TOTAL RECALL: THE SCHOOL DAYS

My school was a little over half a mile from our house over a smooth light grey cement concrete road on which there was not much traffic. This wide road started at the railway station, in the north of our house, as a wide two lane concrete road and went past our house in the southern direction. It narrowed down to a single lane road after the kutchery (collectorate). Then, with a zig-zag, it continued farther and ended somewhere beyond the massive first gate of the Collector's residential estate which occupied over a hundred acre area full of a vast variety of huge trees. The big black iron gate to Collector's compound was a little beyond our school and it was yet another long drive inside, through a virtual forest and two more gates, before one entered the red winding gravel driveway to the portico of Collector's well maintained red bricks bungalow.

Our school was on the right of this road, towards west.

Facing it, in the east,on the left of the road, was a big church compound. The school was an ancient double storey yellow building which housed class rooms upto the eighth class, the assembly hall and the school's offices. The two single storey buildings on either side were new when I first came to join in class sixth. The science laboratories block was to the north and the southern side building held various sections of ninth and tenth classes. The principal's office was in the old building. It had a blue chick curtain on its door and a peon-in-uniform  sitting outside on a high stool.

The principal was an old weatherbeaten disciplinarian. Nobody ever saw him smile. He loved  caning  students. His bungalow was next to the school campus.

Our English literature teacher was  mr. Biswas, an absentminded old  man with a permanent scowl on his face. He was a constant target of pranks by  back-benchers. They would fix a dozen pins into the crevices of the teacher's chair, with the sharp points pointing upwards. Mr.Biswas would lower himself to sit down and then spring up as the pins pricked his huge bottoms. He would then stand by the table and continue teaching as if nothing happened. This pin-and-bottoms game kept repeating often. Sometimes there would be a small pup concealed in the big white duster-cloth. As mr. Biswas picked up the duster to wipe the blackboard, the pup would yelp loudly sending the entire class into a fit of laughter. In the rainy season these boys placed frogs into the chalk box !

The most welcome sound for the boys in my school was the final bell. When the time came, every boy was ready for it. While the gong at the end of the assigned time for each period was a simple ding-dong-dong, the last bell was a continuous, rapid ding-ding-ding-ding. At the first ding all the boys instantly poured out of the class rooms with an amazing speed, leaving the teachers half way through a sentence ! The whole school was on the road outside in ten seconds flat !

This small town of my childhood had a clean and quiet environment  and well swept roads, chirping birds and huge trees. On moonless nights the whole sky glowed with twinkling stars and there was a hazy white north-south band of the Milky Way. I could locate the Great Bears, the Orian Hunters, The Kite and all the zodiac signs that were there.

This has changed. It is now a big city with  expansion in all directions.Litters of garbage and traffic jams are a common sight. The sky is now so polluted that one cannot see any stars at night.The Collector's hundred-acre compound has been invaded by colonisers and converted into a big residential colony. It has no trees. In the spacious compound of the  house where we once lived, a shopping mall has come up which is part of the market area stretching on the two sides of the road right up to the zig-zag before my old school.

But the neat flat grey cement concrete road, said to have been built by British engineers around the first world war, is very much there - defying time, defying misuse, defying the general deterioration that has set in everywhere. . . !!