What's a Lemon Squeezer Doing In My Vagina? by Rohini S. Rajagopal

Author:Rohini S. Rajagopal [Rajagopal, Rohini S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789390914654
Publisher: Penguin Random House India Private Limited
Published: 2021-03-04T00:00:00+00:00

12

Calling

I grew up thinking my life was very ‘ordinary’. Middle-class family—check. Average looks—check. Average intelligence—check. Dull personality—check. Nothing exceptional ever happened to me. Life followed a steady course—school, college, job. Check. Check. Check—no great twists and turns, a nondescript existence.

But in my secret imagination I craved fame and glory, a world of public acclaim and recognition. There had to be a calling to my life, a higher purpose. What was my special mission to accomplish? What were my special skills or abilities or talents? To start a company? Become a poet? Champion a social cause? At twenty-two, as I exited the portals of the institute in Hyderabad, I was vexed by the need to find my calling. As soon as I apprehended it, I knew I would transform into the changing-the-face-of-the-world type of icon that I was always meant to be.

At first I believed it was my duty to carry on the family vocation. My mother is a teacher; my grandmother was one. As if in preparation, while in primary school, I would routinely line up pillows on the bed, wave a ruler at them and write indecipherable lessons on the doors of our bedroom cupboards with a piece of chalk pilfered from school. Everyone could see I was a natural. When I joined college, the time had come to put my skills to the test on the ground. I started offering tuition in French to a neighbour’s schoolgoing daughter. My miserable Hindi had forced me to drop the subject after school and take up what seemed like a relatively easier second-language option in college. We would meet for an hour three days a week after college. But the fallacy that I had been nurturing since childhood soon came crashing down. It was one thing to lecture mute pillows and another to lock eyes and horns with a yawning thirteen-year-old. She had little interest in the subject of study and I did not have the teaching talent to make it come alive. I began hoping that my student wouldn’t turn up for class. Even on the days she did turn up, my zeal to tutor her was even less than hers to be tutored. Only the one thousand rupees I received at the end of the month from her mother kept me going. No, teaching was not my calling.

I graduated from the institute in Hyderabad in 2004. I had no intention of going back to Trivandrum and started looking for jobs in the city. A good majority of those who came to the institute intended to do an MPhil or a PhD and finish up at some university, combining research with teaching. By the final year, a few of my peers were already writing the Graduate Record Examinations (GRE) and leafing through the prospectuses of American schools. Some of my friends did look for jobs, but maximum approval was reserved for those who wished to pursue higher studies. I figured that I had to go to the US and do a PhD.

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