The English Medium Urine Stain

My mother’s insistence that I attend an English-medium school may have been one of the great administrative miracles of my life, though at the time it probably looked like one more domestic decision made under the usual Bengali weather system of anxiety, aspiration, thrift, gossip, and maternal command.

The second stroke of luck was getting into WWA Cossipore English School. I say luck because childhood is not designed. It is assigned. You are dropped into a lane, a family, a language, a school, a class position, a set of smells, punishments, myths, humiliations, and lunchboxes, and then everyone pretends later that your personality was a noble internal project. Mine was not. Mine was assembled like municipal wiring in old Calcutta: partly planned, partly improvised, partly exposed, and always one monsoon away from sparks.

Had those two things not happened, my molecules would have arranged themselves differently. Not poetically differently. Literally differently. A school is not just a building with desks. It is a machine for distributing fears, accents, ambitions, shame, stories, permissions, prohibitions, and the faint, dangerous suspicion that the world may be larger than your para, your family, your gods, your exam marks, and your bowel movements.

The odd part is that the school was supposed to civilize me into usefulness. It was supposed to give me English, discipline, arithmetic, handwriting, posture, and some respectable middle-class confidence. Instead, it gave me something far more troublesome: a durable allergy to certainty. That is not what schools usually advertise. No prospectus says, “Send us your child and we will return a half-formed skeptic with digestive anxiety, mythological images in the head, and a lifelong distrust of public toilets.” But that is roughly what happened.

India today could probably achieve its preferred citizen more efficiently by skipping school entirely and replacing it with a tight syllabus of superstition, obedience, televised rage, competitive grievance, and religious theater with microphones. The modern state does not seem to require minds so much as synchronized throats. Chant here. Rage there. Worship this. Suspect them. Forward the message before verifying it. That would save a great deal of chalk.

So yes, in a perverse way, my school failed beautifully. It tried to educate me into society and instead left a small window open through which doubt came crawling in like a lizard.

My first school memory, however, was not doubt. It was urine.

Before WWA, there was a little kindergarten across the street from our house, if kindergarten is not too generous a term for a place where small children were arranged, watched, and occasionally leaked. I remember standing beside another boy and pissing against a wall because there was no proper bathroom. I remember the wall. I remember the act. And, with the cruel photographic precision of childhood, I remember noticing that the other boy, heavier and possibly older, possessed a darker and more imposing apparatus than mine.

This is how metaphysics begins for some people. Not with Plato. Not with the Upanishads. With a urine stain.

Mine was smaller.

The conclusion arrived before any useful knowledge of sex, reproduction, masculinity, psychology, or indoor plumbing. The mark I would leave on the world would be small. The evidence was right there on the wall, shrinking before my eyes, a private prophecy drying in public.

It is absurd, of course. Childhood is a factory of false conclusions. A child takes one lunchbox, one slap, one word from a teacher, one comparison in a bathroom, and constructs a cathedral of doom. But absurdity does not make a memory weak. Many of the stupidest childhood conclusions live longer than the intelligent adult ones. The adult mind can be argued with. The child’s humiliation is carved into wet cement.

I never liked the abbreviation WWA. It stood for some women’s welfare association, which may well have done decent work somewhere in the foggy distance, but to me it had all the glamour of a government stamp. Now, with the privilege of age and irreverence, I want to rename it XXX Cossipore English School, not because anything particularly erotic happened there, at least not in my witnessed jurisdiction, but because memory has earned its right to burlesque.

Children are never as innocent as adults pretend, and never as knowing as adults fear. We had bodies before we had explanations. We had shame before we had vocabulary. We had rumors before biology. Sex was not education; it was a smuggled mythology of sweat, threat, dirty jokes, magazines one could not buy, and warnings issued by boys who knew absolutely nothing but spoke with the authority of temple priests and failed customs officers.

Indian girls, I concluded early and incorrectly but not entirely without evidence, were practical animals. Many seemed more formidable than the decorative feminine ideals sold by mythology, cinema, and family gossip. They were not trembling Sitas waiting to self-immolate for male virtue. They were alert, suspicious, sharp-tongued, physically real, often larger than the fragile fantasies that corrupted adolescent imagination. The official stories had not prepared me for them. The official stories rarely prepare anybody for anything.

