MEMOIR WRITING
On to School
I REMEMBER …
I remember going to school.
It is now almost two decades past. Yet, the memory remains. Fresh. Crisp. Felt. Lived. Real. Near. Like I will wake up from a fever dream and return to my old two-room ante-unit house. Back to being a child. Childhood for me was school.
I remember my town of old.
With its unusually long rainy season and Anglophilic nickname. Scotland of the East. It is no longer my home. I hear it has changed dramatically. Developed. Concretized. The hills cut into to make room for even bigger roads. More cars. More people. More of everything. Tourist’s heaven. A hill station with no trees and barely a hill to see.
I remember waking up to the sound of rain.
Torrents on tin-sheeted roof. Incessant. Loud. Early in the morning. Too early by Indian standards, but there, in Shillong, it was already an hour into the day.
I remember the long days of monsoon.
When the heavens opened and poured their hearts out. Possibly crying over another adult's heartbreak. But the heavens, I realised, were eternal hopefuls. They will open their hearts again tomorrow. Or maybe the day after. The clouds exhausted and drained. The sun, triumphant, will peek out. This will continue for much of the school year.
I remember the walk.
It was a fair bit of walking. My sense of distance betrays me. In my mind’s map, we walked at least a couple of kilometres. Or so it felt, what with all the climb. The climb-ups and the climb-downs. On and on over our uneven town.
I remember every nook and every cranny of the way.
The most memorable part was the climb uphill. My school sat atop a glorious hill in the town centre. It was a mini-town, with a school and a college, a seminary, residential quarters, multiple playing fields and sports venues, a few shops and canteens, and built-in utilities that owed its presence to some old colonial quirk. My school was once a barrack. A fortress. And so, it was.
I remember the smells.
How they changed and shifted as we walked up the school hill. The pungent, greasy smell assailed us as we entered through the south side. We took this route often, instead of the ‘other’ one, because it was faster. We would always be late, waiting for my brother’s various friends to catch up along the way. We could run down the opposing hill with a bunch of kids and then race up. I always lost, and because of me, so did my brother.
I remember the pungent drains.
These were the ones that emptied as we entered the back gates. This was where the support staff quarters and the school for the deaf and dumb were. On one side, a vast open drain emptied into the municipal sewers. It was always smelly, and the drain often overflowed, forcing us to pull our pants up and wade through the muddy waters. My brother hated it. I liked that. Always an adventure.
I remember the subtle changes along the way.
Our noses sensed when we crossed the staff quarters and entered the shady stretch of woods with the rotting tree trunks, decomposing sludgy leaves, and fallen cherries. My brother always said he could smell a dead rat. I don’t remember that smell.
I remember always wanting to taste the berries.
But I was told they were poisonous. I didn’t eat them for many years. But then, a classmate of mine, my namesake, ate it in front of us, and he was fine. He didn’t fall sick, as far as I remember. So, I ate some berries, too.
I remember the berries’ look, feel, smell, and taste.
They were mainly cherry red, but they began to turn a deep yellow if they were on the ground. Some were still a hard green when I plucked them from the trees. They were tiny and hard and barely had any flesh. They didn’t have much of a smell except the rotting smell that permeated everything in that wood. And they tasted acidic. Sour. It was so tangy that it gave me a brain freeze. I loved it. One day, I had a lot of them. Maybe a bit too many. I fell sick after that. I never told anyone why.
I remember when we crossed the Brother’s residences.
The first thing I noticed was the colour of the flowers in their garden. It was a riot. A sensory overload that, on the days when the sun came out, burst open with their magnificence. The season’s best. Shillong at its prettiest. Yellow marigolds. Pink-red hibiscus. White carnations. Blue hydrangeas. All neatly planted in a British-style domestic garden. Their appearances were immaculately maintained. As if holding on to a memory. Something already archaic. Already in the past. Something tangible yet not there. It left deep red tiered marks in the hands of those who held them. Even then, as young as I was, it seemed like my school was a monument to the past. My brother and I are the last vestiges of a discarded era.
I remember the road to school transforming in autumn.
Pink. Lilac. Hued in with a glorious, cloudless light blue sky. The cherry blossoms dazzled above and carpeted the roads in all colors of a pink rainbow. We knew it would come. Anticipated it. Waited for this time of beauty. All of Shillong did. We even had a festival to celebrate it right after All Soul’s Day. Yet, somehow, every year, it surprised us. When the cherry trees blossomed, they did so all at once. Almost overnight. Such a transformation. It always caught my breath. Such beauty. Soft. Slow. Lulling me into comfort. No sign of the deep sadness that lay ahead.
I remember Brother Gomes accosting us every other day.
He would talk about the stars and the night sky. Venus. Mercury. Mars. The constellations. He taught me about Orion and its belt. He always knew which star was up in the sky and where to look for it. In Shillong’s clear night skies, we could see the heavens and, in the dark, wander to worlds far beyond our own. I loved that. I loved to be in those worlds. This was before all the night lights came in. Too many of them. They made the moon moot. But, when I went to school, the night light still mattered.
I remember the final flight of stairs leading to the school.
The beaten stones and cracked cement were always slippery with a perpetual cover of green moss. There were the light green ones, which we knew to be slippery on our leathered school shoes. We avoided them. The dark green moss was older. Those didn’t slip as much. We needed to tread on them. The final rush-up was always frantic. Accidents were the norm. By my count, I must have fallen at least twenty times in my eleven years of schooling. Always coming home with a bump on my head. All those repeated falls added a couple of centimeters to my mango-shaped elongated head. My face is still marked by the scars of the falls. Years later, when I came out to my sister, she joked that all those head injuries queered my brain. I think she might have something there. Anyway, for some reason, we were always late to school. And regardless of my history and tendency to tumble over, I raced up the steps. Sprinting for the gates and the fortunes and foibles of another school day.
I remember going to school. Everyday. Like it was yesterday.
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