Death to the Terrorist - Dr. Sanjiva Wijesinha

This musing appeared in the Sydney/ACT Blue Black & Blue Dance Souvenir (2009) and is an except from this prolific writer’s book FRIENDS (Vijitha Vapa Publications)

The first time I met my friend Tiny Reid was on my first day at STC. We had just started on day one of term one in Form IB – and as schoolboys are wont to do, as soon as the bell rang for lunch someone started organising a game of cricket. One of the boys Vasantha had brought along a bat. Appointing himself captain of one team (which we felt he was entitled to do, by virtue of him being the owner of the bat) and his pal Ajit captain of the other, they were soon selecting their respective teams. Since I had been assigned that morning to sit in class at the adjacent desk to Vasantha’s, he selected me on to his team (little knowing what a woeful lack of cricketing skills I possessed) and we were about to start when I noticed that Tiny had not been selected for either of the teams. “Aiy,” I said “you’ve left out Tiny!” “Can’t help, we already have two teams” said Vasantha bluntly. “He’ll have to stay out.” Now this struck me as unfair, since Tiny had been sitting next to me in class (on the other side to Vasantha) and had come out with the rest of us to play. “No, I said, you’ll have to take him – otherwise it won’t be fair.” “Oh, all right” relented Vasantha “he can be an extra player on our team.” Wise move, that – Tiny turned out to be one of the best cricketers in our class, much better than Vasantha and myself, and in years to come he ended up playing for the school first eleven as well as for Sara trophy teams.  But that is another story.

Thus began my friendship with Tiny – a friendship that has spanned over fifty years. Knowing all he does about me, if he ever decides to blackmail me I would be well and truly sunk – except that I too know more about incidents in his life than anybody else! He is a person with whom, given the need, I would share my last spoon of rice – as I am confident he would with me if I were in the same situation.

One of the incidents I distinctly remember was the day the two of us got together to kill our maths teacher! We were both in Form 2B (Miss Bay’s class) – and the maths master assigned to teach us could only be described, in the most complimentary terms, as a downright sadist. Those were the days when corporal punishment could be meted out even to seven year old boys – and the old man (no names shall be mentioned) used to delight in slapping us or throwing the wooden blackboard-duster at us for the slightest misdemeanour. He even hit us if he asked us a question and we got the answer wrong – which was not difficult to do because we were so scared to open our mouths and say something wrong, that even if we knew the correct answer, the wrong answer almost always came out.

After a whole month of putting up with this type of terrorism, Tiny and I decided that something had to be done about the old terrorist. Being an avid reader, I confidently told Tiny that I had read in a storybook that if you made a wish and threw a horseshoe over your shoulder, the wish would come true. “If only we could get a horseshoe,” I said, “we could wish that the old man would die.” “Dadda has a horseshoe on his office room wall,” offered Tiny. Our eyes gleamed. If only Tiny could (without his Dadda’s knowledge) borrow the horseshoe for a day, we could put our brilliant plan into action and save all our classmates from another ten months of terrorism.

On the appointed day, Tiny came to school and grinned “I’ve brought it”.  I couldn’t wait till the interval to work our magic – and as soon as the bell rang, we carried his school-bag with the Very Important horseshoe to a secluded part of the school grounds behind the dining hall. There, out of sight of anybody else, we carefully unwrapped the horseshoe. I went first – held the horseshoe in my right hand, stared straight ahead, screwed my eyes tightly shut, softly murmured “I wish our maths teacher would die” and then threw the horseshoe over my right shoulder. Tiny picked it up, changed places with me, and repeated the procedure. Quietly confident that the spell would work, we wrapped up the horseshoe, placed it carefully in the bottom of Tiny’s schoolbag and went back to class.

For the next few days we watched our teacher like hawks. When would the tell-tale signs of malignant disease invoked by our spell begin to show? Unfortunately for us, the old man continued in the best of health. Neither jaundice nor breathlessness nor even a sudden chest pain came to take him away from us and relieve us of the horrible ordeal of having him come in to class three times a week for the rest of that year to terrorise us.

I was sure we must have done something wrong. Maybe the magic had gone out of Tiny’s father’s horseshoe. Maybe you were supposed to throw it over your LEFT shoulder. I don’t know the reason – all I know is that at the young age of seven ears I lost my faith in magic.

I had almost forgotten the incident until I got a phone call from Tiny some years ago. “Have you seen the papers?” he asked “our old maths teacher has died.” “Are you sure?” I queried. “Yes” he said “I just saw the obituary this morning. Too bad our horseshoe spell took three decades to work!”     

Dr. Sanjiva Wijesinha ( STC 1956-1967) is a family physician and an associate professor at the Faculty of Medicine, Monash University Melbourne.

He continues to publish short stories and health articles on his webpage: https://sanjivawijesinha.com/

Also Author of Strangers on the Camino, Tales From my Island and Not Our War (available from amazon.com.au).                     

With some batch mates of 1956 and chemistry teacher Mr Errol Fernando taken at our 50 year reunion.