Friendship!!

There were two teachers assigned for taking our sports classes. Mr. Sanjay who took  the boys’ sessions and a young, lanky teacher with curly hair named Ms. Chitralekha, for the girls. I was most relieved that mercifully, the boys (who obviously had to be perfect at every sport) and the girls played separate games in each class.This feeling of relief was short lived and only lasted until I saw the girls in my class actually play! Most of the girls were really proficient at every sport!! During my first game of hockey, I just stood in the middle of the field,  lamely holding  the smallest and slightly damaged hockey stick in my hand. (This broken stick  was the only one left after the girls had attacked the bunch and taken the good ones). I remained in the center of the field keeping well out of the way of the violent, running girls and the middle aged bulky, dark hockey instructor who was  dressed in a dark blue track suit. His name was Mr. Yadav. Except for a few, all the girls were playing fiercely and after the first 3 minutes, the captain of my team, a tall girl with a long plait whose name I knew was Gaganpreet, took my hand and led me to the corner of the field and told me to stay there for the next 45 minutes! It was the same fate with football, basketball and cricket when I encountered them for the first time. There were a few girls who seemed not to have picked up the game and they just stood on their team’s side of the field and hardly ever touched the ball. I was determined not to be included in this category and tried harder and harder with each game and by the time my first month at the school had passed, I had managed to rectify  my lousy reputation and  at least the teams were beginning to pick me for their defence position after the star players had already been picked! The one exception was Basketball, which I never managed to enjoy till the last day of my time at school because of my inconveniently short height! On the whole, I was settling down well and playing basketball once a week was not going to hold me back!

August had arrived by now and it brought my favourite Monsoon season along with it! The microphones with long stands had been introduced in Assembly which made the news, announcements and Mr. Gajendra’s singing, audible through the deafening sound of the rain and thunder. It was very dark inside the school building during that season. but the hard rain lashing on the glass window-panes all around made a noisy, lovely sound. The classrooms got darker and seemed dingier too, forcing us to feel sleepy and daydream during the lessons.

 For the activity class, we were divided into the three groups consisting of randomly selected students. The first group went to Mrs. Vandana , (a stern looking lady)  for Arts, the second one to Mrs. Anuradha Solanki, (who seemed to be really popular with the girls) for dance and the third group to Mr. Gajendra for Music! Each term, the groups rotated and moved to the next activity. This way every child was involved in each activity. I was in the third group for my first term and went to Mr. Gajendra for music. He was a very friendly and pleasant person and referred to me as “Naya Ladki” (The new girl!) as he said he is not good with remembering names. To this day, he continues to address me by this very name. During the first few classes, he had arranged us in the choir and made us sing songs. All the students seemed to know every song well and sang with enthusiasm. Mr. Gajendra had the singers chosen and the latter were given the high pitched portions of the songs to sing. There were three star singers in my group- Natasha who, everybody said resembled me a lot with her short hair and spectacles, Pratisha , the same bossy girl who had questioned me on my first day  and Saloni, an ever smiling, short girl with very wavy hair! Mr. Gajendra had once asked me to sing a line on my own but I was very coy and politely requested to be let off saying I had a bad throat! Today, however, instead of asking us to sing, we were asked to select a musical instrument each, which we would be learning to play,before we moved on to another activity. I immediately ran and picked up a pair of tablas and made my way to the back of the room. Mr. Gajendra seemed to be amused by my choice and pointed it out to me asking why I had not picked up a simpler instrument say, like a flute! Smiling, I just shrugged my shoulders casually and moving away, muttered to myself – “To keep my asthma under control!” In my opinion, it was a pretty lame joke but to my absolute amazement, Pratisha trotted towards me and ruffled my hair saying- “Sooo funny!”. Other students- Natasha, Saloni, her very fair best friend Sakshi, a boy named Arshad, a tall girl named akanksha  were all laughing too! I grinned at all of them and winked but going back to my instrument, I scratched my head and wondered what exactly I had said to amuse them so! That day, in the lunch period, I was invited by Pratisha and her friends to sit besides them.  Elated, I joined them at once , but also tried not to look at the faces of my old friends sitting at the other end of the table. They were the people who had been really nice to me at the time when nobody would even speak to me, and now, they were also the people whom I had just selfishly deserted for the new ones!

"Settling Down!"

 My initial anxiety of joining a new school subsided after the first few days when I could successfully find my way around the campus. I immersed myself in the fascinating  series of Harry Potter books  which I was introduced to here itself. At home, my mom and my sister  had to literally pull me away from these books to make me eat, drink, sleep and do my homework! My dad had passed away a decade ago when I was just nine years old. Since then mom had single-handedly been taking care of us. My sister Radhika is three years older than me and was then in her first year of the college. Both she and my mother were very glad that I was liking my new school and kept asking me how my day was, how much I liked  my teachers and who my new friends were !

