An Exorcism

An Exorcism
My memories of schooldays in summer time Madras are a disorderly admixture of unbearable heat, glistening humidity, and motionless air. Classrooms were endowed with windows which, per force, had to be kept open as air conditioners were still a decade away on the school’s budgetary priorities. Our classroom had two ceiling fans --- one over the front row and the other --- you guessed it --- over the rearmost one. When turned on, they constantly complained about their advancing years in cyclic but unmusical protestations. However, as the degree of relief one could get from the hot and wet confines of the classroom was directly proportional to the distance from the ground zero under each ceiling fan, there was a premium on seats in the front and the rear rows. I recall that I was neither smart enough to get a front row seat, nor agile enough to reach the rear row before others jumped over intervening desks to plant their satchels over prized seats. The result was that, on most days, I had to be content with a seat equidistant from either ceiling fan. Consequently, I had to grapple with two challenges: one, the stifling heat which tended to blunt the cerebral functions somewhat, and the other, the attenuation effect of the two fans’ asynchronous cacophony on the teacher’s utterances before they arrived at my tympanic membranes.
On one such especially hot and humid afternoon, Mr Taveira, our English teacher, was valiantly endeavouring to introduce to us the nuances of tense. Without disclosing to us that some day we would have to struggle with sixteen tenses (lest the fear of the unknown overwhelm us), he was tackling the simple forms of present and the past tenses first. That afternoon, his simple pedagogical strategy was to iterate a simple sentence in present tense and then point to one of us who would be expected to promptly gurgle out the past tense form of that sentence. I had to keep my ears and eyes fully open to follow Mr Taveira’s speech and occasionally, a distant but insistent bus horn would cause what foreign relations experts call a ‘communication breakdown’. Seeing his finger pointed at me after one such instance, I repeated in my mind the sentence I had heard,” I have a new wife” and, in the absence of any intimate knowledge of Mr Taveira’s marital life, blurted out, “I had an old wife.” Looking back, I can now see the reason why the whole class and Mr Taveira had a good laugh at my expense, and it was only during the break time that a kind classmate explained. What Mr Taveira had actually said was, “I have a new bike”.
The embarrassment haunted me up till a few days back when a student of mine, entering my class late, used the alibi, “Sir, I fell off my bike”. Almost as if on cue, I exclaimed, “What? You fell off your wife?” Somehow, the spontaneous titter in the classroom served to exorcise the embarrassing ghost enduringly!