It was a heart wrenching scene. A bunch of five year olds sobbing into the hankies pinned to their chests. It was their first day out away from the warmth and comfort of their homes to this dreaded place called school. I was one of them. I sobbed in Telugu, the girl next to me in Gujarati and I heard a strange tongue spoken around me. Through my tears I stopped to listen and it occurred to me that it was a language that came over the radio every day. It was English and I couldn’t understand a word of what was being said. The poignancy of the moment when a child can neither understand or be understood. Right across was a group of children interacting with the nuns and teachers with much aplomb. I thought I would never be one of them and I returned to feeling miserable and my sobbing.
One miserable day followed another, till days passed and I got used to the atmosphere in the school and made friends. My language skills improved. It was a willy nilly thing as the girls came from anywhere between Kashmir and Kanyakumari. Besides there were Jews and Armenians, Tibetans and Chinese in the city of Calcutta of the old days. We grew up as a casteless creedless crowd without any idea of any difference among us, bound in great camraderie beyond the class room. We played and read, laughed and cried and quarrelled as children do without a grudge or any animosity. We visited each others’ houses , ate all the delicious stuff our mothers made, forged friendships and made extravagant promises.
Our school grounds were a fusion of colour with flowers, grass, the massive trees of gulmohur, silk cotton and the jamun that fed us of its largesse and drew purple patches on the ground. The sun spangled afternoons of school, its innocent joys and tears, examinations and assignments, concerts and games took up all our time. In flashback, it was a slice of life where every day was an event, a gorgeous looking forward to, an indulgence to our young spirits.
Tucked away in memory was the ‘picture man’ as we called him. He would come every month to show us a film, with a projector that he would carry in his shabby leather bag. All he wanted was a table and a makeshift screen. And thus I saw my first memorable movies ranging from ‘Lassie’ to ‘Wizard of OZ’ to ‘Barrets at Wimpole street’.
Forever associated with my childhood, would be the kindly nuns and teachers whom we considered formidable, who taught us to love language and literature, gave wing to our imagination, above all the human values that bound us all together. They taught us to take success and failure with equal measure, as in the end “When the one great scorer comes to mark against your name it’s not whether you have won or lost but how you played the game” They taught us to play right!
