PROJECT TITLE: "BORN LOSER: LOSING TO WIN" - CHAPTER SIX

The boy’s name was Sunny; he was hardly five years old and trudging to the nearby nursery school while a young girl hardly fourteen years of age hopped and skipped as she carried his school bag and held on to his hand on the way to school.

Sunny hated school. He especially hated an Anglo-Indian teacher named Mrs. Smith who was a stern middle aged lady. In her skirt and stockinged shoes she was a towering six feet and was indeed a formidable personality. She was of the view that left handedness was a result of wrong conditioning at birth. She therefore tried to correct all left handed young children by rapping them on the knuckles of their left hand with a ruler while exhorting them to write with their right hand and extolling the values of writing with their right hands.

Poor Sunny had a tough time with this lady, for indeed Sunny was left handed. As a result, Mrs. Smith used to rap his knuckles repeatedly. Sunny was therefore depressed and frustrated. He was not deliberately left handed. He was just being the way he was and Mrs. Smith wouldn’t let him. Sunny soon started feeling ashamed of himself. He knew he could never ever write with his right hand and found no way out of getting his knuckles rapped continuously, all his life. A kind of guilt and fear came into his existence. Fear of school and the guilt of being different.

Sunny’s mother was Maggie and Maggie was the same infant’s mother who was a Professor at a College run by Catholic Sisters of a particular order in Madras. Maggie had developed a kind of distrust & hatred for maid servants & became harsh with such servants. Maggie, had somehow managed to find maid after maid to baby sit Sunny in his formative years. However, she was a bit more relaxed these days, since Sunny had started going to school at the age of three and now spent most of his waking hours in school. The maid’s daughter would go to school and drop Sunny in the morning at nine in the morning and later pick him up from school at 1:30 pm in the afternoon. Later when the child started going to school she dispensed with the services of all maids & began to do all the household chores herself in addition to her work at the college.

Once he returned home, Sunny would be a bundle of energy and kept burning up the excess energy within the confines of his small home and much smaller backyard. The street outside was only filled with street urchins and Sunny had no proper companion to play with. At times, when he was too bored and restless Sunny would go stand at the front door and watch the activities of





























 the slum dwellers who literally lived off the streets. The street which was more an alley was named Thiru Gramani Street, in memory of some ancient who had once lived there. Sunny had been born in a Christian missionary hospital in Mylapore as it was far cheaper than the other private hospitals.

His father, Amos Ammarkallam for that was his name had brought his wife Maggie and little Sunny to the house in Thiru Gramani street, when Sunny was barely six months old. The house was rented cheaply as it came under the government’s rent control act of those days. The only reason Amos had taken the house was that it was near his wife’s college.

When Sunny had been born the lady doctor had seriously warned Amos that his wife’s uterus was very weak. “She should not strain too much”, the lady doctor had cautioned. Amos had always wanted a second child but his wife’s condition put paid to his desires. After Maggie had come to this house, she had an abortion when Sunny was about two years old. There was a lot of bleeding and Amos was only too grateful that his wife had made it alive. It was at that moment that Amos asked his wife to quit her job, but Maggie stood her ground and stubbornly refused, since she knew that she could not give her child the quality of life that she wanted him to have with her husband’s meagre Government salary.

Maggie had spent her childhood in rough weather conditions. She was the ninth child of a doctor who had lived during the days of the Second World War. Her father had made a lot of money but lost his wife after she delivered her eleventh child. Though he had remarried for the sake of the children, he had succumbed to the dreaded cholera when he had gone to one of the districts of the erstwhile state of Madras to prevent the outbreak from spreading any further. His poor children, of whom Maggie was only eight years old at that time, were shuttled from one relative’s house to another. The money the father had left them had been swindled by her four brothers, who did not bother to take good care of their female siblings and just dumped them in a missionary school with its own hostel.

The girls had grouped themselves together while in the hostel and took care of each other; standing together in thick and thin. The eldest sister who was nearly ten years older than Maggie had gotten married immediately after her schooling and thanks to her gentlemanly husband was able to take better care of her sisters. It was this eldest sister and her husband who had helped all the girls to get married, though Sunny’s mother did save money for her own dowry after she started working.

Sunny’s father Amos was the third child of four brothers. His father White Raja Kallam was a school teacher and Amos’ mother had occasionally done part time work. The family had had a hand to mouth existence and Amos had lived a very frugal life. The most Amos would have ever wanted during his school days in the late 30’s and early 40’s was fifty paisa to watch a silent movie and later the not so silent movies. Amos had been very regulated and controlled in all his doings, from a very young age. Being the third child the mother had not showered as much attention on Amos as she had on her first and last born. The second son had therefore become a rebellious lad while the third son Amos had been a conformist all along.

Amos’ three siblings were all well settled in decent jobs. While Amos and two others had entered Government service, only the second brother had become a professor and later went on to become a principal of a college in one of the southern provinces of Tamil Nadu. Amos’ parents had lived in a small town in the interior of the erstwhile provinces of Madras. Each of his brothers lived in small towns while the eldest brother lived with Amos’ parents themselves. It was only Amos who lived in Madras city, the capital of the state.