Sir Is Coming at 4

A mother says it across the kitchen. A father says it on the phone. A grandmother says it to the cook. Sir is coming at 4. The child is told to be ready. The door is left unlocked. Sir comes up the stairs at the time he said he would, and sometime in the next two minutes, in tens of millions of Indian houses every week, a room closes around an adult and a child.

Sir is the math sir. Sir is the music sir. Sir is the chess sir. Sir is the dance teacher who comes Tuesdays. Sir is the cricket coach who waits at the gate. Sir is the maulvi who teaches the Qur’an at the back of the masjid. Sir is the catechism teacher in the room behind the church hall. Sir is the boy from upstairs who came down to teach the chapter to a younger boy whose mother thought it was a fine arrangement. Sir is sometimes a woman, called sir anyway, or called auntie, or called by her name. The word is small enough to hold all of them.

What we know about sir is that sir is good at maths. What we know about sir is that the last student of his got into a good college. We pay sir in cash, sometimes in an envelope, sometimes through a number sir gave us once. We have not met sir’s family. We do not know sir’s home. We know sir is good at maths.

Sir is one of the most consequential adults in our child’s life. And we know almost nothing about him.

The room we made together

The room is small. There is a table. There are books on the table. There are two chairs. Sometimes the table is the dining table the family eats at after sir leaves. Sometimes the room is the child’s bedroom, because the only desk is in there. Sometimes there is no desk and they sit on the floor. The door is closed because tuition is supposed to be quiet. The room is closed for two hours. Then sir leaves and the family has dinner.

One in five Indian schoolchildren goes into a room like this every week. In rural India, in the primary years, the number is closer to one in three. By middle school, a third of what a household spends on its child’s education is being spent on this room. The numbers come from the government’s own surveys. The schools are not the centre of the Indian child’s education. The room is.

We assembled the room, household by household, over forty years. Tuition was once a thing the slower students did at the end of the day. Today it is the spine of how Indian children are taught. The country has built a workforce of adults whose job is to be alone with one or two other people’s children, and that workforce has no register, no licence, no qualification, and no rules of conduct that anybody wrote down. Many of those adults are very good at what they do. That is not the point. The point is that we built the room before we built the rules of the room.

Most sirs are fine. The essay you are reading is not about sir. It is about the room.

The most loved unrelated adult in the house

The reason we let sir in is older than tuition. India has long held a place inside the family for the teacher. The guru. The asaan. The maulvi. The dance teacher who watches your daughter all week and corrects what you have never seen. The cricket coach who knows your son will cry on the bus home but waits a day before he calls you. India has invented, more carefully than perhaps any culture in the world, the figure of the loved unrelated adult who teaches a child to be more of what the child already is.

There is a reason we love this figure. A tutor in another country is useful. A teacher in India is making a person out of a child, slowly and intimately, and the relationship between the two is one of the few places where an Indian adult is permitted to give a child more attention than the family ordinarily gives. That permission is not small. For many Indian children, sir is the one adult in the world whose entire job, for two hours twice a week, is to look at them.

A tradition this old, and this loved, deserves what it has never been given. It deserves the rules of its own room.

The rules we never wrote

When a tutor in India does something to a child, the case is filed under POCSO. The Crime in India tables tell us the relationship of the accused to the child in ninety-six out of a hundred such cases. Family member. Neighbour. Friend of the family. Other known person. The tables have a column for stranger, and that column accounts for the remaining four. The tables do not have a column for tutor. They do not have a column for coach, or music teacher, or dance teacher, or instructor, or trainer. The country runs a workforce of millions of these adults, and the country counts none of them.

The body in charge of safeguarding Indian children, the NCPCR, published a manual in 2021 on the safety and security of children in schools. The manual runs to a hundred and fifty pages. It tells schools where to place CCTV cameras, how to do a fire drill, and how often to clean the washrooms. The word tuition does not appear in it. The word coaching does not appear in it. One-on-one does not appear in it. The phrase a child alone with an adult does not appear in it. The manual is for the building. The room is not in the building.

Both the parent who hires sir and sir who comes to teach inherited a job that nobody wrote a single sentence for. There is no school of tutoring. There is no licence to coach a child in the back room of a flat. There is no professional body that decides what is and is not acceptable conduct in the closed-door room. Two adults, on either side of the door, walking into a job that neither has been given the manual for.

Other professions, in other countries, faced the same closed door. They wrote the rules. The country that has more of these rooms than any other in the world has written almost nothing.

The same lesson, every time

The room is not new. The room is not Indian. The room is what happens whenever an adult is asked to do, professionally, a thing that requires being alone with a child. The doctor in the examination room. The piano teacher in the studio. The coach in the practice nets. The pastor in the office at the back of the church. The scoutmaster at camp. The room is the same room, in the same shape, in every country in the world.

The doctors wrote it first. In every country where medicine has a professional regulator, an intimate examination of a patient requires the offer of a chaperone, and the chaperone is required to be able to see what the doctor is doing. The rule was not written as an insult to doctors. It was written by doctors, for doctors, because doctors understood that being alone with a patient in a room nobody else can see into is a thing that needs a witness to survive being misread.

The Americans wrote it for sport after their own reckoning over abuse in gymnastics. The phrase the United States Center for SafeSport uses is observable and interruptible. Every one-on-one between an adult and a child athlete in a sport governed by US federal statute must be observable and interruptible. Another adult must be able to see what is happening. Another adult must be able to walk in.

