The sound of rain,the smell of mud,ah,the beauty of Indian monsoons!That day is still fresh in my memory,the first day at The Heritage School,the sight of it was beautiful.It was a new school, a residential co-ed school,to be honest I was only 7,big words like ''residential'' made no sense to me at all,but I had this habit of keeping quite and saving up a thousand question for mum later.
The Heritage School is a residential school in Pune,its surrounded by beautiful mountains and lush green grass-as we were told to write in English essays about''my school''. Anyways, I started studying there when i was 7,class 2,I had no idea what this was all going to be,but now that place has turned me into something no one would have imagined.
However what this school has given me most is confidence,love and courage.It has given an opportunity to make friends who have permanently made a place in my heart,and other things that I learnt here, the school will not appreciate me saying this but smuggling food,making maggi with boiler water(hostel people know it all!)long night chats with friends and then regretting it when we had to wake up at 5 in the morning for morning jogs,eating chappati and pizza topping in history class(YUMMY!) keeping me away from the social networking world for a while,flying paper airplanes and chucking little pieces of paper with notes in them,sleeping in class,reading comics and novels behind textbooks,stealing chapattis from the canteen,studying till 2 in the night with a thermos full of coffee before the maths exam,plucking raw mangoes,giving the head girl a tough time,trying to throw away the disgusting porridge and the bitter sabjis,standing in the heat for the whole day just to practice march-past(blame the Brits for that one),and of course gossiping about boys!
I have had such unforgettable memories at this place,so I thought,I'd walk you through this lane of memories(quite cheesy,eh?).
My first year at this place wasn't exactly heavenly,I was only 7 and I missed family,apart from that I was the youngest girl in the whole school considering the fact there were only 19 students out of which 5 were girls,but we had our good times,with 19 children,Saturday night bonfires-listening to ghost stories,Sunday afternoon trekking in the rain and returning to steaming hot Dhanskak or the ghee soaked theplas-Ah it was heavenly!.Apart from all this I will never forget the year when we had our own bathrooms, 2 cupboards,cupboards full of tucks and long night talks with my seniors,and trust me if you've ever been to a boarding school you know how lucky you are to have your own bathroom,that year went fast and i grew a lot,in size and in confidence!
The first day of the second year wasn't the best,we had a new dorm parent-Preeti Kore,strict and I do mean STRICT,the fact that I arrived an hour later than the expected time with a suitcase dumped with close didn't exactly appeal to her.
Anyways that year I became friends with, Nandini whom i may refer to as ''Nandu''we were so similar and we got along really well,thats the whole point of being being best friends anyway isn't it? Even though she was in one class higher than me,Gujju parents wanted their daughter to go to school a year earlier ,so there she was Nandini Patel-my best friend!Anyways,this year did pretty much fly,we had new seniors who were kind of nice and yes we did increase in number,now there were 14 girls and unfortunately we didn't have our own bathrooms. I was in class 3 and there were 2 other boys with me Zain and Rushil,I was quite pampered at that time,no, not by those boys,by my teachers especially my class teacher,Sai mam,she was South-Indian and she used to get us food everyday in class,sometimes eclairs,if she was a in a good mood a 5 rupee dairy milk and other times fruits,believe me they did taste pretty good when you were stuck up in a classroom.
I had a lot of fun that year,teachers used to conduct classes on the lawns because our school was pretty much surrounded by lawns,they used to take us to this mote mavashis house-ah that place! Mote mavashi was a maid who worked at our school,she had been there since the first rock at that school was layed,she had her own little house in the entrance of the school,it was surrounded by trees and behind her house was a big farm owned by one of the trustees.We used to be there pretty much all the time so instead of worrying about LCM and HCF we were climbing trees and plucking raw mangoes,raspberries,chikoos etc.
The next,year in my class,we had our own little gang there was me,Zain and Rushil from last year and a new boy called Aatif.We did silly things like make our teachers talk until the bell went,we had this teacher called Aparna Tiwari,she was from Bhopal,and I had lived in Bhopal for quite sometime,in nursery that made my Hindi pretty good and she loved me for that! Anyway,so once she came in we used to open our books,once she read a few lines,we came up with irrelevant questions like''Mam,what were schools like in your days? ''etc that kept for going for the next hour and saved us a lesson full of boredom. The best thing about her was though,she always snoozed off behind her newspaper, in supervisions while examinations.
