Tomichan Matheikal's blog

AI-generated illustration It wasn’t easy to discern whether he was a friend or merely an amused onlooker. He was my colleague at the college, though from another department. When my life had entered a slippery slope because of certain unresolved psychological problems, he didn’t choose to shun me as most others did. However, when he did condescend to join me in the college canteen sipping tea and smoking a cigarette, I wasn’t ever sure whether he was befriending me or mocking me. Kailasnath was a bundle of paradoxes. He appeared to be an alpha male, so self-assured and lord of all that he surveyed. Yet if you cared to observe deeply, you would find too many chinks in his armour. Beneath all those domineering words and gestures lay ample signs of frailty. The tall, elegantly slim and precisely erect stature would draw anyone’s attention quickly. Kailasnath was always attractively dressed though never unduly stylish. Everything about him exuded an air of chic confidence. But the wa

AI-generated illustration You outgrow certain friendships because life changes you in ways that nobody, including you, had expected. Joe is one such friend of mine who was very dear to me once. That friendship cannot be sustained anymore because I am no more the person whom Joe knew and loved to amble along with. And Joe seems incapable of understanding the fact that people can change substantially. Joe and I were supposed to meet one of these days after a gap of more than two decades. I scuttled the meeting rather heartlessly. Just because Joe’s last messages carried words that smacked of intimacy. My life has gone through so much devastating fire that the delicate warmth of intimacy has become repulsive. Joe was a good friend of mine while we were in Shillong. He was a post-graduate student and a part-time schoolteacher when I met him first. I was a fulltime schoolteacher teaching math and science to ninth and tenth graders. My dream was to postgraduate in English literature an

When you are down and out, you will find that people are of two types. One is the kind that will walk away from you because now you are no good. They will pretend that you don’t exist. They don’t see you even if you happen to land right in front of them. The other is the sort that will have much fun at your expense. They will crack jokes about you even to you or preach at you or pray over you. This latter people are usually pretty happy that you are broke. You make them feel more comfortable with themselves even to the point of self-righteousness. Ivan was an exception. When I slipped on the path of life and started a free fall that would last many years before I hit the bottom without a thud but with enormous anguish, Ivan stood by me for some reason of his own. He didn’t display any affection which probably he didn’t have. He didn’t display any dislike either. There was no question of preaching or praying. No jokes either. Ivan was my colleague for a brief period at St Joseph’s

AI-generated image Heavendrea was my landlady for many, many years. We got along very well because there wasn’t any occasion when we had to get along together. Fritz Perls would have loved us because we lived out his ideal of ‘I do my thing and you do your thing.’ I was not in Shillong to live up to Heavendrea’s expectations and Heavendrea wasn’t there to live up to mine, and, more importantly, we both acknowledged that. She wanted me to pay the rent in the first week of every month which I did without fail. Life was simple because the matriarch had few demands. I was one among many of the tenants in Heavendrea’s little kingdom. Her house was a proper building with a solid foundation and brick walls. The houses given on rent looked like makeshift structures with floors and walls made of wood and roofs of tin. I liked my little house anyway because Shillong hardly offered anything better to ‘outsiders’. My house had two little rooms and a littler kitchen. When I approached Heavend

The name Geronimo is fiction just as most names in this A2Z series are. But Geronimo was real. He was my landlord, the only landlord I ever had in Shillong. All other house owners were women, landladies. Khasi men hardly owned anything except the bottle of drink they carried home at the end of the day. I’m sure the situation is different today. The change had already started even before I quit Shillong. Khasis are a hill tribe that follows matriliny. The mother is the boss at home. The children get the mother’s surname. The father is almost a nobody at home. In the olden tradition, men had certain status as they presided over religious and social functions. With the arrival of Christianity, the priestly and sacerdotal duties were usurped by the clergy. Now the Khasi men had little role to play at home. American journalist Thomas Laird described the Khasi land as a place “where women rule and men are used as breeding bulls.” Whenever I went in search of an accommodation, it was a

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

A short story I wrote nearly two decades ago, Anna, I Miss You , was based on a real person named Etilda. Etilda was an elderly Khasi lady who taught at St Joseph’s School, Shillong. When I met her first in the monsoon of 1986, she was in her late 40s or early 50s. I had just joined St Joseph’s as a young teacher. St Jo, as they called it affectionately, was a culture shock for me. I was a total alien there initially with everyone else being a Khasi with the exception of one Punjabi Muslim lady and a Garo young man. “ Bam kwai ,” Etilda approached me with a neatly folded betel leaf. “Have kwai” is the meaning of what she said in Khasi language. Kwai is betel leaf with a little lime smeared on it plus a chip of arecanut. It plays a dominant role in Khasi culture. By the way, Khasis are the major tribe in Shillong. Their language is Khasi too. Etilda made sure that I learnt a Khasi word or two almost every day. She also taught me to chew kwai. When a Khasi dies, they say that the d