The extent of my academics in a school never lasted for more than 2 years. Series of unfortunate events kept me and my bro shifting schools and places. We made as many friends as sands in the sea and salts in the desert; the upshot was that I completed my entire schooling in six different institutions; in the final lapse of which, I got to stay over in St John’s for four remarkable years.
St John’s Residential! This was where I lingered a bit longer than the rest of my schools. Lingered, long enough to make a few good relations, relations as good as blood or even better. I had absolutely no heart to leave my previous school and friends. So naturally, the first day at the new school was very glum. Unlike the neat and tidy, less populated class rooms of Shabarigiri, all of Johns’ classes were packs of 60s. By noon, cleanliness and godliness could be found only in pages of our moral science books.
I sat at the last bench on the girls’ row, along with the taller girls in the class. By less than five minutes I realized that I was the only new girl to the class that year, majority in the class were there for more than five years, some right from the kindergarten. Something I found so hard not to be jealous about.
Besides, there were a lot of other things that was hard to behold. To start off, the uniform theme of St. Johns’, then, was proposed by some primordial being. Boys wore white and navy blue and girls wore white and maroon. We also had navy blue socks and black shoes, maroon shaded ties and black belts with the school emblem engraved on a metal at the place of the knot. For the first time in life I thanked God that I came from a society which had no much appreciation for a perfect color combination or even could make out if there is any sense or nonsense in matching colors. All they believed in was, wearing "proper" clothes. Like, if they were supposed to have knee length skirts, they would stitch it till ankle level so that the resulting costume could be worn till it degenerates; which they propose was, "economical and wise".
Inspite of all these dramas, once I started off, it was an easy run. The girls were friendly and we had fun. Despite the change in syllabus, the subjects were easy on me and the teachers were fine too. The classes were co-ed. Unlike in Sabarigiri, where the girls and boys sat together; here the boys and girls sat in separate sets of rows and kept a remarkable physical distance from each other. The weirdness in all these, melted off in a few days and I gelled well as one among them.
In high school they shuffle the different sections of classes and take the creams in the ICSE and moved the rest to SSLC. We had two batches for the seventh, A and the B. I was in A and there were only a few gals from my section to eighth grade. We all cramped up in the last two benches of the new class. The rest of the class was already occupied by our B batch. The only notion both the A and B sections had of each other was their preconceived notions, which wasn’t very good. The prejudices acted tough for a few days at start, but then again we all ended up like the perfect butter for the even perfect bread.
We had our wonderful Jayasree ma’m, who was our class teacher and also taught us Chemistry, days when chem. and bio used to be my favorite subjects. For English we had Mrs. Sulekha Premnath, I was a huge fan of her accent and perfected teaching skills. Like what happens to all the good teachers in low paid schools, they left for better opportunities. Our class went mismanaged and unattended. This would have been otherwise the best class in the school, turned out to be the most notorious one. Extra thanks to a female who had celluloid for brains.
Our PT made regular visits to our classes leaving the terror of a rampaging scout all the time he left. But our class glued up so well. We were like 44 sticks tied up together and so unbreakable no matter what. God showed us some mercy by bringing Prof. JP and Anil Kumar as substitutes for Sulekha ma’m and Jayasree Ma’m. Our class excelled in studies and extra curriculums. A visiting guest lecturer promised our principal that our batch was extremely talented and would bring out outstanding scores for the public exams. Well…
Exams came and went. There weren’t any miraculous results as prophesied. Our entire batch dispersed in tenth. A couple of us stuck together …still together after all these years…still the proud old batch of St John’s. It’s been 13 long years since we all parted our ways. Many of us crossed paths and met up and rejoiced the good old days. Just mates became close friends, close ones good friends, good friends became better and better became the best.
I have come a long way through troubles and hard times like any one. Where I had difficulty of choices, problem of opinions, sorting out priorities, I never had to think twice but to call up any of my johns’ pals. I bet it was the same for the rest as well.
I would specially like to mention our dearest and beloved Anu, who is no more with us but in spirit, who is the motivation behind me writing up this piece, who had been a friend in need and deed for all of us, to take up the example of his friend ship and be there for each other till the day we die.
