The Illicit Happiness Of Other People by Manu Joseph

The Illicit Happiness Of Other People by Manu Joseph

Author:Manu Joseph [Joseph, Manu]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, mobi, epub
Publisher: amazon
Published: 2020-06-25T08:08:46.463000+00:00


SIMION CLARK WAS AN Anglo-Indian physics teacher whose sudden appearance in the cheap cement corridors of St Ignatius had all the enchantment of a Rolls-Royce passing through a narrow Madras lane. Simion was a legend even in his time. He sat erect among the dark slouched rustics in the staff room, he was much larger than all the men in the school and he was large in a way that made those who were smaller than him look like gnomes. He was lean and fit compared to the other teachers, who had been irreparably starved in their childhood; his perfect shirt was tucked inside fitted trousers while the polyester shirts of his colleagues, some days, showed white deltas of old sweat. And the way he pronounced ‘screw gauge’, ‘Ptolemy’ and ‘relativity’, it was as if these were words of his invention. He played the guitar and the piano, and laughed at the harmonium. And he always sang a sad Spanish song during school festivals. He bowed his head to the lady teachers even though they looked like his maids. But he had darkness within. He was merciless with the boys, even by the standards of St Ignatius. He slapped and caned them, hit the soles of their feet with a rod, and landed thuds on their bent backs that echoed, and when they cried, a smile quivered at the edges of his lips.

Unni was thirteen when Simion arrived and was taken to every class as a showpiece by the headmaster, whose own English had become confused and tortured in the presence of the exotic new teacher.

Simion began to walk down the school’s corridors, enjoying the deep fearful silence he cast all around him. Sometimes he stopped and surveyed the boys in a class through the window, waiting for a wrong move, a conversation that was not in English, a shoe that was not black enough.

In Simion’s class, naturally, nobody spoke. If anybody coughed, he had to say, ‘Excuse me, sir’, which imposed considerable pressure on the boys to control their coughs, which sometimes transformed into loud alien yelps. It was inevitable that Unni and Simion would clash, but strangely Simion never hit the boy, or even spoke to him. The day of conflict came four years after Simion had arrived at St Ignatius. Simion was at the height of his powers. Unni was seventeen.

The class began the way it always did. Simion’s entrance was preceded by a nervous calm. Into the familiar silence he walked and settled in his chair, the axis of his upper body slightly tilted as always. He arranged his things on his desk and flipped the pages of a book. There was an absolute stillness in the room, which was not unusual. A physics teacher facing the twelfth standard in any school in Madras would normally have some of the powers of God. In the case of Simion Clark, he was God.

So all hearts stopped when Unni stood up and walked to the blackboard. ‘I did not understand what was happening,’ Balki says.



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