” WHEN YOU ARE IN ROME ” a short story from “Rainbows in Braille” – A collection of short stories – By Elmo Jayawardena
St. Sebastian’s College is a leading school in my hometown. It was formerly run by De la Salle brothers. Originally Irish, they came with the green white and gold colours from home to remind them of their little haven across the Irish Sea. That’s why they painted the school flag with Gaelic nationalism, the green white and gold. The local Christian brothers later took over from their Irish counterparts and that too had changed recently and the school is now run by the priests who represent the OMI fold. As for St. Sebastian’s, it was, is, and will always be a Catholic school, as Roman as the Vatican itself, compulsory confession on Thursday and mandatory holy communion on Friday at the College Chapel. Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be white as snow by Friday. That was the theme and the promise.
Anyone who passed through the portals of St. Sebastian’s, be he the erudite scholar (very few) or the apostolic brethren who joined the holy church or nincompoops like me, we each walked away rich with memories. Such were the people and events at St. Sebastian’s. Starting with our superiors, the dove-cassocked Christian brothers who ruled the roost to characters on the staff who stood as pillars through the school’s colourful history, bar none, they all added their brush marks. There was Marceline of the Chemistry lab and Albert of the Physics room, Jusey who rang the bell and delivered the Director’s notices to classrooms and the never-to-be-forgotten old Mahathun Maama who for some stupid reason was called ‘ground-boy’ ancient as he was. Old Mahathun Maama was the one who toiled in the sun everyday to keep the cricket-ground green and rolled the pitch to perfection so that the young fast bowlers could send their bouncers on the coir-matted wicket.
That was St. Sebastian’s of yesteryear.
The school still stands on ancient foundations fortified by tradition and lore, prays daily, punishes students occasionally, plays cricket, and among other things, sends a few to the national universities to become minor erudites shaping the uncertain fortunes of our nation.
Little has changed from the time it all began, the teachers have aged, some had left, the world, I mean. The bell still rings at 8 o’clock and the boys go lava frozen. Same place, same stories, only the faces are different.
Anton was my classmate. He came from Kadalana, where the church of St Anthony was.
“Everybody here is an Anton,” Kadalanians proudly professed. ‘If not the first name, at least the middle name, that’s how it has to be to honour our patron St. Anthony.”
People in that area took religion seriously. They considered their patron saint to be very powerful, hence in honour or maybe fear they Antonised almost all baby boys.
Now we come to Mr Mendis, our English teacher. Anton and Mr Mendis are the protagonists in this wonder tale. I need to give you some idea of those who ran the lead roles. Our Mr Mendis was a relic of the colonial days. Came to school in a cream gabardine suit, tie and all, drove a bottle-green coloured old Morris Eight that cyclists overtook. Great and learned man, often spoke of someone called the Bard and things we never heard of in the English language, constantly confusing our adolescent minds.
“Shakespeare, Et tu brute, A rose by any other name, these were his favourite quips and then there were the sonnets, poetry and his often repeated stories of Antonio and Bassanio, Lear and his three daughters, Othello killing his Desdemona and some Prince called Hamlet from a faraway land where we were told had some funny sounding things called ‘fjords’.
He did yell such Babalic linguistics which at most times meant nothing to us and went straight over our heads like those sixes you see in one-day cricket.
Mr Ruben L. Mendis was all British, had his curry lunch from a four-tiered faded enamel “tiffin” carrier and mixed his meal with fork and spoon a snow white napkin tucked on his chest to save his shirt from curry spillage. He lived in the past, revelled on the achievements of his masters from the Rule Britannia glory days and was still waiting for the sun to set on the almost lost Great British Empire.
Our class was big, forty plus. Rows of desks, ten abreast and behind them sat us, the Aristotles and the Einsteins. Well, we did learn things. Catechism for instance, till the parables came out of our ears and some math and physics and many other subjects too. That was not the problem. But English was, and Mr Mendis became the avenging angel defending the ever confusing language of his colonial heritage.
We wrote essays. Mind you, we were almost fifteen at that time. We wrote sentences about the “Coconut Tree” and “The Policeman” or “My Mother” and there ended our repertoire. The keen ones who had done homework managed about five lines. That was good, if not great, got beaming smiles from Mr Mendis. The rest of us moiled along; mired like buffaloes in the mud, bogged down between such complications as transitive verbs, past participles and pro-nouns and something totally terrible called the tenses. Mr Mendis certainly did plough a hard furrow.
Let’s go back to Anton and his Kadalana hamlet. The men there are all carpenters. Everyone had a connection to the furniture trade.
“In come the logs, and out go the tables and chairs,” that’s what Kadalanians proudly proclaimed; just like the pig and the sausage story.
In between were the multitudes of Antons. Some sawed, some nailed and some varnished; all experts in the timber business. Like those cigarette advertisements depicting Marlboro country, Kadalana was furniture country.
One important thing, Kadalana never spoke any English. All those log-splitters, chair-makers and table-creators put together could barely come out with a “good morning” in the Queen’s language. It was no sin, this “no English” business. The men in Kadalana dealt with wood, beds tables and chairs. They didn’t need English to saw and plane and nail and varnish, furniture didn’t speak the Queen’s language.
Back to class, Mr Mendis is holding fort. It was idiom time. He fires the first half and we complete the idiom.
