In my pre-teens in the mid-1960s, my father, a central government employee, learned that a Central School (soon renamed Kendriya Vidyalaya) was opening close to our place in Bengaluru. Central Schools, as KVs now, schools mostly admitted children of central government and defence personnel. My father shifted me from a small Kannada-medium school in our locality to the new one, only to find that the latter, perhaps lacking sufficient numbers, was merged with a Kendriya Vidyalaya branch inside a defence establishment, i.e., the Indian Air Force Headquarters Training Command, Hebbal.
It used to be located a few hundred metres east of where it now is in its new avatar, meaning that I, in my pre-teens, had to walk a longer distance, only once in a blue moon spotted by a kindly uniformed bicyclist headed in my direction offering to cut a kilometre or so off of my ordeals. Such a long walk I had previously been unused to and having to carry and read many books in languages I was then unfamiliar with – especially Hindi, then as it is now, a North Indian imperialist language imposed on us – I found myself at the bottom of the class. That is where I found a kindred soul in Rahmathullah, also recently arrived from a local school and having to travel to and from some distance. Mostly shunned by other classmates, we bonded. I used to sit and eat my lunch in his company. I once called him ‘Thurka’, a rather pejorative Kannada word meaning a Turk; along with ‘Saabi’ corrupted from ‘Sahab’, for Muslims.
I remember him sounding pained, as he asked, “Why do you say this” or words to that effect. Looking back, I hope I did so just once and did not taunt him further. That exchange remains vivid in my memory and I feel tormented by it to this day: I must have picked up anti-Muslim and anti-Christian prejudices through some doggerels in Kannada I’d heard from my elder brothers or peers.
Incidentally, Kendriya Vidyalaya Hebbal lies on a road leading east towards a major traffic junction, Mehkri Circle (too often misspelt as Mekhri), named after Enayathulla Mehkri, a freedom fighter and a philanthropist, one of the most under-celebrated public figures of Bengaluru.
The KV in my locality reopened the next year and I lost touch with Rahmathullah, Hebbal classmates and teachers. But if only there were ways of finding Mr Rahmathullah, I would apologise to him for having, as a misguided pre-teenager, called him names and for the majoritarian atrocities, discrimination and pogroms people of his community are facing in India now. And tell him that there are some numbers, albeit grossly insufficient thus far, from among the majority community putting up a modicum of resistance against Islamophobia and genocide-intentioned actions on the part of both State and non-State
actors.