EDUCATION
Kulwant Miss and her Trophy
A school story
Kulwant Kaur: The former cycling trophy winner who now teaches Mathematics
Kulwant Miss studied in a government school. She won first place in a cycling contest and received a trophy. She married, moved to Chittaranjan and joined the St. Joseph’s and Mary’s Convent School.
Kulwant Miss displayed the trophy in the staff room of the convent school where she started to teach Mathematics. As time wore on, her cycling trophy started to gather dust.
Gattu and friends win a traffic safety skit and get shiny trophies
A traffic safety skit had gone well, and all ten students had received shiny trophies from the municipal road safety department.
Soumya the unsung zebra crossing painter
Soumya had been treated very unfairly. She had sweltered under the Chittaranjan sun to paint the zebra crossing for the play.
She was the eleventh member of the skit team, but she wasn’t in the play.
The municipal officer misses giving Soumya a trophy
The municipal officer judging the skit had no idea that an Art club student had spent two hours in the sun, like a laborer, to make the zebra crossing look so good.
They are difficult to paint, with all those exactly equal widths, straight lines, and that the black shouldn’t run on to the white.
The municipal officer awarded trophies only to the kids in the skit.
Sowmya saw the shiny trophies the skit actors had received, and sighed, and went back to the Art club.
Gattu nicks Kulwant Miss’s trophy
Gattu couldn’t bear the look on Soumya’s face.
He went up to the Senior staff room and dusted off Kulwant Miss’s cycling trophy. It had no label on it and so he created one in paper and marker, and glued it. Skit, First Place, 2017, just like his own.
Soumya is scared and shocked
Gattu was taken aback when his “resourcefulness” upset Soumya.
She appreciated Gattu’s thoughts, but she was not going to take Kulwant Miss’s cycling trophy home even if it had been pilfered expressly to undo the injustice she had been subjected to.
If Gattu was so sympathetic towards Soumya, why didn’t he give her his own trophy?
Gattu felt he deserved his own trophy, he’d worked hard.
Principal Alka Tripathi found out. The CCTV cameras did Gattu in.
Gattu received more “counseling” than he had ever received so far in his life. He had received more than most, avid cricket player and window smasher that he was.
Finally Jason McCabe, the sports teacher asked Principal Tripathi to give it a rest. Gattu hadn’t stolen the trophy for himself.
Everybody’s trophies are confiscated
All ten students of the safety skit were tarred with the thieving brush, and had their trophies confiscated. The CCTV had seen them talking to Gattu before he nicked the cycling trophy from the staff room.
Some members of the skit team had never before received a trophy in their lives for anything, and to receive it and have it confiscated the same day made them feel that life couldn’t get much worse.
Soumya’s interrogation
Principal Tripathi and Kulwant Miss went to Soumya and asked her why ever Gattu felt she deserved a trophy when she hadn’t been in the play.
Kulwant Miss falls for the geometry of Soumya’s zebra crossing
When Kulwant Miss saw the neat lines of the zebra crossing, she handed her her trophy back to Soumya with a warm hug, saying that Soumya was more than an artist, she had a mathematician’s eye for measures.
Principal Tripathi doesn’t like the unearned trophy awarding
Principal Tripathi was ambiguous about this. It was Kulwant Miss’s trophy to do as she pleased, but she wasn’t happy about Soumya getting the trophy Gattu had stolen for her.
Gattu should have waited for an Art Club occasion for Soumya to be awarded instead of going around pilfering and polishing old trophies with Brasso and handing them out to all he thought fit.
It is Chittaranjan, not Fairyland. No new trophies were minted for Soumya
Didn’t the Municipal road safety people give out another gold-coated plastic trophy with a plastic base for Soumya? No. This is Chittaranjan, not Fairyland.
Kulwant Miss was kind, so Soumya got a trophy. Soumya was mildly reluctant to receive the trophy, because she had not an athletic bone in her body, and that trophy had cycling sweat in its very construction.
Soumya gets bitten by the cycling bug
But then, Soumya started to turn up to school, on a bicycle. She and a good friend turned the daily school commute into a healthy one.
It was the sight to see, other students lolling out of buses, cars and hopping off scooters, but these two getting to school on their own steam.
Trophies are returned to all the other skit students
This is a mixed blessing, because the trophy brings up some gut-churning memories for all the skit members. Gattu’s family, if they received the trophy back, do not showcase it in their drawing room.
Gattu gets beaten into shape by the coaching mills, and becomes productive at last
What about Gattu? He is in the crushing mill of India’s coaching factories, that break your will and mold you into an engineer, a doctor, a lawyer or a chartered accountant.
You have to grow up and take care of your parents, trophy or no trophy.
Pictures of representative people to match the characters and trophy in the story. Many thanks to Kulwant Kaur who shared a picture of her cousin who studies in a Punjabi school for the photo of a girl in salwar kameez riding a bicycle.
I had expected a perfectly ironed dupatta in a V-shape, but Punjabi school prayers require the kids cover their heads during prayer, so an unfurled dupatta it is. The dupatta is the veil-like garment that sweeps over the shoulders.
Somebody put on her old school uniform in the afternoon, (during lockdown) and took a picture for me in a village in Punjab for that picture. I was also surprised to see that a girl was riding a man’s cycle.
Punjab is 1700 km from where I live, but the photos were shared over WhatsApp. Schoolchildren in my city wear skirts and blouses as school uniforms.
All photos by author. Photos of children used with permission, and then edited with Prisma filters.