The fiction of docile womanhood, I began to suspect, was written by men frightened by actual women. Possibly by men who had lived too long among metaphors and not enough among kitchens, queues, classrooms, and bus stops. The grand mythology of obedience looked increasingly like one of those ancient inventions produced by some under-bathed sage whose body had been denied, whose mind had fermented, and whose spiritual system was really a badly ventilated room.

Around the same time, another glorious piece of misinformation circulated among boys: that celibacy caused semen to rise to the head. Vivekananda was sometimes dragged into this discussion as a warning or a miracle, depending on the speaker’s level of religious fever. This terrified me just enough to produce a private preventive regimen. I did not want luminous sperm migrating upward and turning my brain into a congested shrine. Childhood science was bad, but childhood risk management was energetic.

Mythology itself I loved. I still do. The Ramayana, the Mahabharata, the rakshasas, devas, vanaras, curses, vows, astras, disguises, cosmic weapons, and family disputes of continental scale remain excellent narrative machinery. Indian mythology is one of the great story forests of the world, dense enough to get lost in and old enough to smell of smoke, ghee, blood, rain, and power.

But stories are not facts simply because they are old. Age gives a story texture, not truth. I can think of Ravana and Spider-Man with equal ease. Both are useful. Both are theatrical. Both contain psychological and moral material. Neither requires me to surrender the little dignity of reason and pretend that flying monkeys are a branch of zoology.

This is where many Indians get trapped. They inherit magnificent stories and then, like anxious clerks, try to convert them into land records, science textbooks, medical claims, political manifestos, and proof of ancient supremacy. It is not enough to enjoy the dragon. The dragon must be nationalized. The dragon must prove aviation. The dragon must defeat the West. The dragon must appear on prime time wearing saffron and shouting.

What a waste.

I remember a recurring childhood dream: two dark, powerful figures fighting with gada, the mace-like weapon carried by gods, warriors, and muscular mythological troublemakers. The dream was blue, not merely in color but in atmosphere, as if it had been soaked in indigo. The figures were rakshasa-like, though now, with the cruelty of adult visual memory, I realize they resembled villains from low-budget South Indian cinema. Large bodies. Dark skin. Threatening teeth. The usual lazy coding of menace.

Later, when I lived and worked in Hyderabad, I became more aware of how easily North Indian and Bengali imagination turns South Indian physicality into caricature. A strong dark man becomes a villain, an ogre, a rakshasa, as if melanin itself were an accusation. The religious imagination is not innocent here. Again and again, divinity is brightened and danger is darkened. Fairness becomes purity. Darkness becomes appetite. God apparently looked at complexion and invented caste lighting.

That is not theology. That is prejudice wearing jewelry.

This is one reason I refuse to romanticize childhood religion. It did not arrive only as comfort, song, incense, and grandmotherly sweetness. It arrived also as hierarchy, fear, body-disgust, obedience training, and color politics. A child notices these things before he can name them. He may not have the vocabulary, but he can smell the rot under the flowers.

Milk was another religion.

I drank milk well beyond the age when children usually stop advertising their dependency. I drank it through primary school and would have continued indefinitely if dignity and digestion had not intervened. In America, I drank milk as if making up for civilizational loss. Back in Calcutta, I still lean toward condensed milk in tea, that sticky little conspiracy between sweetness and self-harm.

If the city does not kill me, the milk may yet make a respectable attempt.

For years I carried a private comic vision of installing a grotesque school deity at the gate: a maternal goddess of nourishment dispensing milk from one side, lactose-free compensation from the other, assisted by a male consort engineered for water, tea, and other fluids of dubious theological value. It was a filthy image, yes, but not merely filthy. It was a rebellion against the way institutions sanctify dependence while pretending to produce independence. Schools feed you, frighten you, rank you, shame you, bless you, and then claim the result is character.

Character, in India, is often just fear with a necktie.

And yet I cannot honestly say the school ruined me. That would be too easy, and untrue. Schools do damage, but they also light fuses. Mine did. It did not strangle my curiosity, though it certainly tried to wrap it in timetables. It did not eliminate my ignorance, thank God, because ignorance properly handled is one of the most productive substances available to the mind. It did not make me confident, which was a blessing, because confidence in India is often just ignorance wearing aftershave.

