What I Found in my Shelf

School was always fun. I had been to the same school from my Kindergarten days till I finished my Higher Secondary Course. That meant, day in and day out, I tread the same path from house to school for fourteen long years. But something kept me going everyday – When I step out of home on my Hero IMPACT cycle, I start the stop clock in my watch, trying to make it to school in record time; most times I rewrote my previous record; sometimes I failed, albeit by a small margin. For your information, an average cyclist would take a little more than 59 seconds to reach school from my home. Now you know why people prefer to stay put in a school, in spite of declining teaching standards, due to the distance factor.

In spite of the teachers, school was always fun. This morning, an incident occurred which reminded me of my 8th Standard English teacher and a prose that he had taught us. More of the incident later. This teacher was one of a kind – Cocky, Mercurial and a self-proclaimed Beethoven of 21st Century. If the phrase “To toot one’s own horn” had to fit the bill for somebody, it did so perfectly for this fellow. I guess I am being too harsh on my Guru… So I leave it there.

This teacher provided unadulterated entertainment for us in the class with his pronunciation of English words. Though my memory fails me on this front, I can still remember him, pronouncing “Public” as “Bupppplic” umpteen times. Our school followed “The New Radiant Reader” as the English Textbook for classes One to Nine. I am not sure if it imbibed any radiance into the student but I was greatly enthused by a certain prose by Gilbert Keith Chesterton called “What I Found in my Pocket” in my 8th standard. I still remember every line of that prose, again in spite of my teacher!!!

It revolves around a boring rail journey that GKC had embarked upon when he finds nothing to do. He had never been in such a situation before – no books, no pencils or paper, no stickers on the train to examine, absolutely nothing at all. Suddenly GKC realizes that his coat was home to a British Museum and South Kensington collection of unknown things. He calls his pocket a bottomless chasm and tries to recover the things from it. He pulls out different items – a sea of Battersea Tram Tickets, a piece of chalk, a pocketknife and so on. He finishes the essay thus – “I cannot tell you all the things that were in my pocket. I can tell you one thing, however, that I could not find in my pocket.I allude to my railway ticket.”

It was among the best of essays that I had come across simply because GKC, known for his trademark satirical humor and paradoxes, made an essay out of nothing.

Now the incident that triggered it all – I had to clean my shelf this morning, after a very very very long time. Boredom was not the reason for this rummaging act; Sis’s marriage is around the corner and Mom wanted to set the house in order. So, against my wishes, I was actually forced into tidying my shelf. Huh, if you thought GKC’s pocket was the deepest, a chasm could be, my shelf was even worse. It was the largest three-dimensional hollow rectangular abyss you could find. It was amazing that I found so many things in the shelf that I never dreamt I would come across.

The first to come out was a blue-color-bound Geography Atlas; the pages of the atlas bore a brownish color as though someone had soaked the sheets in a cup of Tea; they looked like falling apart with the slightest of touches. It was a very old edition and I hadn’t seen it since my 10th Standard geography exam. Next in line was a file with some white sheets inside or it seemed like that. But when I opened the file… I was in for a surprise… Yahoooo!! I had found my long lost Sportstar Posters. I had been searching for this bunch of posters from day one of my hostel life so that I could stick them on the walls of my hostel room. Not to spice up my room but to cover the seep-cracks, that were all over the place.

Going thru the posters I realized that mine was truly a collection of old posters. Proof – There was this infested poster of Jayasuriya with lots of hair on his head. Also found one of Kapil Dev congratulated by Richard Hadlee for breaking his 431 record. Next was Sergi Bruguera lifting the French Open Trophy. When was that – ‘93 or ‘94? But the one that caught my eye was some mid ‘90s poster, which had Hansie Cronje in close-up. The rubric read “HANSIE CRONJE – MEANING BUSINESS”. Now was this pure coincidence or did Sportstar show a wonderful sense of prognostication???

Next I took out a pile of books from the shelf. It included autobiographies like My Experiments with Truth and Mein Kampf, which I haven’t read as yet. And it looks like I might end up never reading those. Let Us C was among the books as well, but I am hoping it doesn’t fall into the former category.

Then came the prospectus of the different B-Schools I had applied to last year. Also, I caught hold of my old Vishnu Sahasranamam book that I used last in my 8th class. And finally only the magazines remained, hundreds of them – Business World, Business Today, Industrial Economist, India Today, The Week, the occasional HBR et al. When I spread these magazines on the floor to dust them off, I found out that my exploration of the shelf wasn’t after all a futile exercise. The reason – Among them, I found a small blue (or is it black??) diary like thing with some pages inside it. On closer examination I found it out to be my Passport…

Phew!! I really don’t know how it went there. I thank my stars for having got it back. Immediately I took it and kept it safely in the locker of the Bureau. Just couldn’t imagine the thought of losing my Passport a fortnight before joining my company. Anyway, Alls well that ends well.

PS: Last heard, my 8th grade English Teacher had quit his job and was making a fortune teaching Spoken English in Tamil. No, this is not any oxymoron, its really true.