School Story Again!

When I was four years old, my father had to work for a year in a place on the hills of the Western Ghats where a dam was being built. It was the first time I experienced cold weather. In fact, it was the very first time I owned a sweater (which article of clothing we had never even seen till then!) The plains of tropical South India allowed us to wear the minimum of cotton clothes all through the year. Only the babies or the very old needed to be swaddled with blankets in Novemeber, December and January when the temperature would 'plunge' to 20- 25 degrees celsius!(The British used to describe the climate of our state as comprising of only three seasons, ‘Hot’, ‘Hotter’ and ‘Hottest’!)

When we stood at the front gate of our house, we could see the tea estates at the end of the village gradually yielding way to the forest at the high hills. During summer nights, sometimes we could see the darkness of the high hills lighted here and there by forest fires. The local help who came to our house used to tell how the dry bamboos in the forest would sway in the wind and the friction would make the dry leaves hot and start a forest fire on hot sunny days. It was another first for me as a child. At the backyard, we could see the dam being built a short distance from there. We used to play up and down the hills enjoying the leafy smell of the vegetation around us. I remember trying to sip the minute drop of honey at the bottom of the cluster of flowers growing on the hedges, aping the older children.

As I was about to celebrate my fifth birthday, I was to start school that year. It was a very small village, half of them employees of the PWD. The houses were built in tiers, as level land was hard to come by on the slopes. Our house was at one level, with the school on the immediate higher level. We had just to climb a flight of roughly hewn stone stairs embedded on one sloppy side of the cubical plot on which the school had been built. Alternately we could slide along the other sloppy sides of the school plot too if we wanted to climb down to the level of our house. Truly it was paradise for children of our age as we did this most of the times. In the way of children everywhere we did this even on rainy days when our clothes were covered with stains of mud and grass. The scolding we got from our mothers who had a hard time washing the uniforms covered with mud!

We were made to learn the alphabets and numbers by the teachers who would write them on our slate first. We had to write over them again and again till we got the shape right. The 'palappam's or 'slate kuchi' (small chalks) were in great demand as the new long ones would break easily with the pressure we all gave while trying to master the art of writing. We would hoard even the smallest pieces and would use them as a sort of currency to 'buy' or 'sell' other interesting items.

Once we learnt the numbers in our elementary school, our teachers made us memorize multiplication and addition tables by reciting them in a sing-song voice over and over again. We had to start with the Number 1 table and proceed up to whatever table we had learnt so far. This was done daily at the start of each math class and the result was that most of us could do mental arithmetic very quickly. At the start of the regular classes, the teacher would teach a math problem and ask us to do it on our ‘class work’ notebook. The first one to complete would get a ‘Very Good’, the second one would get a ‘Good’ and the third one would get an abbreviated ‘G’ scrawled on as consolation. So we would vie with each other to finish our sums as fast as we could. It was always a pleasure to count how many ‘Very Good’s we had got in our notebooks. I remember the adrenalin rush and the thrill I experienced if I was about to finish a sum and see another girl too on the verge of completing, out of the corner of my eye!

Whenever we went to a new school, the children of our family found that we were the star students (the standard of the other students being abysmally low). So the rule was that the child who got less than the first rank, would be scolded by our father for playing truant! Our father was the figure of authority in our household and request for any concessions or favours would have to be presented to him only through our mother. At the end of the first term in any new school, I used to get the first rank (no wonder, with hardly any competition) and would be made the class leader, thereby becoming instantly popular and accepted. It is the unwritten rule in our schools that the first rank holder would become the class leader (or monitor), regardless of the fact that she/he hardly had any leadership qualities!