The scouts wrote it in 1987, after their own files were forced into the open. The rule is called two-deep leadership. Two adults at every Scout meeting. No one-on-one between an adult and a child. Not in person. Not online. Not on the phone.

The Church of England, after its own long reckoning, wrote a code in 2021. Always aim to work with or within sight of another adult. Always.

The music teachers wrote it, in England, around the time the country’s child abuse inquiry was hearing evidence from the specialist music schools. The Musicians’ Union guidance is that doors should be pinned open. The Royal Academy of Dance guidance is to avoid unobserved or private contact unless preapproved by the parents and documented.

The closest writing to the essay you are reading was done by a local council in the south of England, in a place called Southend, in 2018. It is a two-page piece of guidance for parents who are hiring private tutors. The two sentences that matter say this.

Intervening doors should be kept open, even though this may mean curtailing your own activities. Any tutor who is mindful and aware of current expectations of professional staff should have no objection and is likely to offer the arrangement without your suggestion.

That second sentence is the sentence the Kaaval essay was written to find. The serious tutor, the one who has thought about what he does, will offer the open door himself. He will offer it because the open door is what protects him as much as it protects the child.

Different professions, different scandals, the same rule. The closed-door room has produced one piece of advice, in every country where anyone has been forced to study it. We are not asking sir to do anything new. We are asking sir to do, in India, what every comparable profession in the world already does.

The rules of the room

There are three.

The first is that the door stays open. Every session. The door is open before sir enters, and stays open after he leaves. The child sits where someone walking past the room can see them. Sir sits where someone walking past the room can see him. The door does not need to be wide. It needs to be open.

The second is that the child can leave the room whenever the child wants to. For water. For the washroom. To stand in the corridor for a minute. For no reason at all. The child does not have to ask sir, and the child does not have to ask the parent. The child decides. The room is not a place a child has to stay in.

The third is one real question, asked by the parent after every session. Not what did you learn today, which gets a list of subjects. Not was sir good today, which gets a yes forever. The question is, what did sir say. The parent asks it. The parent listens to the answer. The parent does not hurry on to the next thing. If a child who was happy talking about sir last week is suddenly quiet about sir this week, the parent has been handed something. Listen for it.

Three rules. None of them costs anything. None of them requires you to suspect anybody. None of them is an accusation. They are how the room is supposed to work.

The essay you are reading is also for sir. Not because sir is being watched. Because sir has been left out of every conversation that should have included him.

If you are sir, you have a job that is older than any of the schools and any of the boards in this country. The math sir, the music sir, the dance sir, the coach, the maulvi, the catechism teacher, the boy from upstairs who teaches the chapter. You are inside a tradition the Indian family loves and has nowhere else made room for. The country has trusted you, often more than it trusts its schools. It has not, in all that trust, told you anything about how to do this job safely. It has assumed you would work that out yourself.

Here is what every comparable profession in the world has worked out, and what the country has never told you. The closed door is not a privacy that protects you. It is a privacy that puts you in reach of a story you cannot defend yourself against. The chaperone the doctor offers is not the patient’s protection alone. It is the doctor’s protection too. The two adults at the scout meeting are there for the scouts, and they are there for the leader. The pinned-open door of the music teacher’s studio is for the child, and it is for the teacher.

If you are sir, propose the open door yourself. Ask the parent to be in the next room. Refuse to teach a child in a closed room. Refuse to teach a child in a bedroom even when the bedroom is where the desk is. Refuse to teach a child whose parents will not be home. The parents who hear you, and who agree, are the parents you can teach in peace. The parents who refuse are telling you something about the room you do not want to be in. You are allowed to walk out of that room. You are allowed to propose the rules. They were always your rules to propose.

There is more than one adult around any of these rooms. The watchman who lets sir into the building. The lift operator who takes him up. The grandmother in the kitchen on the other side of the wall. The cook. The auntie who comes to pick the child up after class. The driver who waits outside the cricket field. The neighbour who sees sir on the stairs every Tuesday.

The ring is not asked to suspect any of these adults. The ring is not asked to confront anyone. The ring is asked to be in the building, to be in the kitchen, to be in the corridor, to be on the stairs. The ring is asked to ask the child, sometimes, what happened today. The ring is asked to keep being there.

A child whose parents are alone with the task of protecting them is a child whose protection rests on the alertness of two tired adults. A child inside a ring is a child held by everyone the family already trusts.

Sir will be at the door this week. He will be there on Tuesday. He will be there on Friday. He will be at the door of tens of millions of Indian houses, and somebody will let him in. The thing that decides whether the room he walks into is a room with rules or a room without them is a sentence that takes the parent two seconds to say.

The door stays open today.

You can leave the room whenever you want.

I want to ask you something after, about what sir said.

The rules of the room are not the rules of sir. The rules of the room belong to every adult who is alone with a child. The relative who comes to stay for the summer. The neighbour whose flat is the one the child runs to when the parents are at work. The driver who waits to bring the child home. The cousin whose house the child is sent to on weekends. The aunt the child stays with when the parent has to travel. Every room. Every adult. Every closed door.

We were never paying sir for the lesson alone. We were paying for the room. The room is ours.

If a child is in immediate danger, call Childline on 1098. It is free and open 24x7. If you are an adult carrying something heavy from your own childhood, KIRAN, India’s mental health helpline, is free at 1800-599-0019.