I Found My Father's Report Cards
The strict man who policed my grades once failed everything too.
My father once grounded me for a month over a 41 in mathematics, and last spring I found his own report card from 1974: mathematics, 34, with a teacher's remark that read, in tired blue ink, "Talks in class. Future unclear."
I want to be clear about what kind of man we are discussing. This is a man who checked my homework with a red pen he kept specifically for the purpose, like a surgeon with a preferred scalpel. A man who, when I stood second in class five, asked one question: "Who came first?" A man whose entire parenting philosophy could be printed on a coin: marks now, feelings later, and later never came.
So when my mother asked me to clear out the old steel cupboard in their bedroom before the painters arrived, I expected insurance papers, expired warranties, and seventeen keys to nothing. Instead, at the bottom, under his office files from a job he retired from a decade ago, I found a brown envelope, soft with age, tied with actual string, like something out of a period film.
Inside were six report cards.
Government Boys School, Kanpur. The name on all of them: my father, aged eleven to sixteen.
I sat down on the bed and read them the way you would read a stranger's love letters. I am not proud of the joy. I am only reporting it.
Class six: mathematics 34, science 41, English 29. Class seven: a heroic recovery to 38 in mathematics, undone by a 22 in Sanskrit, a subject in which, I would like it noted, he later claimed to have been "very strong."
Class eight was the masterpiece. Failed. The whole year. Repeated.
In the remarks column, that same tired blue ink: "Talks in class. Does not submit work. Future unclear."
Future unclear... The man who once made me draw a study timetable in fifteen minute blocks. The man who stood over me during long division like the ghost of arithmetic past.
I did what any loving son would do. I photographed every page.
That evening at dinner I waited until he had criticised the news, the salt, and the general downfall of everything, and then I put my phone next to his plate, screen up, zoomed in on the 34.
My mother saw it first and made a sound I have only heard from pressure cookers.
My father put on his reading glasses. This took some time. He examined the photograph the way he examines auto rickshaw fares, looking for the fraud in it.
And then something happened that I had not budgeted for.
He did not laugh... and he did not shout. He put the phone down, took his glasses off, and looked, for a moment, like a sixteen year old who has been called to the front of the class.
"Where did you find those?" he said. Quietly. He is never quiet. Quiet, on him, is a costume.
"The steel cupboard. Bottom shelf."
"They were tied," he said, which was not an answer... and also was.
Here is what I learned over the next hour, at a dinner table where the food went cold and nobody moved to heat it. In 1973 his father's cloth shop went under, taking with it the family's one income and most of its pride. My father, thirteen, started delivering milk at four thirty in the morning, before school, for one rupee a day. He would fall asleep in class, and when the teacher asked why, he said nothing, because in his house you did not advertise a fallen shop. So the record shows: talks in class, does not submit work.
The record does not show: awake since four, hungry since always.
"I was not stupid," he said, to the table more than to me. "I was tired. But the report card cannot tell the difference, and neither could my father."
My grandfather, it turns out, had beaten him for that failed year. Then he had gone quiet for a month, which was worse. My father repeated class eight in a uniform bought secondhand, in the same classroom, one bench down from where he had failed, close enough to see his own past sitting in his old seat.
"Why did you keep them?" I asked. "You could have burned them forty years ago."
He folded his glasses. "So I would not forget what it feels like," he said. "And then," he shrugged, "I forgot anyway... I just kept the paper."
Every mark my father ever demanded from me was a mark he was still trying to hand to a boy in 1974 whose teachers had written him off in blue ink.
I thought I had found a weapon in that cupboard. What I had actually found was the instruction manual for my entire childhood. The red pen, the timetables, the "who came first"... none of it was ever about me.
I was the retake.
I was the appeal filed against a verdict passed on a milk delivery boy before my birth. It does not excuse the years I spent afraid of results day. But there is a difference between a man who is cruel and a man who is bailing water out of your boat because his own went down, and it took a 34 in mathematics to teach me which one I had.
I wrote about it afterwards, because that is what I do with things too heavy to carry in my hands. First an angry draft, then a truer one about forgiveness, which, it turns out, is mostly accurate bookkeeping: finding out what was actually owed, and by whom, and to which boy. A lot of what I thought was my childhood was really the second half of his. The strange part is that writing it made me miss him while he was still alive and sitting in the next room criticising a cricket match, which is its own genre of memory, missing someone in advance.
But I promised you humor, and my father, to his enormous credit, delivered.
Two weeks after the dinner, I visited and found a new frame on the wall of his study, where the retirement certificates hang. Inside the frame, mounted side by side with museum grade precision, were two documents. On the left: Government Boys School, Kanpur, 1974, mathematics 34, future unclear. On the right: my class nine report card, mathematics 41, the one that had cost me a month of my life.
Underneath, on a strip of paper in his engineer's handwriting, a caption: "Family record. Broken by seven marks."
"You kept mine too?" I said.
"It was tied in the same string," he said, and went back to his newspaper, and from behind it, for the first time in recorded history, I heard my father laughing at a result.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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