How many roads?

What with the demand for faculty outstripping the supply of competent teachers, academic hiring often ends up somewhere on the spectrum between absurdity and farce, with nonsensical dialogues and ludicrous endings. In the past ten years or so, as a subject expert, I have been a silent onlooker in hundreds of absurd and farcical faculty selection dramas in which my role has often been hijacked by KIA to my great relief.

 

In one of the latest of these dramas, KIA, who is as distant from English literature as Donald Trump is from good sense, asked a candidate, who was a postgraduate in English with several other academic qualifications and plenty of experience as a teacher, if she had studied Shakespeare in her MA. She nodded wanly. The reluctant nod encouraged KIA to drivel on about the Bard.

 

“Do you read Shakespeare even now?”

 

She both shook and nodded her head.

 

“What’s your favourite Shakespeare play?”

 

“Paradise Lost, saar” she said in a hushed voice as though she was naming a serial murderer.

KIA looked confused. He turned in my direction for a confirmation. I kept a blank face. Shakespeare or Rajamouli’s father – how the hell would the authorship of this book matter in an engineering college?

 

Never one to give up, KIA decided to address the subject without any expert guidance. “I know,” he said fixing the woman with an intimidating gaze, “Shakespeare wrote Helmet. Did he write Paradise also?”

 

“Oh yes, saar. Paradise Lost, saar, not Paradise. It’s a famous book.”

 

“Drama?”

 

“Of course, drama, saar. Shakespeare wrote only dramas.”

 

KIA has a deeply suspicious nature. “Who lost paradise in the drama?” he persisted, leaning forward as though pouncing.

 

“Angels, saar,” she said in a bright and clear voice. “They were in paradise, and they lost paradise.” Her eyes gleamed with confidence now.

 

This seemed a convincing explanation. KIA leaned back and nodded in satisfaction. “Okay, teach a demo lesson now.”

 

She got up and moved slowly like a detached wagon being shunted on to a side track in the Vijayawada railway yard. The wagon stood between the two boards, one white and the other black, on the other side of the hall, thought for a while and decided to use the white board.

‘The Road Not Taken’ – she wrote this in tiny letters on the board and started talking to the board itself. She said something about some Robert-something who wrote the poem.

 

KIA wouldn’t allow this. “Write on the board, without doubt, but speak to the students behind you. Don’t you know this? You are an experienced teacher, aren’t you?”

 

She smiled with a piteous look on her face and continued her teaching. It was a dialogic process with KIA making it as interactive as possible.

 

“There were two roads, and the traveller took one of them.”

 

“But there was only one traveller, so he could have taken only one of the roads. How could he take both roads?”

 

“Yes, saar. But there was another road also, saar.”

 

“But he did not take it. Why bother about it? Tell us what happened on the road he took.”

“Nothing happened, saar.”

 

“What are you saying? There were two roads. He took one. And nothing happened on that road. Is that what the poem is about? Funny.”

 

“Yes, saar. But no, saar. He talks about other roads also.”

 

“Other roads! You said there was only one other road, but now you are saying there were more roads. How many roads were there? Be clear about the number.” Then he turned to the subject expert and asked, “How many roads, sir?”

 

KIA is a facts-and-figures man. So, I decided to do justice to his question. “Actually, there are three roads,” I said approaching the question with deep reflection. From 2014 to 2023 I took the road on the Addada-Gudlavalleru route. When it became broken up and unusable beyond Penjendra, I took that serpentine one on the Chirichintala route – the road that takes you through several run-down cemeteries, full of tumbled tombstones, before it crosses the railway line and touches Angaluru. A few months ago, even that road become impassable. Then I went beyond and took the unfinished flyover near Dokiparru. The flyover hasn’t been opened to traffic yet, but I use it. It’s a roundabout way, of course, but it doesn’t hurt my back much.”

 

It was a moment of enlightenment for KIA – a eureka moment in which all illusions are shattered and one sees things as they really are. “Is that what the poem is about?” he asked the woman who, both shook and nodded her head, as was her wont, especially when deeply confused, and that concluded the lesson.

 

‘The pain ends when you let go,’ as the song goes.