so, i kinda miss school

Nostalgia is an odd feeling; it somehow romanticises and flattens a range of emotions and events into something one can miss. School, for instance, was bittersweet, but it wasn’t perfect; my mind recalls it as a simpler phase of life. I used to say to people, “I won’t miss school, I won’t miss waking up at 5 a.m. every day.” But I do, it’s been years, and I still do. Nostalgia plays tricks, makes you feel like you didn’t live back then, but you were alive the whole time, though maybe there’s a trace of truth somewhere in there; it was a simpler time, simpler than analysing whether you’re even doing what you were made to do, simpler than wondering if you should write a follow-up email, simpler than asking yourself whether your hard working and somewhat optimistic 15 year old self will be proud of you. 

The bags used to be heavy; A perfect metaphor for indian students and the weight of dreams they carry. Morning assemblies were something else; kids would fall like dominoes due to the heat in the summer, I say that, having collapsed multiple times myself (twice during the national anthem!). The teachers would rush to ask you if you had any breakfast, make you drink water, and take you to the nearest shade. There was the checking of nails, if you were wearing proper uniforms, shoes, and even the hair ties had to be white in my school. This was done by the teachers, the secretaries, the house captains, the head boy and the head girl, who also made sure that the students walked in lines.

There used to be a distinct smell of recess, and kids would carry tiffins in plastic bags in case the lunch was something oily. I remember one of my books smelling like mango pickles. I haven’t experienced that smell in a while. My mother would pack extra spoons with the fried rice my friends loved. Fifteen to twenty minutes are not enough for lunch and unpacking what happened in the four periods earlier; fifteen years of age isn’t enough to know what you want to do with your life, to pledge allegiance to a passion, to science or to the arts. 

I hated having short hair in elementary school. My mother didn’t let me grow my hair out. The missionary schools I went to had a strict rule that girls with hair longer than shoulder length needed to make plaits, not ponytails. My mother is the most wonderful woman I have ever known. I used to be angry about this back then, “It’s just a hairstyle, the other mothers make it too,” I would say, but then it was a lot to wake up early in the morning, do all the chores, pack my lunch, and help me get ready, so I understand. She understood, too, and later let me grow my hair out; she would make the plaits too, until I learnt how to. 

Notebooks would need to be sealed by the principal’s office once a year, and kids would rush to complete their work, get it checked by the teacher, and it was a stressful affair overall. More stressful were those oral tests, the public humiliation that some children had to endure.

I had struggled with friendships, from being bullied in 1st grade for being a non-vegetarian to the lonely lunches, thinking about what went wrong. But I found great friends in the last years of school, and I do not want to jinx it, but they’re among the most cherished relationships of my life. The eighth period in school was reserved for discussions, just a bunch of humanities kids discussing what they’re passionate about, from everyday politics to history rabbitholes. Competition didn’t feel like competition with them, for instance, there was a bet in 11th grade— whoever gets the highest marks in our class in economics gets beaten up. 

We had the best teachers in the last two years of school, the kind that you would want to stay in touch with and the kind you would text when you hit a milestone in your career. I remember that one time I shouted “from the jungle” when my political science teacher asked,” Where do guerrillas come from?” (We were talking about Maoists), he had to turn around facing the board and laugh for a bit as I took in what I had said. I remember he would work so hard with us kids, bring his notes, write them on the blackboard, and explain it all.

There was a bad reputation of dating, at least, in middle school (even in high school, to a great extent). “You are not serious about your academics if you date, ” was essentially a belief held by teachers and parents alike. It affected me greatly, too— I was, at the end of the day, an academic validation-loving kid. The boys in school, and I, did not consider me conventionally attractive either, so that was easy. I did not date for the entirety of my school life, and now, a couple of years later, it doesn’t feel like I deserve romantic love anyway, given the train wreck I've made of my life. Perhaps it has something to do with the fundamental belief that I have held since forever, “we will date when we’re well-settled in life, first, fix this mess, then invite another complex messy situation”. I have consistently treated even normal life as some mess that needed cleaning. On a second thought, though, maybe it was hammered into my head; I do not know when the “well-settled in life” period will come. I am okay with being single, though; I have lived long enough to know that it is not the end of the world. 

The school bus was great. I remember I used to read/revise in the morning and come home sleeping on the bus, at least in the last two years. I would occasionally shout at the younger kids, “Where do you get all this energy from? Can’t you speak softly?”  because 1) No one should be quarrelling on the bus at 6:40 a.m., 2) No one should be quarrelling at 1:40 p.m., especially when it’s May. I miss it sometimes, though, not the quarrelling or the shouting, but the excitement to learn, to meet my friends, they’re all in different big cities now; sometimes it was the dread of sleeplessness, of some incomplete work, of some test I should’ve studied more for. I also miss the return journey in the afternoon, and dissecting the events of the 6 hours I spent in a place where I somehow, unknowingly, memorised the patterns of the tiles in the main ground. There was comfort because, however the day was, it was almost over. There was safety in the predictability of it all. The afternoon nap later at home— even the 8 hours of sleep I get now don’t compare to it. 

While every festival was celebrated at my missionary school, the Christmas celebration was very special. They would sing carols in the morning assembly during the Advent season, and I still find myself singing “Mary’s Boy Child” very often. All my friends attended the celebration in the last year of school, in 12th grade, but I didn’t; I was out of town. There was a part of me that said, “It’s the same thing every year anyway,” but you miss these very “same things” when they aren’t a part of your same, predictable, mundane life anymore. There would be parades on Independence Day and Republic Day. I remember when I was an anchor on Independence Day, and I had to start speaking when the principal was being welcomed, due to some miscommunication—I started with the script— “Freedom-” about 2 times only to be cut off by “Not now! She hasn’t arrived yet.”

There used to be so much space in the NCERT books on the sides of the paragraphs, almost inviting you to write your short notes. I loved writing in them; it wasn’t aesthetic, but it was the way I learned history best. I still do this with research papers/articles/books, whenever I can, but it was another thing entirely to write on the thin paper of NCERTs with the pencil that had been dulled because I had been using it for the past 30 minutes. Everything was important in the NCERTs; I would highlight or underline everything. 

Essays could be written about the pen fights, the make-believe seesaw of rulers, erasers and sharpeners, the scribblings on the desk—they were like an ancient text just waiting to be deciphered (I’m looking at you, Harappan script), the “games period” in free periods if the physical education teacher was the substitute teacher; but there are just too many instances. It would never end; there are too many moments to describe, my memory or writing won’t do justice to them, and I, perhaps, even overemphasised or underemphasised certain parts of my school life here too. Memory and nostalgia are like chasing the past indefinitely; you never quite catch it, but you get parts of it, the flash-like glimpses in your mind, moments that defined you at a point, then time and that one late-night conversation with a friend put everything into perspective. Maybe memory is amplifying the good parts of my school life, but maybe my memory is just a tiny bit right in the context of it being mundane, predictable, and simple, which possibly was a good thing.

but also i should stop romanticizing the past, i was miserable even back then