AGENDA | Sunday, August 9, 2009 | Email | Print |  | Back
Under the Greenwood Tree
Kanchan Gupta
Thomas Hardy could never have imagined that a gnarled, old mango tree in the courtyard of a missionary school set up by two American Jesuits in a sleepy, small, upcountry town in distant India would be named the ‘Greenwood Tree’ after his anonymously published novel, Under the Greenwood Tree or The Mellstock Quire: A Rural Painting of the Dutch School. But there it stood, in all its awesome majesty, right in the middle of the paved assembly ground.
I remember spending many a recess chatting with friends under the Greenwood Tree, swapping my Kissan mixed fruit jam sandwiches for soggy parathas, sharing Little Johnny jokes and whispering in Hindi which, of course, was prohibited on campus, the only exception, reluctantly made, was during Hindi classes. We would snigger at the ‘Dingos’ — Anglo-Indian boys — who insisted they were from ‘Chakadapore’ and not Chakradharpur, lived in the school hostel, had runny noses, faintly blue-grey eyes and auburn hair, boasted about their fathers who drove steam engines at ‘jaldi speed’, called jamuns ‘black berries’, and went home for Christmas.
Legend had it that Fr Eugene Power, who taught English in high school, was dreamily romantic as only the Irish can be, and who introduced me to George Orwell by gifting me a copy of Animal Farm for my contributions to the cyclostyled school magazine, came up with the name for the ancient tree to commemorate Hardy on the iron-rich soil of Kalimati which later became Tatanagar and then Jamshedpur. Till 1947, the premises of the school belonged to the Chhotanagpur Regiment Club; it is possible that the tree (which the school inherited along with the club’s rooms, a well-stocked bar and sprawling football and cricket fields) was christened by a regimental commander’s maudlin wife given to reciting Shakespeare’s
Under the greenwood tree,
Who loves to lie with me,
And turn his merry note
Unto the sweet bird’s throat,
Come hither, come hither, come hither:
Here shall he see
No enemy
But winter and rough weather.
Or it may have served as a rendezvous on moonless nights for tipsy regimental officers and their breathless lovers playing Robin Hood and Maid Marian.
In junior school we didn’t bother our silly little heads with such profound questions as to why was the tree called the Greenwood Tree. For us, it was both a shelter and a refuge; we would rush to it, clutching our aluminium tiffin boxes, the moment the recess bell rang. Far away, or so we thought, from the spying eyes of teachers, some wearily lighting their mid-morning cigarette, in the faculty common room, and the Jesuits in their white cassocks who would be in the refectory. As we laboured our way through bread gone limp and over-salted parathas gone soggy, we would try to figure out what was being served in the refectory from the smells that would waft out from the second floor dining hall with its pretty chequered curtains that was out of bounds for all. “They have wine at lunch, men,” Andy from Chakadapore told us one day, furiously scratching his groin, an act for which we would be walloped at home. There was a collective, jaw-dropping, “Wow!” Andy had more to tell: “Buggers swipe it from the chapel vestry.” We looked around in alarm, lest his blasphemy had been overheard.
Years later, when we had just stepped into our teens and entered high school, the Greenwood Tree became our meeting point, the rendezvous for sharing more than tiffin. Those were exciting times, or so we thought, and we didn’t want to be left out. There was no television, the only decent place you could watch a film was Nataraj Cinema, and the only newspaper, The Statesman, came by the morning train from Kolkata and was delivered at home in the afternoon or the next morning. What we looked forward to with great excitement was the weekly JS, or Junior Statesman, which carried centrespreads of rock stars and other icons of the day. I wasn’t quite impressed by Bruce Lee’s poster, but had plastered the walls of my room with centrespreads of Jethro Tull, Bob Dylan, Grateful Dead and, of course, the Beatles. Jim Morrison got the pride of place.
We would talk about the bands and their latest albums, news of which reached Jamshedpur months after they had been released. We would pool in money to buy LPs, and then fight over who got to take them home the first day. If you had your own HMV Fiesta, and could listen to music in your room and not on the family gramophone in the living room, you were a notch above the rest. Others envied you. I broke with my best friend after he scratched my Fleetwood Mac, and, lesson learned, have never ever lent my music to anybody.
What else did we talk about? Bell-bottoms and jeans (which were then just arriving on the Indian scene), platform shoes, shoulder-length hair, dog-collared floral print shirts and the pretty girls in their starched white blouses and swinging blue skirts from Sacred Heart Convent who walked past our school, giggling and tossing their heads, every morning and afternoon. Like Archie Andrews agonising over whether to share his sundae with Betty or Veronica, we would spend hours choosing between Ipshita and Sharmistha, Snigdha and Sutapa, to take out for a movie on Sunday morning followed by Campa Cola at Kwality in Bishtupur.
It never quite worked out that way. We neither had the guts to walk up and invite the girl of our choice, nor did we have the courage to face our friends if the girl had just said no and walked off haughtily, the probability of which was extremely high. Some of the boys, however, were not averse to making up stories of stolen kisses and hands held furtively in the shadowy corners of Beldih Club or on an ill-lit lane in Contractor’s Area.
And so life went on, from spring term to summer term to winter term. Till the ICSE exams were upon us and we had not yet even bothered to figure out what we would do next. That winter we sat for the exams and next spring the results came. The last time I and my classmates met and lingered under the Greenwood Tree was the day the results were put up on the school notice board.
Nothing, however, remains constant. A Google search to check on my alma mater tells me the Greenwood Tree no longer exists, although Loyola School is today far bigger than it was 32 years ago. Did age finally weaken its stout trunk? Did a storm bring it down? Or was it simply felled to create space for the school’s expansion?
-- Follow the writer on: http://twitter.com/KanchanGupta. Blog on this and other issues at http://kanchangupta.blogspot.com. Write to him at kanchangupta@rocketmail.com
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