LevDavid.com | Cut through | The Law of the Ring

Law of the Ring

Sunali Pillay got pierced. Her school got angry.

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Collect a bunch of terrifyingly human humans, dress them in cardigans and meek floral prints, allow them to wave the nobility banner about, and it should come as no surprise that schools are such hotbeds of ignorance.

Sunali Pillay, you might have heard, is 16 and has taken her school to court for trying to stop her from wearing a nose ring.

The school complains that it’s against rules, and those have been around for a long time. Sunali’s mum claims that the piercing represents family and religious traditions, and those have been around for a pretty long time too. I’m rooting for the ring.

A free society allows us each to be backward in the way we choose. Schools like to insist that we’re all backward in the same way. I find the latter more distasteful.

How many of your teachers do you remember fondly? Not many, I’m sure. And still, teachers have long been mythologized as glowing guardians to the doors to infinite possibility. If they are, they guard those doors well. Some, I suspect, have lost the keys. Others stand at their posts with hands in pockets, trying to hide the fact that they haven’t evolved the thumbs required for key-turning.

They say that teaching is “a calling”. What is that call, exactly? Perhaps something like: “you don’t have enough points to study engineering.”

Yes, every teacher’s watched Dead Poets’ Society and gotten all lumpy in the throaty about it too. But they’d never allow a student to stand on a desk, as much as they’d love to be addressed as “Captain, my Captain.”

Noble, we call them. But teachers (and doctors… and certainly dentists) are no nobler than the rest of us.

They lie to us too. In primary school, the mathematics teacher told us with po-faced certainty that you could not, under even extreme circumstances, subtract a big number from a little one. Not even if a gun was pressed to our little heads, said she. (She knew, at least, how to drive her point home.)

I wish I could say that I was that child who railed against this blatant untruth. I was not that child. Nalini Singh was.

With teeth and spectacles too big for her head, and a head too big for her body, she was an embarrassingly close approximation of the nerd stereotype. I saw her fight the subtraction issue so many times. So many times, I saw her spluttering, lisping protestations beaten down.

Only in high school did the syllabus finally admit knowledge of negative numbers. At the precise moment of the revelation, I looked over to Nalini.

There was no celebration. No look of triumph on her face. Only the quiet sucking back of the light from her eyes. It was too late.

One day in Grade 8, Nalini showed up with highlights in her hair. Some say she got mixed up in something unspeakably sinister. Tobacco, perhaps. I don’t know. Rumours started that she’d kissed a girl behind the tuckshop. Some even say that the girl had kissed her back.

Hers was a life full of geeky promise, sent spinning out of orbit by one mathematical lie.

Since pettiness, like deception, is so at home in schools, it doesn’t surprise me that Durban Girls’ High School (which is, in case you don’t know it, a girls’ high school in Durban) should kick up a fuss over a thing as small as a ring.

The unthinking application of even good rules is bad leadership. Even the highest laws of a democratic country are continually debated, with the legal system graciously acknowledging not only innumerable shades of grey, but a glorious mess of colour. And colour, let’s not forget, is something South African schools of all histories are still struggling to come to terms with.

The world is untidy. Hair falls out of place, it’s often too hot to wear a tie and, given the nature of knees, dresses don’t always fall an inch below them.

And, sometimes, perhaps (I hope), a girl might not want to get pierced simply because her mother, and her mother before her did.

Life asks us to do an awful lot of thinking. Tragically, for school teachers and the religious, and most of all, religious school teachers, this is often foreign territory.

Regardless, my precious, when it comes to Sunali Pillay, it’s far less than a ring. It’s a stud, actually. If school is where the hackneyed lecture to the acne’ed, this piercing is smaller than the average pimple on the average school-goer’s face. Only gold. Rather pretty. And not that big a deal.

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