One of the oddest progressions of life is probably when someone is growing up. All those bitter memories of the failures you experienced which you hoped could be thrown away, hidden in the deepest recesses of your mind, and all those sweet tastes of success which you wanted to store in your mind forever. Yet, perhaps one of the type of memories that you cannot erase no matter what you do are the scars of punishments, for the scars will continue to burn and linger in your mind for a very long time.
One particular incident remained etched into my mind forever. It occurred on a particular Monday some months back, when everyone was feeling the anguish of a hot April and didn’t expect an incident like that to happen. These days, corporal punishment was rare, and reserved for the “special cases” in schools. However, this was not the case for every school. In some schools the cane was akin to a nuclear bomb – deployed in extreme circumstances but, with any luck, seldom used – while other schools witnessed canings so frequently it became sort of a norm for it to occur. Fortunately, my school belonged to the former, but this only served to further imprint the incident inside my mind.
He was just an ordinary-looking schoolboy minus the fearful look in his eyes. It resembled a funeral procession, with him being escorted by two prefects and being led by the feared discipline master himself. Behind his back, his fingers sought out every nook and cranny of his palms, digging furiously into the soft flesh to stifle his bout of panic. We sat, waiting, and watched on as the poor boy was instructed to bend and rest his upper torso on a table placed on the stage of the school hall, while the discipline master read out his offences like a judge would, with the atmosphere as tense and as solemn as that of a courtroom. Minutes lengthened into hours. As our eyes registered the discipline master flexing the cane for reasons unknown to us, perhaps as a grim performance heralding the wooden punisher, the boy braced himself visibly by clutching the table tightly.
The cane descended, hard.
The cries of pain and anguish reverberated around the hall, echoed screams tearing away at us. Most of us had the same thought in our minds: oh, let it be finished quick, and spare us from the melancholy orchestra of echoes! Our prayers were answered faster than we thought it would be, however. Three strokes, and it was over. As sudden as it began. Several people sighed – at what exactly, nobody seemed certain, but relief was evidently etched in our faces. Grimly, we filtered out of the hall in silence, but in quick, brisk steps, as if we were more than eager to exit the hellish place of a makeshift caning area. It resembled a horror movie; it left a lasting impression on you.
“Argh, that wasn’t what I had in mind for starting the week.” Jon, my classmate, attempted to shatter the silence clinging to us, much to our relief. I found that he was actually smiling, albeit a little grimly. Thoughts started rolling all over my mind about the incident I just witnessed. The punishment was certainly a judicious one, for he was caught stealing money from others, but could we say for sure whether he deserved it? No, we can’t, for we do not even know why he did it for. For a minute I was a hollow shell of emotion, contemplating the relevance of the incident to me. Why did I care about it so much? It affected me not physically, but rather emotionally. I saw for myself the tears slowly dropping from the eyes that screamed the word pain. I saw the actual anguish and pain punishment could deliver, but was it really justified? Should the school leave it to the parents to discipline him?
A sentence once said by my friend came to me then. The punishers punish people, but who punishes the punisher? Why do we allow the schools to do such a abominable thing? Why, when the news headlines scream about a teacher caught in a scandal of sorts, do they not receive harsh punishment like what the boy just experienced? These thoughts filtered through my mind, all in a space of five minutes before I had to abandon them to make way for lessons. I knew those questions might be irrelevant, but as a student, I couldn't help but wonder...
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