Is it a ‘he’ or a ‘she’?

In terms of my genealogy, one thing was certain from the start, none of us would ever learn the rules of the gendered language. I watched my cousins and my elder sibling swim, float and sink learning the rules and I knew I would follow them. The elders at home were intent that we learn the language well, so summer vacations at the hometown meant a tuition master to help us identify the maleness of a flower, the womanhood of a chair. My elder sibling had earned the reputation of having converted a Hindi pundit into a yoga master. My ways were more passive.

Hindi was a terror, more because of  the fact that every thing was a he or  a she than the drudgery of the tution master.

 An early monsoon rain, I sat on the portico with my cousin and our new Hindi tuition master. He was old, almost toothless and I watched the silver streaks on his ‘neelibringadi’ oiled shoulder laid hair. He looked more like an ancient out of the tele serial Mahabharata. The shoulder length hair and his raspy voice made him look male and female all at once.

“Stri:ling(Woman), Pu:lling(Man)…. Complete this test before I return” his raspy voice crackled through the early monsoon rain .

It was a weekly test and my cousin, a year older to me sat so close to me for moral support that I could feel the coldness of his skin, the fast-paced warmth of his breath. He was tensed and he mumbled as soon as the first two words were dictated, “Is it a he or a she?”

I looked at the words, “Kursi” sounded female, felt female… so I said it is a “she”

He helped me with the second word, “phool” did not feel male but then it sounded like fool.

The third word “gussa” was confusing. I felt it was female like Sita, he said it sounded more like Rama and hence male.

I looked into his frustration and he into mine and that is how the tuition ‘mash’ found us when he came back after chomping the yellow, coconut oil smelling, ‘he’ chips and the ‘she’ tea, our emotionally neutral grandmother offered him for taming us.

He looked at the similarity of our constructions and roared, “ Cheats! Who copied?”

We hung our little heads together while he defined our brains(both the ‘he’ and the ‘she’) as things made of mud mixed with clay.

Then I asked him, as solemnly as my eight-year-old clayey brain could, “ But why? Why doesn’t the chair have ribbons or the flower wear trousers?”

And just as I went a forbidden, biological step further in my seeking a difference, he shouted, he screamed at his wits end, “Out, out of my sight, you dirty little devils,  mujhe gussaa aa rahaa hai”

We were glad the ordeal of it had ended, even though it meant being declared unfit for any progress in life, and relieved that we had managed to solve the third word as male.

Except that I felt equally baffled when my cousin asked me, “Are you sure the master is not of neuter gender?”