POMEGRANATES IN THE RAIN

The autumn rains swept in…first a few scuttling black clouds drizzling the trees and plants and the heads of unwary pedestrians and then the showers, heavy and persistent. Today is Monday and the sky is grey and watery. I put on my hoodie and went out in the rain and took a picture of my pomegranate shrub, heavy with fruit…some like faint blushes over green and others rosy red, hanging from leaves green and glossy. We didn’t plant it…the birds had casually dropped a seed or two and a little plant sprouted in the flower bed and we transplanted it against the low stone wall. When the fruit cracks open, the fleshy seeds like a million rubies come spilling out…red and bursting with sweet juice. The pomegranate is the fruit of this rich and mellow season.

 Autumn plays on wistful notes… and on days like this, when the sky is overcast, I tend to turn the pages of my life, well-thumbed and yellowing a little around the edges. They say you should live in the present…anchor yourself well in the now. But there are pages in the past dripping with nostalgia and others, scintillating with joy and laughter. It is usually the laughter I seek out, looking at myself and others…what posturing comical creatures we are, taking ourselves a tad too seriously. I’d like to delve into a little story of my past when I was 22, wet behind the ears and carefree. Sitting in my present 60 something, supposedly mature self… I just can’t believe I was 22… once upon a time. But anyway…here goes… a confession of sorts.

I’m the world’s greatest drifter ever. When I held my first degree in my hand, in English Literature, I had no idea what to do with it or where to go with this roll of paper. A lot of the other girls in my batch had decided to continue with a Diploma In Education…and I went along with the herd. They say that teaching, medicine and missionary work are all vocations…you receive a calling to serve others and you bow your head in humble submission. But I don’t believe I heard any calling…I just drifted into it so that I wouldn’t need to take any hard decisions about my future. I never had any ambitions to become a teacher…to knead and mould young pliable minds for higher disciplines. Now what did Bernard Shaw say…` Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.’… First of all, before I go any further, I must state…with vigour and conviction…that this is totally false when it comes to those dedicated individuals who have devoted their lives to the betterment of young minds. But here’s the rub…when it comes to yours truly…Shaw may have been right.

So there I was in the 22^nd year of my life doing a course in the finer aspects of teaching…back in a lecture theatre nodding off to pedagogy, classroom psychology, sociology, methodology and taking Alvin Toffler’s Third Wave in and out of the library and wondering…how it all fitted into my life. Then after nine months, we were assigned to different schools for our practical. I was sent to a convent school in KL. So on the very first day, I borrowed my sister’s dress, fastened the belt tight around the waist…I was much smaller than her… applied a slick of red lipstick, slipped into my high heels and  teetered off to board a bus.  

 It was a terrifying experience walking into a classroom full of rebellious adolescents …armed with only a lesson plan. To overcome my nervousness, with missionary zeal, I stuck to my lesson plan…Introduction…throw out a few interesting questions and reel in the unsuspecting victims …The Main Body…hammer in the principles of the subject with vigorous scribblings on the board and turn around and shoot more questions…Conclusion…` Any questions?’ They always had questions…they wanted to know… if I had a boyfriend. In fact, when I fed them with scrumptious details about my life, they were much more cooperative when my supervisor came along to observe my performance. It didn’t always work, especially with the senior students, who looked at me with disdain, pooled around in the back and whispered and giggled whenever I turned around to write on the board. But the main problem was my self-evaluation at the end of each lesson…how successful was I in executing it…Well I thought long and hard and started off by mentioning the few hitches that I encountered and then…I lied about my learning curve.

But the upside of this whole experience was when I met this fellow trainee, who on the very first day asked if I wanted to join her car pool…` Who else is in the pool?’ I asked eagerly…` Just you and me,’ she said. So I paid her half the petrol and she picked me up and dropped me off at a bus stand near my place.  During my apprenticeship, I learnt an invaluable number of things to sustain me for the best part of my life… My car pool friend taught me how to bleach the fine hairs on my lower arm and wax my legs instead of shaving them and suffering from blade rashes. So now I was armed with more than just a lesson plan. I walked into the classroom confidently with a golden glow on my arms and silken legs. What else could a girl want to get through the many challenges in life? We also nibbled on food and chatted endlessly in the tuck shop. She told me about the many suitors her parents had arranged for her…she came from a conventional home…and I listened open-mouthed about the corpulent and the scrawny and the debonair and the timid that sought her hand in marriage…and how we laughed at all the aspiring wooers who had fallen along the way.

