DOWN MEMORY LANE Sudha Devi Nayak
Schooling took us beyond our narrow worlds
==
TEXT
I stand at the window watching the splash of sunset tinged with purple. At a distance, a school building stood alone in the vast expanse of its campus, lonely, awaiting its children for the new session. The first day of the new school year would soon begin.
The leaves of memory rustle and I am where I was once upon a time. A little girl cast adrift among hordes of faceless strangers — little girls like myself, teachers, nuns and a cold, forbidding building.
On my first day in school, long years ago, I watched bewildered as everyone spoke with felicity, aplomb, in a language that was not my own. And, here I was, tongue-tied, unable to be a part of everything around. This was the first sense of alienation I experienced and the suffering was acute.
When I went home and confided to my father, that I felt I was no good, he said English was nobody’s mother tongue here, and if I wanted to speak well, I should read and write in the language as much as possible. He brought me several books beyond school texts and as I struggled with the intricacies of grammar and the whimsicality of pronunciation, the year came to a close, and a prize came my way for the hard work I put in.
The highlight of the evening of prize distribution that day was the National Anthem. As the band struck and young voices sang Jana Gana Mana, I was in the seventh heaven of ecstasy. This was the song my mother first taught me when I took to reading. Like all children, I felt something enchanting about it.
Schooling took us beyond our narrow worlds. Our teachers introduced us to the great masters of English literature. I read my first Shakespeare, Midsummer Night’s Dream while in the Seventh class. The teacher started off dramatically by addressing the class, “Girls, Shakespeare is talking to you across three hundred years. Are you prepared to listen?” I have ever since been listening, failing to fathom the depths of what the bard had written down for generations.
Our teachers, for all their love of learning, taught us that life went beyond mere learning. In fact, it involved a larger learning that encompassed compassion and grace. Compassion ultimately rules human behavior and gives us the humility to say, “There but for the grace of God go I.” The learning continues even as my hair turned grey.
The headmistress and her faithful band of nuns administered the school with an iron hand albeit with love and compassion. That contrasted with the freedom at home. We learned what discipline meant. They, though, had a penchant for exaggeration. Minor transgressions like slipping out of the gates to buy a chocolate or savour an ice cream, at break time, were treated like venal sins.
Our studies went beyond the books. There was this Belgian, Sister Marie Etienne (which we pronounced as eighteen), a fine needle woman who was assigned the unenviable task of fitting us out as perfect ladies adept at needlework, embroidery and lacework.
So, there followed stem stitch, cross-stitch, blanket stitch, French knots, herring bone stitch, tatting, et al and plain pieces of cloth became canvasses of art with birds in flight and flowers in bloom, and trees reaching up to the sky. Unfortunately, not all of us were good with the needle. While others were lost in fine embroidery, I was among those finding it difficult to use a needle.
The ringing of the big brass school bell, long before the time of buzzers, was a sacred rite entrusted by turns to senior girls. For a blissful period of one week, the ringer of the bell walked on air and rang it with all the might of her frail body at the appointed hour.
For brief moments, she felt she was the arbiter of everybody’s destiny, holding in her hands the power of terminating interminable classes, declaring freedom. I too had my turn.
One day, during the last moments of class, I was sent to fetch a box of chalk from the store downstairs. I did the job but one look at the school clock told me it was time for the bell and if I delayed even by a few seconds the privilege would be passed over to the next girl. I panicked and rushed up the marble staircase, which was out of bounds for us.
Just as I reached the middle of the staircase, I was horrified to see the headmistress, tall and stately coming down, one step at a time. She stopped right in front of me and said, caustically, “And, pray, what are you doing in the middle of the staircase?” Petrified, I stood rooted to the spot and she said regally, “You may proceed,” and walked down the stairs. I rushed up just in time for the bell, my heart still pounding. In later life, no official reprimand, no board room presentation, no meeting with higher-ups engendered such fear.
A gust of wind through the window, sun down, my memory folder closed, and I am back in the present but with a longing for fun-filled, sun-filled days, for a time free of vanities, clean from illusions.
