School ke din

A morning in the past. A morning to look forward to. A morning at school. Mornings I miss. The ones I miss a lot. I miss it all.

A typical day would start with an angdai and a sense of excitement. The awkward dreams from the night before would still linger in my quirky mind. Every morning, I’d be amazed at my absurd and weird thinking which resulted in my extraordinary dreams the night before.  A sense of excitement would be more about describing these dreams to my dear Srija, and wee bit less about going to school.

With a lazy body language, the tired blue toothbrush would be taken closer to the white Meswak toothpaste, and then the boring process of scrubbing my teeth would begin.  Following this would be the unproductive task of bathing, during which I’d be partially asleep, and partially mesmerized by the beautiful fragrance of the mint soap. Then I’d put on the various layers of clothes and head to the dining table for my favourite part of this monotonous morning routine- breakfast! While munching on delicious food, I’d put on my so-called ‘accessories’ namely tie, belt, ID card, socks and shoes. Then I’d head downstairs and wait for the lovely yellow vehicle which is little a makeshift for us musafir-like students.

After this yellow vehicle would enter the society gate, I’d excitedly walk towards, totally ready to rock this new day, and to have a fun-filled little journey with my crazy but super-fun bus squad. I would run-walk towards the end of the bus and sit on mostly the second last seat with my one and only Srija, who is like my mother at school, and controls the absurd and weird thinking and keeps me tolerable. That’s what’s earned her the name Mataji. Apart from Mataji, there’s also Yash, who is a huge Dhinchak Pooja fan, and is called Lakshmi by all. His Vishnu is Nikhilesh, better known as Bella, who an aspiring Doctor cum padhaku baccha . Then of course we have our juniors- Parth and Divya, who add tad bits of lameness to our talks, and are also there to remind us that we are the eldest ones in the bus, and need to act that way.  The journey is characterized by Srija talking about how she slept pretty late last night, and still couldn’t complete the chapter, and hence hasn’t studied for the test. I pitch in and help her to complete the chapter and summarize it, but am never successful with Yash’s continuous chatter, which imply Srija’s irritated expression and invite Bella’s morning dose of his favourite dialogue- “Fight, fight, fight, fight!”

After this daily dose of noise pollution, the yellow vehicle finally turned into a carriage of some sort, and entered its palace- Our dear red and white school building!  We fought like the horses on the carriage to get off the bus. After this animal rights struggle, we used walk a decent stretch and reach our classes with ease. As members of the cabinet, Srija and I used to head back downstairs to perform the duty of traffic police at school. We used to handle the incoming morning traffic.

After the tiring yet routine morning drama, we’d head to our classes and finally meet our dear friends. I’d usually meet Shruti,(lovingly called unicorn), Tina (Doc from Back to the Future), Tanu and Dibya, who were my jigri dost since 4 years. And my morning was incomplete without scaring Mr Himawari aka Aarya. Then ofcourse, there was Anjil to greet me each morning. But the morning is incomplete without meeting my cuddly bear- Sid.

The first period would start. It was usually maths, and Bhagyashree ma’am, who was also our class teacher would enter the class. We had a couple of math wizards in our class, and I was certainly not among them. I don’t know whether those guys had calculators instead of cerebrums in their heads, or it was just their talent, but they solved the sums even before I could finish writing the formula. So maths class was basically about ma’am giving us some sums, and these guys finishing them in just 15 minutes and the rest of us lamenting the fact that we had cerebrums, not calculators in our brains.

The second period was mostly Biology or Chemistry, which were both taught be Deepa ma’am. I must say that if it wasn’t for ma’am, I’d just be a person who would never understand why HCl doesn’t react with H2SO4 or how why my hair is brown. The best part about these classes was the arguments between ma’am and Sujay which were mostly fruitless and confused me to a great extent. But the icing on the cake were Ketaki’s comments. Ma’am used to be the only teacher who used the ICT regularly. She used to explain everything in depth, which would make me, a student with an IQ of -100 in science, a super attentive spectator of the interesting scientific phenomenon.

This was followed by the short break, which evaporated even before the ingestion process for my first bite of poha could take place. I distinctly remember that Deepa ma’am used to be so engrossed in the concept, that the break bell was never heard. And when our next period, SST would begin, we would just be opening our tiffin boxes.