Slates and Strictness
Slates and Strictness
A Tale of Letters and Lessons in 1960s Ceylon
Inone unassuming corner of the classroom – where the sunlight entered softly, the way an old aunt might peep in just to see no mischief was afoot – the slates were stacked in neat little piles, like temple offerings waiting patiently for prayers. Each slate had a pencil stub tied to it with thread that had seen better years, its fibres loosened by too many small, impatient fingers tugging at knots. The string wasn’t decorative; it was a safeguard. Chalk pencils, much like little boys with undone homework, had a way of vanishing without farewell – slipping between holes in desks, hiding behind blackboards, or simply escaping during tea break.
These weren’t the clean, synthetic boards you see in shops today. Oh no. In 1960s Ceylon, a school slate was as stony as its name implied – cut from dark, natural stone, quarried and shaped into smooth rectangles, and framed in strips of jak or coconut wood. They had a comforting weight, cool to the touch in the mornings and smelling faintly of damp soil after rain – like they had spent the night dreaming underground.
The surface, when new, was smooth and almost glossy, like the skin of a pond before the first pebble. Over time, it bore the etched evidence of learning: Sinhala letters curling like cinnamon bark and written in trembling care. Writing on them was done with a stony-pencil known as gal laella, a stony stick that left dusty trails and sometimes snapped mid-word, like a joke interrupted by a teacher’s cough.
Mistakes weren’t permanent. A shirt sleeve, a spit-slicked thumb, or the heel of a palm was all it took to clear the slate. They were forgiving, these boards – if a little proud. They didn’t break easily, unless dropped during a scuffle, or launched (accidentally or not) across the room in a moment of excitement.
Children never said it aloud, but they treasured their slates. That cold, hard slab was the first place where letters became names, and names became something close to dreams.
Woe betide the child who misplaced their pencil under Mrs. Cooray’s watchful gaze. She was quick to anger and she remembered every transgression the way the earth remembers monsoons. Her punishments were severe, and they lingered in the memory like cod liver oil on a cold morning.
By the blackboard – its surface worn down by decades of chalked ambition – rested a stubby wooden duster and a battalion of chalk sticks. Some were no bigger than a black cigar; others were fresh and pointy, recruits waiting for battle with grammar and arithmetic.
The Sinhala alphabet was no laughing matter. Sixty letters in total: forty-two consonants and eighteen vowels – each more elaborate than the last. Mrs. Cooray, a small woman with large convictions, treated them with the reverence of scripture, but she had to teach these five year olds, perhaps twenty. “There is beauty in the curves,” she would declare, tapping her ruler like a metronome of truth. But to these students in upper kindergarten, the script looked more like a collection of coiled snakes, waiting to spring.
And if anyone mistook a aa for an ae, her ruler would swoop through the air – not in fury, but with that solemn disappointment that always seemed worse than anger. The ruler itself, a veteran twelve-inch slab of wood, rested on a desk that looked like it resented being turned into furniture. Its drawer groaned open like a sleepy uncle with arthritis.
Mrs. Cooray was not a large woman – perhaps just over four feet – but she sat in her high chair like a lighthouse in the storm, watching over boats struggling through a sea of alphabets and sums. Her saree was always brown, pleated with military precision. The maroon blouse beneath had thinned at the elbows, but she wore it like armour. Her thick, round glasses gave no quarter to mischief. She pushed them up mid-sentence with the flick of a middle finger, and somehow even the chalk dust fell silent.
She did not smile. Not for neat handwriting, not for birthdays, not even for flawless recitation. A smile, she seemed to believe, was a luxury that could weaken the spine.
In the classroom, the only sound was the tick, tick, tick of her ruler against her palm, and the gentle rustle of restless bottoms shifting on wooden benches. Now and then, a fly wandered in through the window and was shooed away with a rolled-up timetable.
But when someone reversed a letter or sent a vowel wandering too far, the slate was hoisted like a warning flag. The child’s knuckles received a harsh tap, and Mrs. Cooray announced, “See, children, this is what happens when you forget your alphabet.” She possibly believed in cruelty – not consequences. The children weren’t always sure there was a difference.
Most of them were only five – still puzzling over the difference between a black tea and a shoe polish tin, let alone the subtleties of script. But to Mrs. Cooray, age was no excuse for untidiness of mind.
Upstairs, in Grade One, lived a different sort of mystery: her son, Marian Cooray. Tall for his age, broad-shouldered, and quiet as a monarch, Marian didn’t need to introduce himself. His presence carried the mild menace of someone who had never been scolded. There were whispers, of course – that he’d arrived late in her life, or perhaps from a cousin’s care, or possibly straight from a train with his uniform already pressed. But no one dared ask. Mrs. Cooray had ears in the staffroom and memory like wet cement.
Marian never raised his voice. He didn’t need to. He flicked ears, stole erasers, mocked slow readers – not cruelly, but with the nonchalance of one who knew rules didn’t apply. Complaining about Marian was like complaining about thunder – it made no difference.
To most, he was simply a rascal. But to the children who watched him closely – the quiet ones, the daydreamers who stared at the rain – they saw something else. A boy who sat alone during lunch. A boy whose jokes faded when no one laughed. A boy who longed, perhaps, for a smile – and had settled instead for immunity.
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