What it gave me, in flashes, was the sense that adults were incomplete. Teachers, parents, elders, authority figures, all of them had holes. Some were kind. Some were tired. Some were underpaid. Some were trying. Some were ridiculous. Some were vain. Some were wounded. None were the finished statues children are asked to salute.

That realization stayed with me. It made me a pain in the ass later, a stickler, an irritant, the sort of fellow who asks why a process exists, who benefits from a rule, what evidence supports a claim, and whether the emperor’s underwear has at least been laundered. This is not always socially useful. It makes one unpleasant at meetings, weddings, family functions, and national festivals. But it is not nothing.

My parents, mercifully, were too exhausted by the burdens of the Bengali joint family to complete the full parental indoctrination package. They loved, worried, scolded, provided, and misunderstood, but they did not possess the bureaucratic stamina required to crush every oddity in me. The school, too, was stretched thin. Too few teachers. Too little money. Too much tuition culture. Too many children carrying too many invisible storms. It was not a sleek machine. It leaked. And through the leaks, I escaped.

This was before capitalism properly arrived in India wearing deodorant, management vocabulary, and a smile like a bank loan. Calcutta was still nursing its old injuries: unemployment, political exhaustion, decaying infrastructure, intellectual vanity, class resentment, and the magnificent Bengali talent for discussing collapse over tea while doing very little about it. The poor were poor, the rich were insulated, and the middle class was already beginning its long process of splitting into the almost-rich, the not-quite-poor, and the permanently anxious.

In that world, English-medium schooling was not merely education. It was a passport office for the imagination. It did not guarantee escape, but it gave one access to maps.

I was not a brave child. I was sensitive, nervous, watchful, and already half-withdrawn into the private country of the mind. I do not know whether that was temperament, environment, early mood disorder, or the usual cocktail of family, school, body, class, and weather. There was no clear before and after. No dramatic origin scene. No thunderclap. I simply remember being more comfortable thinking than participating, more soothed by explanation than company, more loyal to inwardness than playground democracy.

The first major depressive episode came when I was nineteen, but the school years had already trained the circuitry. The amygdala had its own attendance register. Anxiety took roll call every morning.

Indian schoolchildren know this climate well. Perhaps today they know it even more intensely. Marks, competition, family expectation, social comparison, coaching classes, bodily shame, religious pressure, career panic, and the ever-present terror of falling behind form a weather system that adults keep calling discipline because the alternative would require them to apologize.

But loneliness is never clean. Even the introvert wants witnesses. I have often wanted admiration while pretending to be above it. I have fished for compliments with the stealth of a bad thief. I have wanted to be seen, but safely; heard, but not interrupted; applauded, but not handled. Perhaps this blog is part of that same arrangement, a little stage with an emergency exit, a one-way communiqué from a man who wants company but fears the cost of actual company.

I did have friends in school. Not grand soulmates, perhaps, but those practical childhood alliances formed by proximity, shared hours, common enemies, exam panic, gossip, games, and the local geography of habit. Such friendships feel eternal when you are inside them because childhood has not yet explained time. Later you discover they were built on narrow bridges: same class, same lane, same bus, same tuition, same fear. Remove the bridge and the friendship stands stranded on the far bank, waving politely, then less often, then not at all.

After returning from the United States, I met a few old acquaintances and learned that memory is sometimes the better host. The boy you remember and the man before you are not the same organism. The adult may be vain, prudish, cruel, pompous, politically deranged, spiritually inflated, or merely boring in a way that insults the child he once was. Better, sometimes, to keep the old friend preserved in amber than to meet the tax-paying reptile who replaced him.

A fair trade. I will not get another childhood to restock the shelves.

Depression, however, is always available. It is the one place that remains open in all seasons. A bottomless pit has the advantage of reliability. When I fall in, I at least know the architecture. And when I climb out, even temporarily, emergence feels like promotion.

The metallic taste of failure, blood, blade, fear, and the premonitory sinking before a depressive episode belongs to the same family of sensations. They gather in the mouth and chest like bad relatives at a ceremony. The curse of feeling too much is that ordinary life arrives over-amplified. A remark is not a remark. It is a verdict. A silence is not a silence. It is abandonment with furniture. A memory is not a memory. It is a summons.

