“Shreya,” mom called out. “Shivani aunty and I are going out. So you’ve to baby-sit Rohit tonight.”
Shivani aunty, my mom’s best friend, was also our neighbour. I reluctantly closed the novel I was reading and walked next-door where eight-year-old Rohit insisted on watching an English movie adaptation of a fairy tale. And he fidgeted with his tab while watching the movie.
“What’re you doing?” I asked him.
“I’m searching the Internet for pictures for our project at school, didi ,” he said.
Search engines were non-existent when I was his age and each time we wanted pictures for our class projects we cut them out from charts, old text books or magazines. We did not have the luxury of printing pictures with one click. But the whole process was fun. We would find our old doodles and other stuff while rummaging through old textbooks for pictures.
Rohit’s voice jerked me back to reality. “I’m bored,” he said. “All right, I’ll tell you a story about my school days,” I said.
He studied in the same school as I did when I was a kid. It was a nice and homely school back then, but now it had turned into a corporate, money-churning giant that focussed exclusively on grades. He did not seem very interested, but nodded. I went back 15 years in time.
“Our English teacher would insist on our enacting all the lessons. My friend once dressed up as Mr.Tumnus for the play, “Entrance to Narnia”, where he had to stick a fake beard on his face. It would not come off later on and he had to walk about with that beard for two days.
In our science class, we would give presentations with charts and plastic models. For one lesson on certain kinds of diseases and vaccine we did a play where I used an entire packet of my mother’s red bindis to make a girl look like a measles patient with red spots on her face. I got my favourite doll to school for that important presentation, where we demonstrated the administration of the polio vaccine.
Some days later we had a presentation on water purification where we had to add bleaching powder to water. I added an entire bottle of talcum powder for the ‘demonstration’ as it was white just like bleaching powder and was readily available at home. The teacher was very amused with what I did.
We also had jam preparation in the preservation chapter, for which we got pineapple pulp and sugar from home and made jam at school. We took it home very proudly, and mom and dad insisted it tasted heavenly — although it was only half-cooked.
In the physical training class we had different sets of uniforms according to our ‘houses’. We had four houses — red, green, blue and yellow, similar to those in the Harry Potter story. I was a big fan of the series and always grimaced that I was in green house for that was the colour of Slytherin House at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry founded by Salazar Slytherin.
We were taught embroidery work at school and I once tried to stitch a peacock pattern on to a piece of cloth. I wasn’t good at it although I found it very interesting. My peacock ended up looking like an over-grown duck. I never gave up, though — which was the most important thing as the teacher said.
I loved Saturdays because we had a half-day at school and the last period of the day was the ‘library’ period. The librarian distributed fairy tale books, which were hardly ten pages long. One couldn’t get a new book if one was finished, as the librarian believed it was impossible for a kid to finish the book in anything less than an hour.
At this point, mom’s voice jerked us back to the present. The two friends were back from their shopping trip.
“All right, Rohit, I will complete the story some other time,” I said. “You told me a fairy tale, didn’t you?” he asked as I was leaving. I stared at him with a puzzled expression. “Because school now is nothing like that, didi ,” he said, and walked away.
I sighed as I realised that those days were gone and that this poor kid would never know what it was like to go to school in our days.
sahithia3@gmail.com
