee, leaving tuition, thirty rupees, and the celestial cot.

No, he resolved. He would neither resign nor go mad. Montu might speak, not speak, understand, misunderstand, or cultivate metaphysical borboti in the garden of English; Mihir would merely make him read. Detachment, he saw, was the only syllabus. The Gita had perhaps anticipated Montu, for only a divine charioteer could have advised action without attachment in the presence of such syntactical slaughter. Mihir would teach, but would not internally participate; he would pronounce, but not perish.

His philosophical excavation was interrupted by Montu. “Sir, what is the English of salary-spreader bed?”

“What is that?”

“A thing. Tell me its English.”

“There is no such thing.”

“There is. You do not know the English.”

“Then perhaps pay-saving bed.”

“But saving means shaving. Little boys--”

“Our servant earns salary but never finishes the salary-spreader. He has been told repeatedly, but he never finishes it. That is why he has survived in our house. Father is very sorrowful about it.”

Mihir refused to think. Thought was the doorway; madness sat behind it, polishing its shoes. Enough education had been inflicted for one day. Sweat had soaked not merely his head but his entire constitution. “Go,” he said, “as before, you have holiday.”

Now for sleep. He had walked from Bowbazar to Bagbazar, wandered, bargained with hope, and argued with grammar. Dinner was unnecessary; a friend had already fed him. He switched off the lamp, stretched upon the softness, and slid towards sleep's imperial frontier.

Then, as he crossed the border, a thousand needles declared independence upon his body. It was not a bite; it was a referendum. His skin, having no vote in the matter, registered protest by exploding into immediate, eloquent, and secular pain.

With a cry he sprang up. Horror! The bed was not a bed but an entomological procession. Row upon row of bedbugs, platoon upon platoon, thousands, lakhs, generations, dynasties, republics of bedbugs marched across the white sheet.

At last the phrase salary-spreader bed unveiled its venomous poetry. So this was the secret of eleven-day tutors and twelve-day martyrs. A man had to fight Montu by day and bedbugs by night, pedagogy in the afternoon and parasitology after dusk. The employer had designed a system of such diabolical fiscal elegance that even the East India Company might have blushed with professional envy. The gentleman who had survived nineteen days deserved a statue, preferably with biting insects carved in bronze around his ankles. And that noble employer, withholding salary unless the month were completed--what generosity, what refinement, what rascality!

Mihir looked tearfully at the invading empire. To kill them all would require not a man but a ministry. If he spent the night killing bedbugs, when would he sleep? Therefore he sat on the chair, lamp burning, keeping vigil like a saint of the mattress. His eyelids petitioned for sleep, his back filed complaints against the chair, and his entire body drafted a memorandum demanding immediate transfer from the Department of Tuition to the Department of Survival.

At dawn, as if commanded by a bugle, the army vanished. Within minutes the sheet appeared innocent. Mihir was impressed. These creatures were educated. They entered by night in disciplined silence and retired at first light with modern military precision.

But where had they gone? Lifting a corner of the white sheet, he saw the seams of the mattress crawling with compressed brown scholarship. He did not inspect further; sanity was already standing on one leg. He returned to the chair and kept the lamp on, lest the enemy discover aerial warfare.

In the morning Montu's father asked, “Did you sleep well?”

“Splendidly. On such a bed, how could one avoid sleep?”

“Good, good. Comfort in sleep is the true luxury of life. And the bedding was soft?”

“Do not mention it. Once, in sleep, I wandered into the neighbour's house and did not realise.”

“What are you saying?”

“Our house is famous for mosquitoes. Without a net, no man sleeps; he merely donates blood. One night the neighbours had called me urgently, but I forgot. At bedtime I remembered, but their doors were locked. I decided to sleep without a net. Next morning I found myself in their house.”

“How?”

“The mosquitoes dragged me there. That is why nets exist. They prevent nocturnal inter-house migration.”

The gentleman was shaken. “If mosquitoes can do this, what can they not do! You are living evidence.”

Mihir folded his hands. At that instant diplomacy entered him. A lesser man would have complained; a greater fool would have resigned. Mihir chose the middle path, that ancient Bengali highway where intelligence, hunger, and theatrical exaggeration travel in the same bullock-cart. “I require an advance. I shall arrange for the bedbugs.”

“Arrange bedbugs? For what purpose?”

“You do not know? Bedbugs are the greatest stimulant of memory. In England they are cultivated for dull boys. One friend of mine has entered the profession; he extracts bedbugs from railway compartments.”