“Well begun”.
The boy replies, “Half done”.
“All that glitters,” comes his booming voice.
The finger points.
Solomon croaks “is not the galle Sir.”
He’s got something right; Solomon knows it is something about gold.
“It is not galle you fool, Galle is a town, it is gold, gooooo-aallddd, the master elaborates stretching the word like elastic.
“Yes Sir, galle,” Solomon repeats. He cannot figure out what is wrong, he has that bewildered look of the wrongly accused innocent.
“Solomon, Solomon, Solomon,” Mr Mendis mutters, “King Solomon was wise, you are otherwise!!”
We don’t have any idea what he is talking about, but we do know of a King Solomon, he is in the Bible.
“Penny wise?”
“Found poolish” answers the neighbour on my right and looks at me for a compliment.
“Found poolish?” Mr Mendis yells. “Like the fol-toppie you eat from the canteen.”
So on and so forth goes the idiom time. We like parrots, gave meaningless memorised answers to Mr Mendis’ front lines, clueless as to what they meant. It was idiom time, that’s all we knew.
“When you are in Rome” the eyes roll, pick the victim, and Anton of Kadalana stands up, probably wondering who or what is a Rome.
“When you are in Rome” Mr Ruben L. Mendis roars again. The gladiator is now in the coliseum, shield in hand, visor pulled low to cover the face, sword drawn against the timber-man, the battle is about to begin, a fight unto death. We watch in silence.
“When you are in Rome” thunders the third time.
A timely prompt comes from behind; it was Nonis, Anton’s friend doing his bit with comradely concern. Anton picks, and rises from the dead like Lazarus from our scriptures.
As he began to stutter his response, the master soft-toned with glee; great!!! A miracle. Ruben L. Mendis has managed to make the mute speak.
“Yes Anton, go on boy, when you are in Rome?????
“I was in London, Sir.”
The slap hit him so hard, that if not for the roof, Anton could possibly have flown out and got stuck on the iron spikes of the Buckingham Palace gates, or landed in the once eternal city, right in front of the Spanish Steps.
“When you are in Rome, I was in London” Mr Ruben L. Mendis muttered, repeating the sentence to himself nodding his head like a hungry lizard. There was disbelief, but belief too, as he grappled to focus. It took some time. Then his face changed, he sensed some curiously warped humour, and broke into an almost uncontrollable cackle of laughter. We all laughed, including Anton, none of us having the faintest clue as to why we were laughing.
That was years ago. Rome and London time at St Sebastian’s.
The world has rolled and revolved around the sun and got older. Mr Ruben L. Mendis is long gone, resting now in a cemetery where Christians are buried. He’s entombed under a marble slab with a grave-stone that depicts his name and says when he was born and when he died. There are some other words too, all about Mr Mendis resting in peace. Gone with him are his Antonios and Bassanios and his Hamlets and King Lears. The sonnets and poems too have long vanished to oblivion along with his gabardine suit and his faded enamel tiff-in carrier. That’s life, things change, things certainly have changed.
As for Anton, he is still around, running errands on a bicycle for some two-bit politician. Not even mainstream, just one of the choirboys.
I met him sometime back, stopped and chatted by the roadside, that’s how the Roman story came back to me. Said he’s got two boys, both had gone to Italy as migrant workers and were doing well.
“They send me money,” he says with pride.
I asked him where they worked, he didn’t know; such things mattered little in his world.
“It is some funny name,” Anton said, “my wife knows.”
Well! His children were in Italy, could be in Rome, I in wicked jest wondered when Anton would be going to London.
At St. Sebastian’s they still teach English and play cricket and send a few probable erudite students to the university to study and help change the shape of the nation. A new building had sprung up where the old canteen was, named after one of the prominent ex school Directors. The barb-wired fence in front of the cricket ground has been replaced by a high wall, these days that’s the norm in the country, maybe fearing an invasion from the north. A security guard stands at the gate to check who comes in and who goes out and ensures that only the right people enter the school premises.
As for the pillars of St. Sebastian’s, they have all changed too.
‘Ground-boy’ Mahathun Maama is no more and they now have an electric cutter to mow the grass and the pitch had being dug and renovated to a turf that is needed to produce modern day cricketers. Jusey, the College Director’s ‘golaya’ who delivered the notices to classes, I heard he is in an Old-People’s Home, not merely because he is old, but more to do with having no people of his own. No one knows much about Marceline of chemistry and Albert of Physics, gone and forgotten like the times themselves. As for the bell, it’s still rung sharp at 8 in the morning and the boys go lava frozen. Confession on Thursday and holy-communion on Friday at the College Chapel is still the faithfully followed ritual. Our class of Einsteins and Aristotles are now middle-aged men and most have blown with the winds to various corners of the planet. We did graduate from our drudgery days of sentences about ‘Policeman’ and ‘Coconut trees’ and ‘My mother’ to be able to hold our own in the new world we leapt onto. Perhaps with embarrassing difficulties at first, we did manage to crawl to an acceptable level of English, both spoken and written, as the years rolled by.
It took me a long time to know what the hell the great Mr Ruben L. Mendis was laughing about when he slapped and almost spiked Kadalana Anton on the gates of the Buckingham Palace.
“When you are in Rome, I was in London”; some idiom.
Mini Glossary
Golaya – peon
