Madrasi School

Happy days, and a few sad memories

By V Ramnarayan

Hare Radhakanta Syamalanga was one of the prayer songs sung in the morning assembly at the Madrasi School (DTEA), Lodi Estate, circa 1961 when I was briefly its student. The singer was invariably CR Gayatri (later Gayatri Ramachandran IAS), apparently trained in classical music and endowed with a nice voice and perfect sruti. Bharatiyar's Vellai Tamarai Pooviliruppal was another favourite of hers. I write this today because the song has inexplicably been my earworm since this morning. I never knew Gayatri personally, so she must have been astounded when I "sang" the opening lines of the song minutes after being introduced to her decades later in the foyer of the Music Academy Chennai. My companions, my wife included, burst out laughing, attributing a romantic interest where there had been none. In fact my cousin Ashok Sundaram had taken me to meet her at her Hyderabad office in July 1992 or thereabouts in connection with my benefit match, but Gayatri had no recollection of that.

Madrasi School was a beautiful interlude in the peripatetic lifestyle of my school years, thanks to my father's 'transferable' bank job and his brief stint in an American company in Delhi. For someone whose previous pit stop had been Tuticorin in the deep south, going to Subbiah Vidyalayam, as plebeian a school as they come, Madrasi School provided a comforting introduction to English medium education in the capital city, with Tamil the mother tongue of more than 90% of the students, though Hindi with English (and a smattering of Tamil) thrown in was the lingua franca of the school. My classroom, like other classes up to eighth standard, was a large, cosy tent, and the teachers by and large pleasant if not overtly friendly.

English medium was a challenge, but the young are resilient, and my new classmates were more than friendly and welcoming. Strangely, I ended up doing well in English and Hindi, though I had no business to. Luckily, there was no pressure on us. A Hindi tutor, Yagyanarayanan, came home, but I don't remember learning much from him, because we did not allow him to teach us much, constantly distracting him with empty chatter. At school, I remember Rukmini Teacher, who taught us English, a kindly soul in a madisar nine-yard sari, a lovely person who was easily the class favourite. I don't remember the other teachers from that first year. A silly incident involved my piercing my own left arm with my compasses on a dare by a friend, who also humiliated me another time by kicking me hard on my shin with his booted foot, with me offering no fight, coward that I was.

I had already lost more than a season of cricket during our Tuticorin sojourn, as had my talented left hander brother Nagarajan, just a year younger than me, and with me in Madrasi School. Youngest brother Sivaramakrishnan, was still at the pampered stage of getting to bat three times to our one innings whenever we played cricket near our Defence Colony home. At school, there wasn't much organised cricket, so we lost another season of the game. My dear friend and classmate Srinivasan--later to be known as Delhi Cheenu when he moved to Madras for college studies--introduced me to the other cricketers at school as someone coached by AG Ram Singh, true but with hardly any evidence produced my my feats on the ground. Cricket at school and Defence Colony was pretty uneventful except for a solitary friendly match we played at India Gate, with a confident, almost arrogant young man named Chadha (don't remember his first name) doing the star turn for our colony, which was otherwise a miserable flop.

My cousin Ramu or R Sivaramakrishnan, three years my senior, was a kind of folk hero of the school. Tall and well built, Ramu had a boisterous laugh and a lot of style. He was an ace basketballer as well. Rajamani was another basketballer of the school I knew slightly then, but caught up with years later at our Shastrinagar Madras neighbour's house when he came there as part of the famous Tiruppugazh Raghavan's bhajana troupe. This was a startling new avatar of Rajamani whom I had come to regard, rightly or wrongly, as a school tough guy. Another 'dada' in his juniors' eyes had been a chap called Radha Raman (the Raman pronounced as ramann, not raaman), who once drove the school bus with all of us boys and girls in it. I don't remember what dire consequence ensued.

While I remember that Mr Suryanarayanan or Soori or Choori was our principal, I have forgotten the names of most of our teachers. Vice principal Rajagopalan was our neighbour in Defence Colony, and we were friends with his children Hema and Raman. The VP's upstairs neighbour and tenant/ co-tenant was Mr R Parthasarathy, a Tamil teacher at our school who later taught at Delhi University and became famous as Indira Parthasarathy, an award-winning author of short stories, novels and plays. I had opted for Hindi as my second language, and I.Pa. taught me exactly one class as a substitute for our regular teacher on leave. He left a terrific impact on me with his wit. Example: When an Englishman drops something, he says, "I broke the plate," while in India, we tend to say. "The plate got broken." Over the years, I have been lucky to work and interact with I.Pa. in a number of ways, and it has been a privilege. He is an intellectual of rare humour and courage, and much of his writing is a scathing commentary on our body politic.

The only other excitement I experienced that year in Delhi was smoking a cigarette for the first time in a Defence Colony house (don't remember whose) with classmates Chandrasekhar, Jayaram Rangan, Cheenu and Sivakumar or Chicku, though I think one or two of us did not dare to do the unthinkable that day. Sorry, Appa and Amma, wherever you are watching us from. I was not a very good boy.

Leaving Delhi and the school, as well as my lovely cousins, Ramu and his siblings, and Indira and hers, was a terrible wrench. Appa joined Bank of India at Bombay, and we moved with him, and thereby hangs another tale, but I fast forward to Chennai where we eventually landed up.

I completed my schooling at Vidya Mandir, Mylapore, and so did both my brothers, while our sisters had to go to girls' schools to do theirs. I started playing competitive cricket only at Presidency College where I did my undergraduate course, because Vidya Mandir did not have eleven cricketers in a school strength of about 50, and I was not selected to play for Vivekananda College, where I did my Pre-University Course.

It was while I was at Presidency that Cheenu, now Delhi Cheenu, caught up with me again. He was a nice young man, always smartly dressed, well mannered, and well read. He was now a student of AC College of Technology, and a member of their cricket team, a stylish, correct looking batsman who somehow did not master the art of scoring runs despite occupying the crease for reasonable lengths of time. He was a regular visitor to our Shastrinagar home, where an unruly gang of cousins congregated during weekends. Cheenu was a patient young man who took the teasing of one of my cousins, Venkataraman, sportingly. After college, we all went our different ways, and I lost touch with Cheenu except to know that he worked for TCS for quite a while. Just a couple of years ago, I asked his aunt Vimala, who is also related to me, about Cheenu's whereabouts, only to learn that he had died quite young of a heart complaint. My smoking initiator Chicku, too, did not live long.

Add to this gloomy story the tragedy of cousin Ramu's death in a car accident in December 1968, and my Delhi memories are tinged with sadness, though we also enjoyed good times as a family there.