Florentina and Shillong

Florentina is not one individual but a representative of the many females I lived with at St Joseph’s School, Shillong. St Jo was introduced in the last post. It is worth taking a closer look at St Jo.

 St Jo was an exclusively girl’s school when I joined it as a math teacher in the high school section in 1986. It belonged to a Catholic congregation of nuns and was quite an old structure with classic wooden planks for floors. I can see from the Internet that the entire campus has undergone a sea change although Shillong is at an elevation of 1500 metres from sea-level.

Much more than the infrastructure must have undergone change. A friend of mine visited St Jo recently [does anyone call it by that endearing abbreviation anymore, I wonder] and told me that he was treated very rudely by the principal though he is a Catholic priest. It was that same priest who had got me my first teaching job there at St Jo back in 1986 when the world was a much simpler ambience. He was a student for priesthood then. Today he is a venerable old priest.

Back in the 1980s, the nuns were a simple lot. The world was much simpler, of course, than today. The romantic in me would have thought that a hill station like Shillong with tribals as the dominant population would have retained some of that old-world simplicity. But I’m told that I won’t even recognise Shillong if I visit it today. It has embraced modernity so much. A lot of concrete has replaced the old traditional bamboo-clay walls and wooden floors. Highrise buildings abound everywhere. Sophistication has swallowed the entire tribal world.

Don’t you want to visit Shillong? A friend asked me the other day. I said No. Shillong inflicted a lot of wounds in my soul back in the latter half of the 1990s. The scars are still fresh. Why should I scratch those scars and seek the perverse pleasure of reopening them? Moreover, Shillong is not a classical hill station anymore. It is just another heap of concrete structures.

Maybe, I should visit it just for the perverse pleasure of seeing the marauding march of civilisation on hills that were intractable earlier. I would at least love to see St Jo once more, the school where I started my career, the school that taught me how to teach.

Florentina was a student of that school. As in most posts of the series whose part this post is, Florentina is a little fiction and more reality. The name is fiction. But the person is real. The only difference is that the person is not a particular individual in this post. Florentina could be any one of those hundreds of girls whom I taught at St Jo from 1986 to 1994.

I still remember a lot of faces from those days. Even names. Exotic names like Ibawansuklang Marbaniang or Shailanti Kharmawphlang. Or Florentina Shangpliang. Even their faces come alive in my memory. Cute girls with angelic smiles. St Jo was a convent school. The headmistress Rev Sister Thaddeus was a benign person. I remember many of the nuns in the convent too. They could never have been rude. The world was not so bad yet.

Really? Those were days when militant organisations were very much active in Shillong demanding the ouster of outsiders like me. There were many Khasi tribal organisations, including a student union, that went around attacking nontribal people and even killing many. There was much brutality.

Yet the truth is that there was much goodness in the Khasi hills as anywhere else in the Northeast in those days. The assaults were carried out by a small section of people consisting of the usual rut of aspiring politicians and another usual rut of criminals who were ably made use of by the politicians.

Florentina still had the innocent tribal charm. She neither understood the violence that sent thousands of people including little children to refugee camps nor endorsed it. Florentina sat by my side in the little living room of my rented house at Lower Mawprem and learnt math and physics. She didn’t want to join politics. Politics? She yucked. That was men’s job. And men were useless except for breeding children. That was what Florentina believed. And the men of Shillong seemed to do little to disprove Florentina.

I understand Shillong has changed a lot today. Would I revisit the place? Well, if Florentina sends me an invitation, maybe. 

I'm grateful to Pandian Ramaiah for teaching me to create images like this.

PS. I'm participating in #BlogchatterA2Z 

Previous Posts: A,  B,  C ,  D, E