Tuesday, May 5, 2009

Mark Torpy

Mark Torpy: Mark was my schoolmate at St. Patricks; same class but different sections. But languages classes were common as our batch would go to their class for “Hindi” and “Special English” classes and so we got to interact and become friends. In fact the classroom would be jam-packed to accommodate this new crowd and often many would squat on the floor as the desks would be filled.
              Mark and Luke, the twins would stand out in any crowd by their sheer Caucasian colour. The Torpys are Anglo-Indians and the last three generations have nothing to do with Ireland, their native country except for the skin colour. His father was a colonel in the Indian army and both the twins behaved just like any other school going boys growing up in the late 70s; their accents were Indian and so do the craze for Bollywood stars and huge supporters of Indian cricket team.
            Mark with that white complexion looked as much a Hollywood star. His face was long and features shouted “handsome” every which way. Mark had a maturity far beyond his years and never given showmanship or braggadocio. Rather he was more humble than his share. He was invariably the monitor of his class and he ruled most benignly without making enemies. The job of a monitor is to ensure the silence of the class when the teachers were away and one effective deterrent was to write the names of noise-makers on the board. The teacher would come and mete out a caning. Mark would rub the names at the sight of the teacher and spare some violence; a huge thing to do!!! Even his writing style was unique; a lefthander holding the pen at the tip of the fingers and twist the elbow as to write from the top of the page. He would take a break by blowing air to the palms to dry out the sweat twitching the fingers.
                He never spoke long but when he did it was always friendly and inclusive in sharp contrast to Luke. On the cricket field or even in any game, he was by far the best. Mark was so athletic that while fielding at cover he would move from point to mid-off like a gazelle. Given his white skin, it looked a white tiger patrolling the region or shriek of lightning. No exaggeration here. He was a good batsman but he promoted other batsman ahead of him and come in last and whack a couple of fours. Those square-cuts were a specialty. When it came to bowling, he could break a batsman’s legs – we played without pads- with fastish legbreaks or medium pace bowled from a just a few steps run up. We had high quality cricketers in our daily play and Mark Torpy was the best by universal consent. We assembled at 4:30 in the evenings for 2 hours of cricket from our 7th standard to 10th and these years gave us the greatest thrill of our lives.
              Those were excellent days; without hype and a lot of innocence. We would collect Gavasker’s columns in newspaper and pass to cutting to one another. Mark would keep a career scoresheet of Gavasker and update them almost each innings-wise. Luke admired Zaheer Abbas to no end and even mimicked his walk with a panama cap and bat tucked under his shoulder. Mark would bowl like Holding and Qadir for a rib-cracking laughter around.  
           All good things come to an end. After 10th standard, we went to different colleges and slowly lost contact apart from chance encounters. Both the twins got into engineering colleges in the defense quota and last heard they are doing very well; Luke always couple of notches below at school fared far better in USA while Mark is somewhere in Australia.
           Even after the passage of 25 years I can’t help thinking that Mark was a class person and he can liven up any environment he is in; extremely bright, friendly, and adaptive, modest and classy. Truly one of nature’s great all-rounders!

Verdict: Sattwic
Lesson to be learnt: There are so many things to learn from such characters that I must become a willing follower. Thanks for the memories, Mark. 

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