IT ALL HAPPENED IN A SCHOOL
a novel by Gaurav Sharma
PROLOGUE
GOD & GURU CONVENT
Monday, September 11, 2017
The chirpy five-year-old angel to her father is unusually
quiet today. After months, she has refused to have lunch with her father after
returning from school. He tries his best to cajole her but nothing works. He gives up and infers that she is not well.
But, strangely, as her parents turn away, she slips into the bathroom.
Minutes pass. She is still in the bathroom. The father,
restless and worried, asks his wife to check. The mother finds her frantically
washing her clothes. The bloodstains on her clothes have tinged the water red. Soon,
the mother finds out that her little daughter has been raped. The girl tells her mother, “The uncle who wears a cap has
beaten me with fingers down there.”
The father rushes her to a hospital where the doctors
confirm that she has been raped. Her condition deteriorates and she is in a
critical state now.
Police have arrested the culprit. This forty-year-old ‘uncle’
is a peon in her school. He, himself is the father of a teenage daughter.
The innocent victim also mentions that she had complained
to a teacher but she laughed it out.
She goes to TAGORE PUBLIC SCHOOL in Gandhi Nagar, Delhi.
Barely three days before this heinous incident was a boy
found murdered in the toilet of RYAN INTERNATIONAL SCHOOL in Gurugram, Haryana.
Police arrested an employee of the school, a bus conductor, and reported that
he had confessed to the boy’s murder. Later, it surfaced that a senior student
of the same school had killed the boy.
The rapist and the killer didn’t think about the parents
for whom their children were the hope and purpose of life. They didn’t think
that their merciless act would paint a dirty picture of all schools. In the latter
incident, the criminal himself was a juvenile. By committing this needless crime,
he killed the myriads dreams of four parents.
The schools are supposed to be the safest place for
children after their homes. They are not. Not any longer. Even the teachers are
not true to their profession. The teacher the little girl complained to should
have listened to her and should have acted upon immediately. She was a woman
and must be a mother to a daughter.
The extensive coverage of these crimes by the media has
ensured that the culprits would be brought to justice but, there had been a case
that didn’t come into the limelight. Power stamped out the flames before they
could grow. However, the ashes refused to cool down. Another five-year-old was raped
in a school twelve years ago.
The news of an untoward incident in a school anywhere
makes tremors run through me. My foundations shake and the earth threatens to
loosen its grip over me. The sun looks away. Skies spit on me. The air cuts
through the arches on my terrace hurling expletives. The ‘Nishan Sahib’ and the
huge Cross installed on the terrace feel ashamed of their association with me.
Terrible events of yesteryears still hover around and blatantly refuse to die.
I am not the only one who suffers when a felony is
committed to any school student. My horrendous past troubles another person. It
refuses to allow him peace as well and haunts him as severely as it haunts me.
When a gross offence occurs in a school, he comes here after work, to visit the
Gurudwara sahib and sit quietly for some time. The magnitude of our guilt is so
huge that twelve years of remorse could not wash it off.
This man, Harjeet Singh, is a former employee of God
& Guru Convent. The terrible events that took place fifteen years ago
devastated him such that he had to quit his job. The disaster did help him to
evolve as a human being and as a teacher; however, the cost of this
transformation was so high that it would keep him burdened for life.
I am happy for him because his career flourished after he
left me as it always happens with all the good teachers who unwittingly join
this school. They prosper in life and career when they change their employer.
As if, they serve here under a curse and once that curse is lifted, there is no
looking back for them. Harjeet is now the Principal of a reputed school in
North Delhi.
When he resigned from his job, his wife was pregnant with
their first child. “If the baby is a girl, I'll call her Pankhudi and if it's a
boy, I'll call him Soubhagya.” He had decided. Pankhudi and Soubhagya were two
of his colleagues during the last three years of his tenure here. He adored
both. His daughter is twelve and son is ten years old now.
It is ten past three and Harjeet is here.
Since the day I was founded, I have a special power. When
someone associated with me contemplates sitting alone, their thoughts seep into
me. I’m a sole witness to the rumblings of discontent and an audience to their
soliloquies.
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