The lady stood holding what to me looked like the walking stick the headmaster dragged around his body around school with every morning . It was pale, wooden and extremely rigid. What had been horrifying had been than the boy in question had actually been sent outside to select the cane with which his punishment would then be meted out to him.(there is a south indian vernacular proverb, as it were, that reflects this) And as she stood there her arm raised up right over her head to gain momentum, she remarked to this boy, pants undone, standing buck naked(literally!), in a martyrly self suffering tone that she was doing this because she loved him, us even, that it hurt her as much as it was hurting him, even more, then WHACK!
I think every one of us closed our eyes, though we had been given strict instruction to watch with our eyes open. To regale at the punishing of the sinner (and they wonder why we turned out to be a generation of voyeurs) I was sick, and more now than it ever was then. I'm older, almost as old as she would have been, I have nephews and nieces that age and my friends have children in the third grade (thats how old we were) and the thought of treating a child like that still sickens me. It gets worse, we were in boarding school, so that lady there was our mother for all practical purposes. Here was a fully grown Adult asking an 8 year old to go pick up the thickest log of cane he could find, one that will cause him the extreme pain that he deserves because he failed a spelling test, and then turning to twenty other 8 year olds and demand that they watch this inhuman act so that they may shame him into learning how to spell better while learning a lesson of their own!
Must be me, but by some act of fate you are reading this.....I HOPE YOU ROT IN HELL.
No comments:
Post a Comment