Then one morning, there we were in the tuck shop again in between lessons, gossiping away when one of the students came up to me…` Mrs So and So wants to see you in the staff room.’ Mrs So and So was the teacher whose lessons I had taken over. She rarely spoke to me and most of the time appeared unfriendly. I felt a twitch of nervousness…maybe some of the students had complained about me…perhaps I had divulged a little too much in my attempt to be friendly with them. I went along to the staff room and stood before her. She seemed strangely friendly…`Ah, it so happens that I’ve been called away and you will have to sit in for me as one of the judges at the inter-school debate today…` What debate?…But…I don’t know anything about…’ She stopped me in my tracks and told me to be present at a particular school at 3pm.

The shock of the whole thing was that I would be one of the two judges in this debate between two of the most prestigious boys’ secondary schools in KL…one was not even called a school but an Institute and the other was run by a certain order of Catholic brothers. I stepped into the auditorium and felt my knees wobble. It was packed with all these school boys, teenagers of 16 and 17 in smart uniforms and their teachers. Everyone turned to look at me as I sat right at the top, the last row…near the exit. One of the students came up to me and said they were waiting for the other judge and if I wanted to sit closer to the stage…I shook my head. The debating teams of both schools had taken their places on the stage and kept looking at their notes, mumbling to each other and darting glances in my direction.

Then the same student approached me and said the other judge couldn’t make it…so it was just going to be… me with no experience under my belt, trembling like a leaf and sitting in a borrowed dress. He handed me an official looking sheet of paper where I had to give points to each speaker. How hard could that be I wondered…and just as I was getting my head around it…the student continued, pointing to the bottom of the sheet…` After you’ve put in the scores for the rebuttal, you add up the total score for each team.’…REBUTTAL! What the hell was REBUTTAL??? I couldn’t very well ask him. I was a graduate of literature…had done Shakespeare…could use` thee’ and `thy’ and pored over writers and poets of different ages, studied their works and gave them lengthy interpretations, half the time not knowing what I was talking about and… even did the French writers, Flaubert and Zola…and what about Kafka and Camus with his dreaded Absurdism and Surrealism…But nobody taught me rebuttal… I felt a desperate urge to go to the toilet. I turned around to see if I could make a quick dash for it.

 But the microphone crackled and somebody announced the beginning of the debate. Before I knew it, the leader of the Proposition launched off with an impressive speech…` Gosh where did they learn all these highfalutin words?’ I wondered. Then the leader of the Opposition took his turn and spoke loudly and with such pomposity that the loudspeakers vibrated. The other speakers stepped in, one after the other and shot their opponents down with a barrage of verbosity and thumped their fists on the table. I was so sucked into this furious exchange of words and timbre of speech that I forgot about the toilet and worse still… to award marks to each speaker. I broke out into a cold sweat and scribbled some marks in, somewhat randomly but making sure to keep the difference marginal between both teams… after all they were equally skilled…so I told myself.

` Now for the rebuttal’…they announced….The rebuttal? Ahh… now I could see what they meant. The leader of the brothers’ school…I quite liked the boy…summed up the points for his team and refuted the arguments of the opposition quite…eloquently I must say. His schoolmates in the audience applauded him and his teachers beamed with pride. One or two boys turned to look at me but I thought I would keep a straight face…I was comfortable in the game now. The leader of the Institute then took the mike…we didn’t know what hit us. He spoke like a budding lawyer…his lawyer father must have trained him…bristling with self-assurance…the polysyllabic words rolling off his tongue like marbles…and then he came in for the kill…merciless and swift…demolishing all his `learned opponent’s’ stack of arguments. I was stunned. His supporters roared with pride and his teachers nodded their heads. The Institute team with supercilious smiles, looked at me…they had the game in their pocket.

The rebuttal would decide which team would win. I nervously did a couple of calculations in a notebook fished out of my bag…kept adding and subtracting marks…the auditorium had become restless and noisy …everyone kept turning towards me… I hesitated… with the pen poised over the sheet and… finally penned in the scores and sealed the fate of those two schools. The sheet was handed to the teacher in-charge, who went on stage and announced the winning school…there was frenzied jubilation in one half of the auditorium…so deliciously unexpected…and stunned silence in the other half…how was it possible? Before the commotion could die down and they summon me to the stage for the closing remarks…and the budding lawyer pound me with another rebuttal, I slipped out the exit and ran all the way to the bus stop. When I got on the bus, there was a clap of thunder and the monsoon rain drummed on the metal roof to match the beating of my heart.

I have deliberately not disclosed the names of the schools…because you can never tell who might stumble upon this…and these days you could be charged with all sorts of things…even stuff buried deep in the past. So cheers till the next time.