My Fair Russian Lady

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1970, IIT KGP: I was then a more or less confirmed chain-smoking bachelor living in the Faculty Hostel. Aged 27, thin to the bones, fed up with the routine hostel food, but nowhere to go foraging. Long evenings spent on the wrought iron lawn-bench, pondering life and death, reading tremendously readable but gloomy books like ‘Crime and Punishment’. (Maugham says in his ‘Summing Up’ that he owes his lucid prose style to years spent studying Dostoevsky)

One fine evening we had a Visitor. A huge lady towering over all the inmates of our asylum, extremely fair, baring her plump legs to the knees, clad in colorful cotton printed gowns, freckled face, fiftyish. She was settled in the Guest Suite (so-called). We came to know that she was the new Russian Teacher, Madam Scherbakova.

She saw that I was the most available person ever on the lawn (others were more ‘professional’ and busy). After a couple of days, she came over to the lawn and seated her 200-pound self beside me on the creaking bench. She started gesticulating wildly and lisping English-sounding words in ‘chaste’ Russian. I figured out that she wanted my name, profession and ‘introduction’. After some dumb charade, I guessed she was checking if I was any good in English. Apparently she was pleased with my ‘proficiency’.

She made me know that she couldn’t speak or read a single word of English, but opted for IIT KGP as a Russian Teacher for Research Scholars who had taken Russian as their ‘Foreign Language Requirement’. She armed herself with the famous Russian-English Primer by Nina Potapova, but knew only the Russian part of it; and desperately wanted to learn the English. Obviously she needed urgent help and was asking me if I could ‘tutor’ her the English part of it before each class of hers. I said I would try.

But there was a catch: I had to accompany her to her class room and help her ‘on-site’ wherever she gets stuck. This part of the bargain I was reluctant to bite, but she tempted me she would make me an expert in spoken Russian in 3 months (a la Eliza Doolittle). I already had my quota of German and I said no, thank you. But she wasn’t one to take no from anyone. Next evening at 5 PM she ferreted me out and dragged me to her Russian Class; my arms and legs flailing the air: a most diverting sight to my colleagues and students in that drab campus.

From then on it was I who used to hound her. The reason was simple: I never could imagine there could be such a fantastic Language Teacher. She would distribute copies of Potapova (at a price) among the students and start ‘teaching’. The first lesson was some common word: ‘onion’. She would utter in her musical tone the Russian word for it and I had to get up and blurt the English word. She would give a disarming smile and repeat ‘onion’, ‘onion’, ‘onion’ 3 times with a victorious flourish. This would go on for a few minutes but by then she would forget the day’s lesson completely in her enthusiasm, and utter a completely new and strange word which was not part of our agreed terms for the day. She would look at me pleadingly and I would fail her completely. But she was not one to be daunted: she would quickly draw it on the blackboard in 2 seconds; and everyone would shout: ‘lizard’. It was a sight to see her beaming face. She would go on: ‘lizard’, lizard’, ‘lizard’ till the whole class approved her English pronunciation. Everyone was mighty pleased and the attendance grew by leaps and bounds. I didn’t learn much Russian, but learned a cardinal principle of teaching: “If you have the will to learn from your students, the Class Room would be great fun”.

Time for her to leave: the entire Faculty Hostel where she became the most popular Visitor threw her a grand Farewell Party. We decided that each of us her admirers would file past her by the Dining Table and present her with one rose each. She was overwhelmed at the unexpected gesture. Tears swelling in her eyes. We then asked her to make a short speech in Pure English. She blushed and gamely tried and we would hoot whenever she slipped into Russian. And we all laughed and laughed, she joining us most sportingly.

And she was bent on giving me (her English Coach) a one-on-one party in her ‘suite’. She came to know that I was vegetarian, teetotaler, virgin. She was aghast: such beasts were unheard of in Russia. And decided to promptly rectify the first two damaging qualifiers. She dragged me to her suite and made me eat ‘pilmony’ specially prepared by her. Pilmony, I gathered, was her favorite Russian snack made of ground beef dipped in wheat flour and ‘boiled’! I had to down the damn thing with ounces of Pure Undiluted Vodka, Made in Russia (with predictable consequences).
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