 Speaking of whom, that was a matter of opinion actually! My classmates seemed to be a set of smart and confident people! They were at the same time, also supremely unconcerned about the new student who had joined their class! It would have been good if I wouldn’t have been the only new addition to the class that session because I noticed that all the girls were already pre-divided into either groups or pairs amongst themselves and their whole attitude clearly screamed to me that they were not willing to add any new member to their personal territories! Most of them had not even made an effort to talk to me and judging by the way they simply looked past me, I might have been as good as invisible! The boys were more united than the girls but then, they were most oblivious about anything going around them apart from sports. 

It did not take me more than a couple of days to figure out that the female strength of this class was unanimously divided into two major sections- “The popular and the cooler group of girls” and “ The not-so-popular -group of girls”. The former kept to themselves and did not interact with the latter at all! The second group was friendlier to me and I made a few friends with whom I could hang around in the break times but secretly and selfishly, I longed to switch over to the other group. I knew that it would take some time to make my place there. This was my first experience with the classroom politics and I planned to handle it well! If the girls ignored me, I ignored them back! If asked a question  , I answered coolly, as if my time was being wasted! It was childish and silly but slowly and steadily, it was beginning to work. I knew that the girls had begun to notice me and I was certainly not complaining! I mostly kept to myself at the school but in the class, I volunteered confidently to the questions which teachers asked. Being an avid reader, I was good at the languages and soon became one of the better students of these classes. Math was still a problem and I was really struggling with it! I knew that I must be Mrs. Pandey’s worst nightmare ever! I dreaded the Math classes everyday and on the days when we had a double class, I literally had to drag my feet to the school, wishing that Mrs. Pandey would be absent, (which rarely ever happened)!

Science was not one of my best areas either, but it was better than Math as it comprised not of the complicated formulae and tables, but of the theory which I could at least mug-up. The fact that It had not yet been diversified into Physics, Chemistry and Biology but was one combined subject, also helped matters. Our science teacher was a very sweet, playful man called Mr. Manish Sinha. He was a fair, bald and child-like person, with twinkling eyes and laughter just like Santa-claus –Ho Ho Ho! It was very sweet (and a bit strange) how he treated us like young kids. For instance to capture the attention of the noisy class he would say- “Now ,will everybody please look at Mr. Sinha’s beauuuuutiful face!??”  or “Now I am going to tell you a thing which only two people in this whole wide world know...”, he used to say, while making a huge imaginary circle, swinging his hand  to signify the world, “ Do you know who these two people are??...APJ Abdul Kalaaaaaaam.........aaaaaaaand.....Mr. Sinhaaaaaaaaaa”. He once made us draw a colourful picture of dinosaurs each on drawing sheets holding which, as a group we were all made to recite a poem in the assembly, called “Dinosaur, dinosaur, where do you live?” on the tune of “pussycat, pussycat”, the popular nursery rhyme.

The boys, in particular  found it a bit unnerving to be treated like a bunch of six year olds but personally, I found Mr. Sinha very sweet and lovable, just like a teddy-bear!

History was taken by Mrs. Bhan herself who really brought it alive by   often connecting historic events with personal tales related to her family and acquaintances. She told us about the time when she was a child and was asked to present a ‘Thali’ of fruit to a very aged, bald person sitting with her father wearing only a flimsy dhoti and nothing else. She asked her mother- “Mummy, why is this man wearing no clothes?” and her mother had shushed her and said “Lila, Do not talk about him that way! He is Gandhiji, the most respected and loved  freedom  fighter of our country. He is here to discuss some important issues with your father!”. Stories like this made our history classes all the more alive and interesting! Mrs. Bhan was a lively and a patient teacher! She made sure that each child participated in her class and was always eager and excited to listen to the views of everybody present there even if they were a bit off-the-track and irrelevant!! Sometimes, all the students would enthusiastically shout out their answers all at once, making Mrs. Bhan turn still and absolutely stationary, with her index finger on her lips and her eyes closed, until the class quietened down itself!

On the other hand , Dr. Bhan’s reasoning lessons were one hour of uncommanded, pin-drop silence and the students’ undivided attention! He asked us to solve one mathematical or a general puzzle in each of his classes, which was usually very confusing but, the answers seemed pretty obvious and easy, once he had showed us how to work it out! Dr. Bhan, I noticed, had a dry, sarcastic sense of humour! He had a strict way of handling the class but he also cracked unexpected jokes from time to time, which made everybody but himself, laugh loudly! The fact that his face remained serious , not showing as much a flicker of even a tiny smile, while the people around him laughed and laughed, made the situation even more hilarious! I remember once when one of our classmates, Hardik was caught staring absent-mindedly out of the window by Dr. Bhan, he said to him in his Kashmiri accented Hindi –“MOSAM (mausam!)  SUHANAA  HAI , AAP  BAHAAR  HI CHALE JAAIYE!” (i.e Since the weather is so lovely, you should go outside only!). It is one of our most special memories associated with Dr. Bhan! Thus, my academic graph was balanced because of my good language skills on one hand and my very poor performance in Math! Sports ,on the other hand, were a different matter altogether!