This is not romantic. Sensitivity is often praised by people who have not had to survive it. It can make art, yes, but it can also make grocery shopping feel like a minor military campaign. The wiring runs deep. Neurons that fire together wire together, and in some of us they formed little unions early, negotiated terrible contracts, and have been striking ever since.

One thing is certain, though certainty itself remains suspicious: whoever I was meant to be is not who I became. The normal trajectory, if such a thing exists, went elsewhere. Mine took a side lane, stepped in something, lost its glasses, and began arguing with a goat.

By fifty, to remain a nobody is almost an accomplishment. The world works hard to turn people into titles, salaries, handles, designations, opinions, and display pictures. To remain awkwardly unclassified is not glory, but it is a kind of resistance. I am not recommending it. It pays badly. It does not attract women. It does not impress relatives. It does not photograph well. But it has its freedoms.

The body has been less cooperative. Short skeleton, surplus fat, nervous gut, poor eyesight, unreliable mood, and a lifelong treaty negotiation with the lower intestine. I remember shitting my school pants at least twice. This is not the kind of childhood material people embroider onto cushions, but it matters. For some children, school anxiety is not an abstraction. It is a liquid threat moving through the abdomen during arithmetic.

To shit or not to shit was not a literary question. It was logistics, dignity, and terror.

Public toilets in India remain among the strongest arguments against civilization. They are like parliamentary ethics: theoretically present, practically unusable, and avoided by anyone with remaining self-respect. Much of my childhood outside the home involved not education, friendship, or play, but the strategic avoidance of bowel events. I measured space by toilet risk. I measured time by digestive probability. I measured character by containment.

A boy’s moral education, in practice, may consist of learning how long he can clench.

And yet, despite the urine, the shit, the mythology, the fear, the sexual confusion, the color prejudice, the religious nonsense, the class absurdity, the underpaid teachers, the bad toilets, the weak spectacles, and the chronic internal thunder, I cannot deny that the school lit something. A fuse, yes, but also a lamp. It gave me English, which gave me access not merely to status but to shelves of thought. It gave me teachers whose imperfections taught me that authority was human. It gave me classmates who became evidence that people are never as simple as categories. It gave me enough structure to resist structure.

That is not a small gift.

The great failure of education is not that it fails to produce employable people. It often does that adequately enough for the mills of society. The deeper failure is that it produces too many people who are certain too early. Certainty is the cheapest luxury good of the educated classes. They wear it like perfume. The truly educated person should be harder to fool, but also harder to harden. School should protect the mind from both superstition and smugness. Instead, it often manufactures a polished version of both.

I am an asshole, certainly. But I try not to be a certain asshole. There is a difference. The certain asshole is a public health hazard. The uncertain asshole, properly restrained, may occasionally be useful.

Calcutta, meanwhile, remains itself: overcrowded, tender, brutal, funny, decaying, argumentative, overfed with gods and underprovided with drains. Too many people, too little space, too much time, too much noise, too many wounded egos wandering the streets in search of an object. A mob can form here with the speed of mold. Religion adds kerosene. Politics supplies matches. Poverty supplies the dry wood. Then everyone looks surprised when something burns.

The menace of our time is not spectacular evil. It is banal derangement at scale. Too many holy men, too many forwarded certainties, too many sentimental lies about nation, mother, god, purity, masculinity, tradition, and destiny. Too many people standing at the center of the universe with no evidence except volume. Facts arrive late, exhausted, and covered in spit.

Against all this, what can one small urine stain do?

Not much.

But perhaps that was always the wrong measurement. A small stain is still evidence that someone stood there. A child stood there, frightened, comparing himself, already building a theory of inadequacy from a wall in Calcutta. That child went on to read, doubt, desire, panic, fail, leave, return, write, mock, mourn, and keep thinking. The mark was small, yes. But it was not nothing.

At forty-nine, I had wondered why one should live more. At fifty and beyond, the answer is not grander, only more stubborn. To see what else can be understood. To rescue one more memory from the swamp. To laugh at one more sacred fraud. To describe, with whatever shabby instruments remain, how a boy became this man and how a school, while trying to make him proper, accidentally made him porous.

That may be enough.

And if it is not enough, it is still what I have.