Schooldays

 

Those are the days stashed away in a dusty closet. But they hark my attention sometimes to those times of lovely sweet-nothings. The schools of the eighties of the past century in the villages appear like at the other end of the planet in the literary queue. These are fiercely creative and competitive times, unsparingly pushing us into the grip of selfish subjectivity. Modern education seems a savage downpour upon little heads.

But as students at a village school in the eighties, ours was a totally different world. Seeped in the sublimity of simple emotions, untouched by frustrated aspirations, we had all the time to be lazy within the premises, as if recuperating to go all agog after the school. We were all very lazy at the village school. The students and the teachers competed against each other in being relaxed and at peace with one’s being. The only time when the teachers showed some agility and quickness was while thrashing and shouting abuses with a cool nonchalance.

The students, in turn, were extra agile in evading anything distantly related to the studies. Laziness would get into an enchanting bloom during the winters. The winters would arrive with limitless grace to bestow the balmy days under the open sun for all of us to dose like a sunbathing python after a hearty meal.

It was a small world and the expectations weren’t high. In fact, there was hardly any expectation from almost all the students. As the temperature dipped, the main priority shifted to get extra Vitamin D. The classes would shift to the huge playground. Heavy on brunch, the teachers dozed on their chairs. They would bang the stick on the ground once in a while, throw some harsh word—they were very charismatic and ingenious in their favorite cuss words—and after the temporary fit of anger would again get cool under the warm sunrays.

We would also go into automation mode—like a drowsy cow mulching fodder with eyes closed. We munched upon the dry grass. We chewed a lot of it during the long-drawn days, waiting for the sun to cross the horizon. Doing jugali like a buffalo is a kind of meditative practice. It takes you beyond the hard edges of time. Time passes off without too much of a burden. The birds sang in the trees with a virtuous acclaim. And we would lose a bit of that poise only during the last period as we waited for the last bell to go active again the moment it was heard and go hopping for an active evening spurred by a voracious variety of childhood antics.