Jerry Pinto wrestles and punches his way through PT class!

Looking back, Wocka must have been mad.

He believed that the only way you could become a man was to endure physical pain. He also believed that he was in charge of making a gang of 12-year-olds into men.

"Form pairs," he would scream, his red face going redder. "Look him in the eye. Now... SLAP."
It wasn't fun, physical training. Until then, PT period, as we knew it, meant "Dance like a happy butterfly, you pests, dance" and 'kho-kho'. No one knew that from Std V onwards, it was going to mean pain. Our first class with him and we found out.

Wocka began. "Now come up here one by one and hit me."

We lined up, almost giggling with anticipation. We would hit him. We would hit him all right.

"Above the belt and only punches," he reminded us. We stopped giggling. We hit him and then he hit us back.

But by the third class, we found out that there was more to Wocka than just learning to take pain. PT period went into the school grounds. An area was marked off. It was a square patch of red earth. By the side of it was a spade and several other hand tools.

Every evening after school, we were supposed to get there and water the ground, then we were supposed to turn it over, with the tools while the older boys laboured with the spade. Wocka himself arrived with earthworms every day, more and more earthworms from some cornucopia of the wriggling hermaphrodites, which we only knew as the friend of the farmer.

"Dig, dig, water, water," he would shout, sowing earthworms from his plastic bag, scattering them liberally everywhere, prodding at the limp ones with a broad forefinger until they were gone, either buried or forced into action.

One evening, we found Wocka oiling the earth, carefully mixing the surface layer with handfuls of mustard oil. No one knew what he was doing. But he was hunkered down and oiling the ground.

Three months later, I lay in that patch, the sun blinding me, the sweat burning my eyes, my ears aching from so much pulling, my arms limp, the breath crushed out of me. I had lasted all of 30 seconds, if that much, at my first bout.

I had done what I could. I had surprised my mother by demands for milk and almonds. I had tried drinking eggs raw and thrown up. I tried eating ghee. But to no avail. From the moment Batli, a boy of the same mass as me but with almost twice the acceleration, stepped into the ring, his body gleaming with oil, a predatory smile playing above his prognathous jaw, I knew I was done for. I was.

Wocka loomed over me.
"Get up. Don't you want to be a man?"
I wondered if there was some other way, any other way.

Three months later, a boy almost died from a ruptured appendix. Wocka had hit him too hard, his fate for being an odd boy out and not moving fast enough when the order to form pairs rang out. Wocka left school. There were rumours that he had been arrested. There were other rumours that he had escaped.

We went back to 'kho kho' and the 'akharas' reverted to Nature. We stopped referring to earthworms as 'wockas'.

Oddly though, Wocka's madness got me for a while. I did squats with my schoolbag full of sand because I did not have a cattle yoke, the recommended weight. I rubbed my hands in raw rice to roughen them. I walked about with a dictionary in each outstretched arm because I could not find weights at home.

And I began to go to Sardar Patel Stadium whenever Dara Singh and Randhawa defended the honour of India against Man Mountain Jake and The Masked Horror. Each time the posters went up, I got onto a bike and got myself the cheap seats where the hoi polloi shouted itself hoarse as Dara Singh entered a tag session alone against the men who had defeated his brother. He was already a film star then.

Many years later, watching my nephews watching 'WWF' on the telly, I knew that I had been there when it began, this conversion of an ancient sport into a spectacle.