Yeh Scam Kya Kehlata Hai?
When a diehard YRKKH fan writes this, you gotta know this is serious.
It was the summer of 2010. I had celebrated my 4th birthday barely a couple of weeks ago and had already become a Boscoite. Unknowingly, I was slowly proceeding to get scammed for life.
Days passed. I would go to school every day, come back and not slip anything about how my day was and how was the school, because of some utterly inexplicable reason. Though my parents would know that I even detested the word school or ‘iskool’ as a double distilled bong would say, every damned morning, thanks to my sharp cries and ghastly howls. Now it was for about a month I was doing this and my parents were really, really worried for me. They always worried that something unwanted and dangerous would happen to me and I would not even reveal a word about it, thus making things easier for ‘dushtu loks’ (Bengali for criminals) and for that matter class bullies.
However, our school was a very safe place, so even if I had remained as silent, criminals never were a threat till I was in the school campus. But nothing could be done about the bullies because their sheer numbers were not to change, at least in my case, depending on how silent I was.
So, my father hatched a plan.
It was a rainy day and a weekend. I was playing in the veranda when my father came in and asked me for the nth time about my school. As usual I said NOTHING substantial. But what happened next startled me.
My father literally gave the description of what happened in school in the past week vividly. Awestruck, I asked him the most obvious question,” How come you know this, Baba?”.
“I’ve got a secret source, who tells me about everything you do in school. From the biggest of secrets you hide to the tiniest mischief you do, I come to about the whole of it.” He said with a smile.
Fear crept in my soul. He knows everything. EVERYTHING.
He silently left me alone even before I could say a word. But the fear he had just poured in me was not to leave. And I started to become over conscious about my conduct in school. I was always under a fear and pressure. Every weekend my father would return home from work and would tell me about my deeds in the school, through the week and whenever I would ask him “Who is the secret source?”, I realised that now it was his turn to remain painfully silent. But I would go on pleading him to tell and asked him questions like ‘Have I met this person ever?’, ‘What is he/she like?’ etc. and he would say nothing of my use.
Years passed and my belief in ‘secret source’ only grew stronger. By the time I was in the 4th grade, half of the class had either involved themselves in breaking each other’s leg or started talking about how humans make love, but not as something scientific or natural but a spicy thing out of which great gossip could be made and ended up getting parent-calls or other punishments. But I stood miles far from such gossips fearing THE secret source and hence my father.
When I reached the 7th standard I came to know from where babies come and that too my father made me aware of it, unlike many Indian fathers who think educating their children on this topic is a shameful thing to do. And it was now when I started moving away from the people who fell below unprecedented heights while abusing each other and even disrespecting teachers behind their back for no proper reason (though no reason can justify such acts) however neither because of my fear of The Secret Source nor my father. But because of a tiny yet clear voice which by then had started to pinch me whenever I laughed at a joke which debased the teachers or some friends in a crude manner. It was then I started to distinguish between right and wrong. But now that I was about to leave the school shortly after giving my ICSE exams, it was about time I know who this person, whom I still believed in and feared equally, actually was.
A few days back, I asked my father for the very last time — — — — “Who is the secret source?”
“Your conscience.”, he said almost instantaneously with a kind of smile which I had last seen 11 years ago in a rainy day.
I gasped. I asked him for a million times hoping for a different answer. The answer didn’t change. I felt devastated and angry. I felt angry because I was falling hook, line and sinker for over a decade. And then when I finally digested that it was me myself and my father guiding me throughout and nobody external, I asked him how he managed to do this.
What he said was simple. I would always tell my parents about my school but in a scattered manner and infrequently and then used forget that I had told them such things. They assembled and arranged the bits and pieces of data I gave them and presented it to me in such a manner as if they knew about what I do more than myself. This was the trick.
And then I asked him, “But why all this? Over the time I started to tell everything that happened in School, then why didn’t you break this whole thing to me a lot earlier?”
“Your safety was not the only reason. And you know the other reason very, very well. Think why your parents were never called.”, he said with a warm smile. And that tiny yet clear voice spoke again.
Jumping to the spring of 2021 when I am writing this and am going to pass out of my school very soon, I can say that, in the past 11 years of my life while I was in school, I neither suffered a single parent call, nor was my upbringing and character ever questioned. And all because of the fear of The Secret Source, which had ALWAYS cautioned me. ALWAYS.
Yes. I have been scammed for life. That too because of my parents. But in the end, the most I can say is I’ve got truly loving parents and that, not all scams are like ‘THE SCAM’ of 1992. Some are different; quite like my parents.
