I remember...
I remember…
Origin of this blog:
We had close to thirty pens lying around the house. However yesterday, when I wanted to do a Sudoku, I couldn’t find a single one. SC, my husband was the culprit. He likes to have one peeping out of his shirt pocket every day. That would have been okay in the normal case. But unfortunately, the pen never comes home with SC and his shirt pocket!
So it was that I, having searched the whole house, finally found a pencil with no point. Alas, no sharpener in the house! So I took a kitchen knife and started filing away.
[The Sudoku I completed soon and I went on to do a word maze. After deciding that my skills are disappearing because I couldn’t find a single word in the list given, though I seemed to be finding any number of other words, I decided to look at the solution. It was a completely different list that was marked!]
To return to the main story, while I was sharpening my pencil, I started to remember some incidents of my school life. I wrote this list down, pencil on paper. Here it is!
I remember
- Discovering the wonder called pencil cutters and sharpening three whole pencils down to stubs in one day. Amma finding out and warning me the next day that she had measured the lengths of the pencils!
- Carrying lunch box and water bottle separately in a plastic cover one day. Forgetting it at the bus stop and finding out very late. Getting scared that I would have to eat at the convent under the watchful eyes of the Sisters. My dear sister giving me her lunch and saying that she would share from her friends.
- My sister coming to see me during the class intervals and me saving half of the toffees that I got for her.
- My sister’s friends making a big fuss of me, saying that I was cute and pinching my chubby cheeks.
- The whole class being punished and made to stand in a row outside the class for being noisy while coming back from the playground after exercise period.
- Playing Helper and Catcher, Lock and Key and other such games and always being interrupted in the middle of the fun by the bell.
- Finishing all exam papers early and making careless mistakes like not seeing certain questions and Amma shaking her head in dismay.
- Learning about elections and voting one bus ride home and asking my parents to ‘ote’ for one person because my seven year old friend thought he was the best!
- Waiting till Monday morning to get a less-than-perfect exam paper signed by Amma and Amma getting angry.
- Completely believing and insisting to my family that my friend’s cousin sister had turned to salt one day and that her family was still using that salt!
- Not hearing the bell ring while busy at play, being made to stand in front of the class with my friends, making signs from there to bench mates to have my bag packed as it was the last period and I had to run to get a side seat in the school bus.
- A friend describing the way to her house saying that her house was the one in front of which her father would sit smoking ‘beedi’.
- Going to school on Achan’s scooter sitting sandwiched between him and my sister.
- Collecting broken glass bangles and breaking some new bangles for a new game which called for ‘valapottukal’, hearing rumours that the teachers had heard of it, emptying water from the water bottle and hiding the glass pieces inside it.
- Listening to friends talking “adult stuff”, not understanding a word, yet pretending to know it all.
- Counting the number of Christmas stars that we saw on the way home from school, the last day before the school closed for Christmas holidays, exchanging greeting cards, knocking on my aunt’s bathroom door where she was taking bath (her house was on the way home), shouting out a new phrase that I had learned that day, Wish You a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
- Standing on a stage the first time reciting ‘Robin sang sweetly when the days were bright’, Sister telling me in the end that no one could hear a word.
- Watching my friends’ mothers helping in last minute revisions on exam days and feeling proud that my mother trusted me to do well alone.
- Drinking sweet lemonade out of my water bottle on exam days, a special treat that Amma gave.
- Watching the nearby empty house through the class room windows, listening to haunted stories about it, supposed suicides that had happened there, staring at it during class hoping to see a ghost.
The list continues endless. I had a pleasant nostalgic time writing this. Hope you have fun reading it too. I would love to read your lists, but no tagging!
© Usha M., all rights reserved.
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