"And in that dorm room with thirty beds, we slept as dead men. The softest noise could trigger the warden’s black box.”
I won’t tell you I am Spiderman or something. I am not amazing. When Andy Dufresne escaped from Shawshank prison in 1966, I didn’t even exist. But I went to a Shawshank too, my own Shawshank.
Dad brought me to live in a hostel as a naive kid. No sooner, I was promoted to a house where rules were both strict and weird. A tall, fair guy with brown hair and a well-shaped English accent was our housemaster, our warden. Up to that moment, I didn’t have the slightest of idea. My life in hell was about to begin.
Like Warden Samuel Norton, our house master believed in two things: discipline and duty. We were bound to both. A lot of discipline, and a lot more duties. Everybody knew what he meant on our first night when we were all instructed to get to the study hall.
“What have you brought for the house?” he had asked. The answers came in all forms. Sir, I am good at Mathematics. I can win trophies to decorate. I like painting. I could print banners and placards if the house needs it. I love sports and can represent us in the Track and Field Meet. I can sing. I can dance...
The warden was unimpressed.
All of us huddled together in a U-shape we stood, as if at some sort of Scouts ceremony. Everybody said something. It seemed they had all brought gifts to the house. My turn came too.
“Aah...I am fond of gardening sir and ...”
I could never complete the sentence. But I tell you this—I had never done as much gardening as I did that particular year.
The warden pointed to shelves laden with golden cups and trophies on the wall. “These emblems are running shields. We may lose them next year, or if we work hard, we might even add some more. But what I ask of you guys here is house spirit. That’s all I ask!” And that night, after we were dismissed, everyone went to sleep in confusion. The lights were out soon. But until its last filament ray remained, I lay upon my bed busy thinking. What did this ‘house spirit’ mean anyway?
We soon found out how stubborn our warden was. House was to him as gold was to Midas. He made you march in the garden, skin burning from the day’s sun and fingers blistered with the Chinese bricks we had to carry around. A wheel barrow out of nowhere lay in his flat; we had to bring quintals of sand just to erect a brick layout with the name of our house on it. Then at the end of the day, when we thought we were done, he stood behind our heads with a flashlight. We painted those newly installed bricks under the moon. Even when we went to bed, the phrase ‘house spirit’ reverberated in our minds. All night long.
Our days got tougher. There were no weekends for the warden. He spent his Saturdays busy at work, and so did we. I thought we had come to a school to study, and that the house simply a building in which we lived. Everyone had initially thought so.
We were mistaken.
“Hope is an emotional state which promotes belief in a positive outcome related to events and circumstances in one’s life.” Wikipedia believes that is hope. As for us, we went to bed praying for tomorrow so we wouldn’t have to clean the bathroom. Maybe next weekend, we could even go home and skip work. Maybe we’d get enough time to study instead of marching as armies, perfecting the house.
Maybe we wouldn’t have to pay money to raise house funds that were wasted on buying posters and paints. Maybe we’d get a little extra milk and biscuits someday. But these never happened. We still dreamt though. And for us, that was hope.
Our warden was a very unreasonable man. We went for our mid-term break. When we returned, he had installed a beeper on the front wall; a blue-brown plastic cube with a wire tail that led to its switch in his flat. We called it the black box. Its utility was not known until that night.
It was mid-winter. The lights were out and we were all lying on our beds. Many inmates owned battery operated radios, earphones plugged deep into their ear holes. The rest of us gossiped until we fell short of things to talk about. But that night noise was loud. Someone cracked a lame joke and the dorm was soon filled with laughter. It was then that the beeper beeped. The house captain knew its meaning. He stormed into our room with an aluminium rod. We knelt on that cold floor until our knees were numb and our buttocks purple with diarrhoea. Nobody produced a word after lights out again.
What kind of life did we live, really? When Mark Zuckerberg was writing codes for his billion dollar machine, what were we doing? Well yes, we were in a prison learning how to decorate beds using three or more green and white bed sheets.
NASA was onto its Spirit Mars landing mission while we mopped that floor three times a day. When many mums served their children milk with Bournvita, we were assigned to carry a jug to our warden’s flat. And in that dorm room with thirty beds, The softest noise could trigger the warden’s black box.
And just as he might have arrived, the warden left one day. Perhaps he had achieved from life what he sought. He did take our house to unbroken limits. We won trophies that year. Shelves were full. But in turn, we had to lose so many nights’ sleep. We had developed a sense of compulsion as we repeated the same thing over and over again. We had forgotten motivation. And paying taxes as students...the height of ridiculousness...
The warden never understood us. Or maybe we never understood him. Anyway, he was out now. That was what we had wanted all along.
Sometimes it makes me sad...the warden being gone, and all.
We don’t have to arrange beds. We are free men. I can only think. There’s no beeper anymore. No gardening and other things.
It feels like school now, finally.
We are free to rejoice, and to make as much noise as we can. We will, you know. This is hostel. You enjoy until you can, and then you stop still, never knowing when it will be that you can enjoy again. These rules are funny. First you hate them, and then you get used to them. Enough time passes, and you even begin to depend on them. That’s institutionalisation.
Here we are celebrating. The house captain won’t do anything today. After all, he is one of us. It pricks me though; to realise that it won’t last long. They say the next warden is coming in a few days.
He might play with his own set of rules. We’ve got to get institutionalised, again.
- Anik Yadav
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