St Xavier’s School: Address for grounding

When I joined St. Xavier’s School in the year 1939, the Anglo-Indian teachers held sway and the Belgian priests ran St. Xavier’s with a judicious blend of strictness and compassion. The world here was insulated from the convulsions and contortions of the marketplace and the battlefield.

I stepped into Standard I B with William Ferris as our class teacher. He was a gentleman to his fingertips and often came to have tea with my parents at Loudon Street. He was the ideal person to give us courage right at the beginning of our journey. E. A. Riper of II B was more rough, more sardonie, less lovable. Terence Belletty in the 3rd standard was a very well-dressed, quiet and dignified teacher. We listened to him with rapt attention. I believe that he was in the same class as Jyoti Basu when they were both students at St. Xavier’s.

M.W. Pires of Standard IV B was more in the limelight than any of his other colleagues. He was known as a very seasoned teacher. His appeal was enhanced by his good looks. His daughter, Joyce, was a stunningly attractive young woman who must have broken many hearts. After leaving St. Xavier’s, Mr. Pires and his son, Alan, started a primary school at the crossing of Ballygunge Circular Road and Gurusaday Road. Needless to say there was no dearth of students in his new school.

W.R. White was in charge of Standard V B, a very bluff and stolid sort of person. He spent too much time on mathematics which was my bugbear and he took a very dim view of my poor results in geometry and arithmetic. This was the time when we were given a new subject to study — moral science. Christ’s Parables were thrown in and we were encouraged to give our views on what we thought was good or bad, or right or wrong. We discovered that morality was an essential ingredient of a stable and sane society. We exercised our minds to give answers to pertinent questions. We were full of bounce when dealing with moral science.

Standard VI B saw a handsome priest, Father F. Van Baal as our class instructor. He was soft-spoken and gentle and made us feel wanted. He often had a faraway look in his cornflower blue eyes.

After this it was the Junior Cambridge class run by Ralph Deefolts. He was a very painstaking teacher with an intelligent face. We were introduced to biology for just that one year and he succeeded in rousing our interest in the subject. I met him and his pretty wife in Darjeeling during the puja vacation at the Bellevue Hotel. He came to the lounge one evening and churned out the latest dance tunes on the piano. He played with immense showmanship and we lapped up the jazzy, sensuous rhythms. He remained a standing reproach to all the stodgy people who came after him. His ingrained musical sense added another dimension to his character.

Father F. Mairlot was ready to receive us in the Preparatory Senior class. Although he wasn’t as sharp as a razor, he was the personification of goodness. During my long illness in 1959, he was almost a regular visitor — talking about the books I was reading and the fight I was putting up to combat this illness. His very presence exuded genuine warmth and solicitude. A Catholic priest seldom fails a distressed person and this has been proved over and over again. Although he is 96 now and burdened with very poor vision, he still writes to me from Australia twice a year.

Rev. Father R. Dobinson had acquired a halo around him as the charismatic senior Cambridge class teacher. He did not confine himself to the prescribed syllabus and often discussed writers and books we had never heard about. He wanted to sharpen our intelligence and make us a little more complete. He used to ask the students to sit in his chair and dilate on their future plans after leaving school. This is how he tested their presence of mind and powers of communication. Quite a lot of us faltered and mumbled and tripped over our words. If it wasn’t for him we wouldn’t have known about Gabriel Marcel and Pablo Picasso. That was the last stage of our journey through school and “Dobbie” brightened our lives with his incisive comments and forays into unchartered territories.

The Bengali teacher, who instructed us in our mother tongue from the 3rd standard right up to the Senior Cambridge, was Nalini Ranjan Chowdhury. He was prim and proper and nattily dressed. His classes were always interesting and lively. There were times when he felt like moving away from our text books and embarking on ghost stories. It’s amazing that I always stood first in Bengali all through school and Mr. Chowdhury held me in great estimation. He used to live in a hotel in Harrison Road but we were never given more information about his solitary existence. Some of his old pupils kept in touch with him long after they had left school and the rapport between them never waned.

Nibaran Chandra Chatterjee was our Sanskrit teacher with more than a touch of amiable eccentricity. He looked rather grotesque and was always shabbily dressed. He came from Dhaka and looked terribly pleased if any of his students happened to be from East Bengal. He wanted to know what village their fathers and grandfathers belonged to and never stopped scouting around for more details. He had a fair knowledge of Urdu and Persian but was too modest to boast about his prowess. Some of the cheeky students used to call him “Gejel” because of his bloodshot eyes, untidy hair and shambling gait.

Many eminent people passed through the portals of St. Xavier’s School. Jyoti Basu, Sir Abdul Halim Ghaznavi, Professor P. Lal, Dr. Subir Chatterjee, Moshtaque Murshed and Dipankar Gupta are some of the lustrous names. Nothing was foisted on us and the benign influence of the Fathers kept our humanistic instincts well-oiled. In the meantime harsher conditions have intervened and our cherished values are crumbling rapidly. It is time to say, “Nay, rush not. Time serves, we are going, gentlemen”.