Just Another Chemistry Teacher

There was an air of expectation in the classroom; the rumour was that Chat was angry and would storm in from the Chemistry Lab any minute.  All eyes were on the connecting passage and the forty of us in ninth standard – one of whom was in a stage of advanced terror -  sat in silence. 

Chat, as always, did not disappoint.  He strode into the room with an air of irascible purpose, and I was immensely relieved that his ire was to be vented on someone else.  One of my classmates had messed something up and sat in front, quivering like a huge lump of freshly-set jelly buffeted by a monsoon wind.  Chat looked around for him, peering over his specs and spoke in that uniquely ascending nasal voice, his index finger jabbing the poor fellow’s chest, “I say, I will take you by the scruff of your neck and the seat of your pants and physically, do you understand, physically eject you from my class.” This was Chat’s favourite sentence and he would say it as only he could, in the most comical way, his academic stoop accentuated by the rapid forward-backward movement of his head, much like an ostrich in a zoo sizing you up.  His bottle-brush moustache would bristle and move in directions beyond his control,  and the face would turn a mild red, the ears a bright crimson. 

 Yet, no one in class dared laugh, giggle, snigger or show traces of a smile.  For this infuriated him and an angry Chat could go berserk, throwing things, getting into a fit and hammering students without any seeming control on his hands.  

Chat – David Chatterjee – was the Chemistry teacher for three generations of students from Josephs and the best in the business.  He seemed obsessed with the subject and, had he had children of his own, would probably have named them after acids.  He would spend a large part of his day lurking around in the Chem lab, with its myriad colours and smells, and plotting the creation of some arcane compound or digging into a grim textbook the size of a bedside table.  

In class, he would, with childlike delight and a trademark smile that showed just how much he was enjoying himself,  rattle off formulae and dictate notes with only occasional reference to a book, notes that were clear and precise.  Occasionally,  this dictation was interspersed with phrases from quotidian Shakespeare,  for he was as much a master at English literature as he was at Chem.  On one memorable occasion, arriving at a conclusion by the method of induction,  he quoted Sherlock Holmes as well, ”If you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth”.  I felt a thrill, the one you feel in the presence of a Superior Human.

Yet, what made Chat unique, what put him in a class of his own,  were his peculiar mannerisms.  I am hardly knowledgeable about psychological disorders, but there is little doubt that Chat had every one of them:  prone to great mood swings and particularly suspicious of his students’ intentions.  If you were smiling when he hadn’t said something he thought funny, he took it to mean that you were smirking at him and  the index finger of the right hand would dangerously wag up and down in the warning sign of recrimination .  Once, in my four years in Chat’s class, I smiled at something the fellow next to me was drawing.  In an instant, Chat was by my side staring at me with a menacing furious glare through those thick specs that froze the bone marrow.   I shrunk back and put my head down, a figure of sorry contrition, until he wordlessly turned away. 

Another trademark was his humour, or alleged sense of humour:  when he smiled, it was at something he felt was blindingly funny, though the forty boys in front of him sat open-mouthed in puzzled silence for a few seconds before deciding to follow suit.  His upper lip would rise, much in the way an Army major smiles before the execution of a sworn enemy, and out would pop some comment that was, admittedly, very droll indeed.  When presented with a wrong formula by an unprepared (but shaking) fellow in front of him, for instance, Chat turned towards us and said, the upper lip rising a millimetre and the head rocking on its hinges, ostrich-style: ”I say, we have in front of us, a fellow who has redesigned the arithmetic of valency.  He has the hallmarks of a genius.” while the rest of us let ourselves go and laughed heartily.  Or the time when,  with a smile that was dripping with Chat sarcasm,  he mocked a fellow writing a formula on the blackboard:  “This man is unique in his ingestion of the recesses of mercuric oxide” or some such cryptic sentence in his own slowly-ascending recitation, while the left shoulder seemed to do a sort of waltz of its own - he seem to laugh most at that shoulder. 

On these occasions, the entire class would burst into laughter.  Poor Chat never quite realised that the laughter was because of his mannerisms, not at the student’s inadequate knowledge (in which condition, I assure you, he was not alone).   If he wanted to call you names, options such as ‘foolish’ or ‘negligent’ would simply not do.  He once called my closest friend a ‘troglodyte’, which had us rushing to the library in the recess.

Then there was the memorable incident when he forced each one of us to smell hydrogen sulphide.  Now, as you know, there are gases.  And gases.  And then there is hydrogen sulphide which, he emphasised with much delight, smells of rotten eggs (when it is in a good mood).  He somehow got it into a test tube and had every one of us take a short breath of it, our extreme reactions, even the odd attempt at retching,  giving his upper lip a fair bit of work.  It was Chat’s way of saying, “So you see what a career in Chemistry can do to you?”  Four decades after the incident, I have not forgotten the smell. 

Chat was the aloof sort. He stayed close to school and cycled to and from it; if you passed him by on the road and greeted him, he would nod briefly and continue on his way.  He had few friends, mingled very little with other teachers and, due to his bouts of anger and mood swings that both terrified and confused the students, was the subject of much gossip amongst us, the most common one being that he concocted his own consumable alcohol in the lab.   Everytime we entered his class, all of us would look for the signs on his expressive face and at the movement of the head.  For the formidable brain within was a mystery wrapped in enigma.

When the ICSE results were announced every year, all this would be forgotten.  For, without exception, every student would do well, indeed very well, in the subject, and no one would hold back their tribute to the man they feared, yet held in some awe.   When I finished my tenth and left school to join up at college in the accounting stream, I was relieved at having left Chat behind and sad at not taking up Chemistry further on, both emotions being a tribute to the idiosyncratic, yet brilliant, teacher. 

Two decades later, and after having taught for about thirty odd years,  Chat left the school, some say, in a bit of a huff.    Shortly thereafter, he dropped into school to collect some papers and, on his way home, was hit by an autorickshaw, while crossing the road. 

Across the World, from the thousands of students who had studied under him, there arose a collective groan at the news of his demise.  The tributes flowed thick and fast (my own little piece was titled 2KMNO₄ + 16 HCL =............ , the beginning of my favourite formula that I remember to this day), and in the years since, when we old students bump into each other across the seamless World and walk down nostalgia lane over chilled beer, Chat inevitably pops up as a topic of conversation and, often, imitation.  Much to the amusement of those watching, we stand up and recite the formulae for neutralisation, mimicking his stride as we do so, the stoop at the shoulder and the head moving up and down, the eyes twinkling with the passion for knowledge.  And we all realise that three decades later, we still remember a great deal of what he taught but have gladly forgotten his wayward, unpredictable tantrums.

For such is the power of a teacher.