Auld Lang Syne…
My schoolmates got together last weekend, far away in the southern end of the Indian subcontinent. God’s own country that, and if anyone begs to differ, keep begging and when finished, stick it where the sun doesn’t shine.
I attended Ambalamedu High for a dozen years and enjoyed quite a bit of it. We mostly got there on time, come rain or shine, and went about our business with not much fuss, at least as far as I recollect. I close my eyes and I can see this grainy sequence of queuing behind Srinivas and in front of Eldho (we did that ordered by height), walking down to the assembly ground occasionally placing a wager on which language that morning’s prayer would be in and being very disciplined about the whole affair. The choir, we were reminiscing just the other day, was usually an all girl affair and our most talented singers at that. I particularly remember Kala, Parvathi and Malini, not only because I have had occasion to work with each of them in some capacity or the other at school, but also because quite secretly, I am fairly certain, they were my mother’s favorite students over the thirty-odd years that she taught there. I am also certain that I didn’t make that list, by the way - an immodest brat with a lot to be modest about is how she would sum me up if you did ask her, I suspect :)
Till about a few years ago, I could recite names from the attendance register in sequence as it would have been read out 18 years ago - curiously most of my memories are of the very last year we spent there. I remember that there were two consecutive 45-minute ‘periods’ of dissecting a Malayalam novel on Wednesdays. I remember colliding head-on with a certain chappie we used to call NR in the course of an eventful game of football, probably the very last we played at school. I remember “Ennennum Kannettante (Kannan’s Forever)” - a chick-flick of late 80’s vintage (a tenacious soul managed to get his paws on this and a few related flicks on his recent raid of Kottayam on DVDs and promptly brought them back; office didn’t see me for a week)- and checking at home if I did have any cute cousins I didn’t know of as yet. I remember the horror of spotting a head of snowy-white hair appear just as the stitched cricket-ball went past the tennis court’s retaining walls, just as vividly as collapsing in relief when the ball missed by an absolute whisker. I remember being terrible at table-tennis and this creep being mean about a few used shuttle-cocks. I remember songs from Literary Association meetings and being admonished by a long lost friend in the gentlest way possible about having recited a nursery rhyme during one of them. I remember a quiz which almost descended into a mass brawl in class - it was always boys vs. girls, inexplicably - because we lost the page which had AWACS’ expansion written on it. I remember all my mates. Little have I forgotten Bishop’s Candlesticks, Macbeth and Androcles. I vividly remember the time when not less than six different groups played cricket around a pitch where Murali was hoisting Hazeeb over the ropes and into Rahul’s balcony every second ball…
My little girl is five and whenever we can, my wife or I drop her to school. I love our walk down to her school (and the drive, but please don’t tell Ken) and the hundred tussles we have to have with each other on our way. Our conversation never ceases to astonish me - kids have this way of surprising you with how much they observe and can recount. I love being introduced - “Dad, meet Keiron, Sheilin, Mathew, Joshua, Sanjana and my friend Lucian” - to her friends. I am never surprised to see her half way up the tree-stump in the school’s front yard with three other fellow X-chromosomes, sparring with half a dozen boys who want to occupy the same space. I had to pinch myself when she, quite nonchalantly, gave us her first school report. Her school uniform involves a steel-gray pinafore that, hold your breath, “should ideally reach below the pupil’s knees at the hemline”. I love it all. It brings a smile to my face. It reminds me how green my valley was, our valley was…
Eighteen years, thirty eight countries, two employers, hundreds of acquaintances and one too many inches of waistline later, I miss my school and my class. Terribly.