The gentleman leaned forward, commercial light illuminating his face. “In England they are wanted? Bought? Sold? Imported? Exported? I can supply thousands, lakhs, as many as civilisation demands.”

“I shall buy them myself. Bedbug blood is exceedingly beneficial for brain. Take one bedbug and press it upon the head; from thousands and lakhs of bedbug blood emerges one drop of brain. Instant intellect! Before my B.A. examination I tested it. I had wasted the year; failure had tied its shoes. Then I read an English article about bedbugs. I collected every specimen in the house. Only three days remained. Result--behold!”

He produced at last the long-suffering certificate. The poor document, ignored during recruitment, now entered the drama like a witness with documentary evidence. The gentleman's eyes expanded into verandahs. There it was: passed with distinction. Bedbugs! Who would have imagined that so much learning could be stored in so small a packet? Education, it appeared, was not in colleges but in crevices; not in libraries but in mattresses; not under mortarboards but under sheets.

“And here,” said Mihir, “there is no need to purchase. Your house contains thousands. Your sleep is heavy; you have not noticed.”

“Why did you not tell me earlier? I would have manufactured brain already. I must leave now for a feast at Bhabanipur. At noon I shall return and collect them. Then I shall teach Montu myself.”

Mihir departed, and father and son exchanged solemn glances. At length the father said, “I have long suspected a connection between bedbugs and brain. Consider their intelligence. They prick; instantly the bell rings in one's body. Rise at once, or they disappear. They know matches were invented by man and avoid them. Their brain is in their whole body, since they have no proper head. Mihir is correct.”

“What do you say, Montu?”

“Yes, father.”

Montu's agreement had the admirable economy of a government seal. It could approve philosophy, finance, entomology, theology, and household lunacy with equal punctuality. His father asked; Montu affirmed; civilisation proceeded.

“Furthermore, the relation between bedbugs and education is profound. As bedbugs increase, education increases. Bedbugs have multiplied in trams, buses, cinemas; newspapers too have multiplied. That day in the bioscope, a coolie sat before us on a four-and-a-half-anna seat. Remember?”

“Yes, father.”

“He could not read a letter, yet immediately bought Anandabazar for two paisa. Is that not educational expansion?”

“Yes, father.”

“Then before Master-moshai returns, we shall utilise the bedbugs. You need brain, and I too require some. My memory is weakening. Recently I called Shyam Babu Gobardhan Babu, and Gobardhan Babu Haradhankanta. This is not desirable.”

“Yes, father.”

Evening brought Mihir back, exhausted by sleeplessness and by a friend's adda where cards had been handled with more seriousness than currency. Tonight he would sleep with the lamp on; perhaps bedbugs respected illumination. He would chant inwardly, teach Montu briefly, and collapse.

Montu entered with books. Immediately the room filled with a strange fragrance. It was not attar, not rose, not jasmine, not sandalwood, nor any respectable perfume known to civil society. It was something medicinal, victorious, and faintly funereal, as if a dispensary had married a battlefield.

“Have you applied scent?” asked Mihir. “A peculiar perfume comes from your body.”

“Not body, sir. Head.”

“What fragrance?”

“Bedbugs! After you left, father and I finished all the bedbugs from the salary-spreader bed. Little Ram refused. He said, what use has he for brain? Now not one bedbug remains in your bed. Ha-ha!”

“What?” roared Mihir. He leapt from his chair and fell upon the bed, beating the mattress with tragic fury. Montu froze, book in hand, as though grammar itself had fainted.

The father rushed in. “What happened?”

“There are no bedbugs, father. Master-moshai has fainted.”

“Why did you tell him? I warned you. Such grief over lost bedbug brain!”

“How could I know? I said nothing; he smelt it. I have heard water on the face restores consciousness. Shall I sprinkle?”

From the depths of fainting came Mihir's voice: “Uh-uh!”

“No need,” said the father. “If he wakes, he may bite. See, he is muttering.”

Mihir overcame his bereavement the next morning at exactly half past eight. Like a true householder, reconciled to property, pedagogy, and pestilence, he snored the whole night without interruption. Thus concluded, for the moment, the first great campaign of Master-moshai in Kalpa-Khali: the pupil remained untaught, the father remained convinced, the bedbugs became martyrs to intellect, and thirty rupees continued to shine in the distance like the moon over an unpaid mess bill.

Note : Original Story in Bengali by Shibram Chakroborty transformed  by Kallol Saha For Utsav Stories by Development Connects.