by Vani Viswanathan
Divakar Mathew was unique for an eight-year-old. For one, he was the only Christian boy in Vedagyana Vidyashram, a primary school set up and run by a fiercely Hindu sect in a small town in Tamil Nadu (strange circumstances led to this and let’s not dwell upon it here). For another, he was determined, perseverant and full of grit – all of which endeared him to most of his classmates and teachers at Vedagyana. Teachers adored this Christian boy who was quiet, diligent and did his best to not feel out of place in a school that screamed religion (of a kind different from his) through its walls and pillars.
Divakar was considerate because he decided, in the first few weeks of joining the school as a five-year-old, that his friends didn’t mean it when they said ‘You won’t understand’ to many things that he didn’t understand. They didn’t try to explain, because he was different. Over the last few weeks, though, since they all started class four, Divakar got the sense that as much as his friends liked him – and liked to borrow his notebooks to copy lessons and homework – they never thought of him as one of them. He realised that the ‘You won’t understand’ simply meant that it didn’t make a difference to them whether he knew what they were talking about or not – be it about the vaadhiyar pestering the boys to do the sandhya vandanam, the idea of theettu, or those weekly homams that they made all students participate in.
It hurt; it hurt him that they would always share something special that they felt Divakar could never have. If he didn’t address this, he was sure that his gang – Gokul, Nandini, Aishwarya and Rudra – would forget about him as they grew older and these rituals and differences were drilled in further.
It was with this in mind that he gave his name for the district-level Vishnu Sahasranamam recitation competition that was coming up in a week.
Parvathy miss looked up from the notebooks she was correcting when Divakar went to the staff room to tell her he wanted to participate in it.
‘Are you sure, Divakar?’
‘Yes, miss.’
‘But do you know how to recite this?’
‘No, miss, but I’ll learn, I know.’
Looking at Divakar’s mousy face, now filled with that quiet determination, Parvathy miss could tell that this meant something to him.
‘Well, if you are so sure… ok, then.’ She then wrote out the details of the venue and the number of stanzas he had to memorise.
The next day, Parvathy miss called Divakar after her lesson to give him a cassette of the stotra and a Tamil script of the stanzas. ‘You can return both after the competition,’ she said, and Divakar politely murmured his thanks.
Memorising things was never a problem for Divakar, although he had to deal with his parents’ questions on why he was repeatedly playing some Hindu song every evening. He told them he’d been asked to represent the school in such a competition, and they tut-tut-ed about the school imposing their religion on him, but left it at that. ‘These’ people were everywhere and it didn’t hurt to know more about their strange prayers and rituals, they reasoned.
And so it was that on Wednesday, Divakar and a few other students, including Gokul and Aishwarya, were taken in the school van to the headquarters of the madam that the school was attached to. Gokul and Aishwarya were amused that Divakar was participating but politely refrained from making fun of him. But a fifth grader was tickled. ‘Dei Mathew, you learnt the one thousand and eight names of Vishnu va? Yaen da? You do know that you can’t say alleluia and amen and all there, no?’
Vasanthi miss shut the boy up, but Divakar knew this was why he had to prove to them that it was easy to recite all these if you’d grown up hearing them every morning, but the bigger deal was to learn them from scratch without having ever heard them – like he had done.
The students walked into the buzzing matham. They were directed to a large hall, on the way to which were corridors lined with old-school pillars, the walls filled with pictures of some swamiji or the other. Gokul and the fifth grader boy prayed to one picture right outside the large hall. Divakar and Aishwarya caught each other’s eye; she shrugged.
They went in and Vasanthi miss listed the students’ names as one middle-aged woman sat at a desk checking the names against a list. She gave each of them a name tag that they had to pin on their uniforms. ‘Oh, you are the Christian boy!’ she said, chuckling merrily as she handed Divakar’s name tag. ‘This is a first! We’ve all decided to come and see you recite!’
Vasanthi miss shot the woman a glare and hustled the students along. Participating students were split into large groups, and she led each of her students to their respective sections. She took Divakar the last.
‘Listen, Divakar – don’t you pay any heed to these people. They don’t know that faith rests in the individual’s heart, not in his religion. May bagawan be with you!’
Divakar nodded and took his place on a steel chair towards the end of his section. He looked around at the other students who had come in. For some reason, many girls were in pattu pavadai and most boys had worn vibuthi on their foreheads. Some boys had gone overboard and worn only a veshti, the threads across their chest bare for all to see. Some had pinned their name tag on the threads, while others had pinned it to their veshti.
One girl was religiously reciting the stotram – she had probably just started, since she was only in the third stanza. The judges, a bald man with a large, red naamam on his forehead, and a woman with a stern face wearing gold-rimmed spectacles, stopped the girl soon and called the next participant, a nervous-looking boy. The boy stammered through the first stanza and was asked to go. Another boy followed next, but he went straight from the first to the third stanza and was sent back too. A girl came next, with a strong and loud voice. She confidently recited her way through the first five stanzas, and Divakar observed the hints of a smile on the bald man’s lips. The girl uttered the ‘bha’s and the ‘ttha’s with such clarity that Divakar couldn’t help admire her.
The bald man said, ‘Go straight to the 15th stanza, please.’
The girl was caught off guard. She stopped mid-sentence and stared at him. ‘Sir?’ she said.
‘Fifteenth stanza, ma, tell us, quickly now.’
Her mouth hung open as she mentally recited the lines from where she’d stopped, to go to the fifteenth stanza.
‘Next!’ called the female judge.
‘But ma’am…’
‘Next.’
The girl came back and sat in the row behind Divakar’s, disbelief writ all over her face. Divakar turned and did his best to give her a sympathetic look, but she was too shocked to notice.
A boy came next. Then two more girls, and so on. Whenever a participant seemed to be doing well, the judges asked them to recite a stanza that they arbitrarily chose. One was asked to go from the third to the fortieth, while another was asked to start reciting from the thirty-first.
Students either walked off in a huff or sat quietly, not having expected this. As Divakar waited, he got the sense that they were keeping him for the last; crowds were gathering as other students who had finished were strolling over to see sections that still had participants. His impatience – and irritation – was growing. Why were the judges being sadistic? There were now only three participants left; Divakar was called.
He was nervous now, having watched others for nearly an hour.
‘Mathew, eh? Good, good,’ said the bald judge. The other judge smiled at him, and Divakar didn’t know what to make of it.
‘Recite from the fiftieth, but backwards,’ said the man.
Divakar gaped at him. ‘Go on,’ the man said. Divakar stood still for a few seconds, wondering what to do. He knew how the fiftieth started, but couldn’t have managed to recite it the other way. He was disgusted by now. He didn’t want to participate anymore. He was sure there was something wrong with saying the god’s names in a reverse order. This was just…perverse. He didn’t want to belong to a group that had such people in it. He silently left the room.
The next day, Divakar Mathew returned the cassette and the book to Parvathy miss.
‘I heard about what happened, Divakar, and I’m sorry,’ she said.
‘Did I do something wrong, miss? Should I not recite these if I’m not Hindu?’ asked Divakar.
Parvathy miss didn’t know what to say. Divakar left, quiet even in indignation.
Something changed soon, though. The following week, Gokul and Nandini fought over which of them would invite Divakar home for Pillaiyar chathurthi, because it was boring to sit through the prayer with their parents alone. Rudra complained to Divakar about how annoying it was to do some ablutions before every meal at home. Aishwarya told him she thought Gokul praying at the madam to a picture was ridiculous. In their strange ways, each felt that Divakar now knew what it was to be in their shoes. Because Divakar Mathew had now realised it was nothing special.
