Ishani's Birthday Gift

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Pratik's Post Script

to

"Between You & Me & Li'l Ishani"

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Ours was a Hindi medium Theosophical School in Varanasi. As long as we lived in the city we were happy and gay. When I was in class V and my brother in VI, my father moved in Banaras Hindu University(BHU) quarters to save the house rent. In BHU, most of the boys and girls of our age went to Convent Schools and spoke English fluently and read Mills and Boon. Girls refused to converse in Hindi. At home we saw the hard bound Tom Brown’s School Days with a young boy’s picture in school uniform on the cover but inside it everything was Greek to us. This gave us a feeling of inferiority. My father was not ready to admit us to a Convent and instead purchased a Linguaphone® for us by paying Rs. 400/- in those days, which I suppose was the sum needed as a donation for our admission to the Convent. ‘Linguaphone®’ had sixteen EP (45 rpm) records. The first one started with the arrival of Mr and Mrs Hunt at the Heathrow airport in London from Geneva and in the subsequent ones they moved through Immigration and Customs to reach the hotel. Soon we learnt to pronounce Passport, Cassette, Tape, Record and Pepper-mint Chocolate with their right accents. We could mimic the sentences of Linguaphone® but could not make a single one of our own.

Among neighbours we envied Ronny, a boy a year or two senior to us, as he stood always first in his class, could recite from Shakespeare, chant Rig-Veda Hymns, write poetry and solder resistors, capacitors and transistors on a circuit board. All parents wanted their children becoming replicas of Ronny. We tried several of our tricks to outwit Ronny but all in vain.

Then my brother and I planned that we must knock him out of his own ring of expertise in front of others somehow. So we chose English Vocabulary as the subject. After going carefully through the list of new words we learnt, courtesy Linguaphone®, we settled for Cosmetics and thought this word would definitely knock Ronny flat.

Finally the moment came one evening in our drawing room when Ronny was present with other elderly people. Point blank we asked him the meaning of Cosmetics with our right accents.

Within a split of a second Ronny shot back: Prasadhan Dravya.

Neither of us heard either of these words ever before!

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