The dark room

What is the most ingenious thing you can come up with to make a noisy kid running errands to fall in line? Scare him. This is easy. Because no matter how difficult a kid is, he is bound to be scared of something or the other; be it a dog, a scary person, or a conjured up monster or Boogie man who lives under the bed. Yes, this was the perfect tactic for my pre-primary teachers to handle a classroom of fifty odd frenzied and boisterous kids who would drive them nuts. They would often warn a trouble maker in the class about taking him/her (it was ‘him’ mostly) to an ominous ‘dark room’ on the first floor. No matter how naughty a kid was, the dark room sounded scary and this worked till we were in the pre-primary class.

Now, what was this dark room? Since we were in the pre-primary class, it did pique curiosity in our little hearts about how this dark room actually is. My room number was 2, class section B. The dark room was in the first floor while our classroom was in the ground floor. It was visible at a diagonal view from my classroom and always had its doors closed. Pre-primary was the first elementary class of our school. That meant that we were the youngest kids in the school. We were confined to the ground floor and did not ever try to climb the stairs, which was exclusively meant for the seniors who had classes in the top floors. So all we could do is, catch a glance then and now from our classroom, to the above floors that appeared inexplicably large to us. What the above floors looked like was best left to our imaginations. Anyway, the dark room was a mysteriously spooky place which appeared to be a small closed room. And, once again what lay behind the closed doors was fodder for our babyish imaginations.

Well, my teachers kind of trained their creative imaginations upon us while attempting to frighten us with hideous things that lived behind the closed doors of the room. Each one of them had their own creep suited to scare the kids. Some bluffed about a monster in the room with red eyes, horns like a bull and a scary grimace with its fangs jutting out. Some teachers even loved to accessorize the evil monster with a trident or that sort of thing. Some teachers were exceptionally good at giving us creeps about the dark room. I remember one teacher telling us that the dark room was like an endless dark tunnel. She said that whosoever enters it loses his way for forever while grappling in the never ending darkness. The stupid monster created by other teachers didn’t scare me. But this dark tunnel thing really gave me goosebumps.

Some teachers were extra zealous in intimidating kids by pretending to drag them into the dark room. I can’t blame the teachers either, for some children were horribly naughty, and fairly innovative in throwing all sort of tantrums. There were some bullies who loved to poke others with sharp pencils or keep kicking the front kid’s chair and harassing others in all possible ways. And there were fights. Kids love to fight and often these were pretty dangerous with both parties hurling pencil boxes and duster (even school bags at certain times) at each other. Sometimes, one would form coalition with the enemies’ foes and charge the assailants. Blood spill was not uncommon, and the defeated party would immediately report to the teachers’ jury with its indictments. A trial would follow and the guilty would be punished according to his/their degree of culpability. If convicted of high degree non-pardonable crime, the ill-fated criminal would be reduced to tears while the teacher ordered his/her deportation to the dark room. The journey to the dark room was however cut short as the kid would be taken to the principal’s room instead. A brief rebuke from the principal would discourage the kid from creating nuisance for some days.

When I used to peep at the dark room from my classroom, I would find that the teachers entered a room just beside it. It was the teachers’ staff room. Once I caught sight of a sister entering the dark room with a tray and cups. I thought this was for appeasing the dark room creature with some refreshments to keep him satisfied, lest he should venture out and gobble up the kids. However, it was not long before we were promoted to class 1 and we could finally climb the stairs to the first floor, and came across the mysterious dark room.

My class 1 section was just beside the classroom next to the dark room. It turned out that the dark room was actually a small makeshift room with a nice bed used as a sick room. It was also used as storage for sundry eatables including tea, coffee, etc for the teachers. So that explains what I saw earlier. The sisters also used to the dark, albeit sick room for keeping their bags and stuffs. The room soon lost its scary charm and for the rest of my school days, I saw kids screaming and parading in front of the dark room. We soon forgot that this room was once a mysteriously scary place that was used for creating all sorts of imaginative perils that one would never try to discover. The teachers had to take other routes to tame the wild kids.

Few days back I was watching the Harry Potter film, The Chamber of secrets. This is when my ‘dark room’ memory popped up. Our school maybe one-hundredth the size of Hogwarts and the dark room was only a wee bigger than Harry’s closet. But the way the room spooked us, it was not any less intriguing than the dreaded chamber of secrets. And of course, we had our share of magical experiences while running our minds about the heinous possibilities that lay behind the closed doors of the dark room.