Unforgettable ‘gutiya’ and the ghost-hunting in the hostel

It was when I finished my exam and was struggling to forget the tough time I had with my teaching methods paper, I was wondering how many of my teachers taught me according to the book. Then only I realized that despite the theories preached by behaviour psychologists and the thousand and one techniques supposed to be taught at the Colleges of Education, only a natural teacher can perform the miracle he or she is expected perform.
Unfortunately the faces of most of the teachers who were in my lower school are not clear in my schoolbook-memory except that of Lalitha Madam who taught Sinhala. She was not only my grade four class teacher but the reason I started writing; she was my first inspiration.
My Grade Five teacher was a different story. There was no question about her teaching, but sometimes she took to canes and rulers to curb the students. She used to have ‘punishing sprees,’ where she would get half of the class lined up at her table, waiting with our palms outstretched to received the ‘gutiya.’ Perhaps it was the pressure to see her students getting through the scholarship hurdle made her strict and seemed somewhat distant from the students.
Grade six and seven are two years I had my best of teachers who taught not only books but also things that are important to keep my head upright in society. Teenage-years may call be called the difficult years, but for my friends and I, they were the unforgettable years of school life, which laid the foundation to lasting friendships. The teachers we had in those classes knew exactly what they were doing and whom they are dealing with. As a result, most of us found good confidantes in them and the psychological and physical changes we were undergoing were no mysteries to us.
So, when the girls of my age were busy thinking about the boys they had seen in the roadside we had better things to do like investigating into a major hostel ghost story that haunted the minds of the entire seventh-grades. Even though the outcome didn’t make us ace investigators, the updates of the ghosts topped the gossip charts of the girls, beating the good looks of Shahid Afridi and the cute faces of Westlife dudes. Even though it sounds stupid to me now, as a twelve-year-old, with a brain wrecked by curiosity, ghost hunting wasn’t something to which I could say ‘No thanks.’ But there was one person behind us to save our backs-that was my science teacher- Anuradha Madam. She never burst our bubble by saying it was nothing, but lured us into brainstorming conversations about afterlife and scientific facts about spirits. So, by the time we found out there was no ghost of a white lady who got murdered in the colonial-time building- we took it in a good spirit.
The school also had two teachers who were very much like the personifications of horror. The couple was known as ‘T-56s’ among the teachers and the students. Their speciality was that they would hide behind a door or in an empty schoolroom, catch you unawares and punish you for something you did not do. I was lucky enough never to bump into any of their missile zones during my tenure.
When I left to Visakha, the relationship with the teachers there were not the same, but it was surely one of the first things which made me feel at home there. On a very personal note, I owe every one of my teachers because I have never stepped into a tuition class in my life.