Class 6-Oh this year was indeed memorable.We had our own little group of friends in class and we kept talking ALL the time literally,teachers made us sit in all the four different corners of the class room but all we did was make noise and laugh and then get kicked out,the strategy was if one gets kicked out the other should annoy the teacher and get kicked out too so we could all stay outside the class and continue our little conversations about teachers,students,football clubs,family,movies and plan about how we should all meet up in the holidays(this hasn't happened till today.) Okay,so don't get the idea that we were spoilt little brats,it was just one teacher whose class we did this in-Pranjal Patil(social science) aka-PP(Pakao Pranjal),she read one paragraph per lesson and told us more about her life than the Indian constitution. So basically this year was full of fun and laughter and heated debates.We had debates every Thursday evenings and oh boy,did I love debating!-except for with this boy called Zubin Damania,believe me he would make the prime minister of India weep with his rebuttal points,apart from the fact that,the prime minister won't speak much.We used to call him Malik(boss),he was a great friend,so chubby with glasses but when he was in front of that mike he turned red like a tomato and spoke like a MP backing up his party(except he didn't throw chairs or shoes),whether it was about children watching TV or the women wearing burkhas. Like the time when he replied to his opponent who believed kids should watch more of Discovery channels than Cartoon Network by saying would you want little kids to watch''Ten hottest beaches and bikinis of the world'' on Discovery rather than laughing at Tom and Jerry?You probably get how witty this boy is!
The next year,I'm skipping to is Class 8,its kind of a long story i moved back to London and did half of Class 7 there,but when i came back I was promoted to a higher class-which meant I was with with my best friend Nandu! This year was A.M.A.Z.I.N.G! Well,I was chosen to be the captain of the football team which is an honor and our team won competitions our school had never won,however we had a new principal who was from an army school that meant triple the strictness,simply for the facts that she wanted us to walk in a line every where we went,there had to be complete silence,we had to study triple the times and worst of all we were not allowed to study outside on the lawns and enjoy the beauty of the place we lived in-little did we care about the grass,the whole point was silence replaced our laughter,studies replaced sports,freedom of speech replaced zippers on our mouths and of course straight lines were expected. With all these new rules came the ticket to have fun! So instead of keeping quite we kept talking,just to annoy the head girl,obviously because my little gang of friends didn't like her.Apart from all that,there was lots going my,other best friend which i forgot to mention about Anisa,shes mental,just like me so we were perfectly making the people around us go mad,like our new dorm parent,ugh she was a pain too,but not like Preeti mam,a different pain,you the one you can trouble and annoy,like she never liked me whistling and i loved it ,i mean why be sexist and only let boys whistle? However all this came with a big terror,Mr Parekh,het hated me and my friends partly because his daughter was a pain and we couldn't stand her and of course because we enjoyed life more than him.Yes we did,we enjoyed life even though we cried because we wanted to get out that hell Anyways, me and my friends couldn't shut up even if we wanted so,every morning for half an hour and every night we had random discussions about all the possible topics in the world, friends talk about-girls,boys,friends,enemies,football clubs,movies,facebook,food,politics,families,teachers,places,future,jokes,homework,exams,music and endless other topics and our conversations ended with our dorm parent screaming at us to hurry up.
At times we wondered what life would be without great friends and my friends do hate cheesy lines,so when I said that I will miss you all a lot when we leave this place,they laughed and they would definitely laugh if they found out I have written a blog,but i know that deep down,they miss me too and when we're out there facing the real world as they call it,we will miss those long night talks,the sleepless nights before football tournaments,the smuggling of food,that giggling,those arguments,getting soaked in the rains,the fear of incomplete homework,gulping down disgusting food,calling each other names,flying paper airplanes,partying with lemon juice and parle-g biscuits,the excitement on phone call days oh and of course waiting for the end of month for that birthday celebration evening the only way to get a dozen of chocolates and cake!These are the little things we miss,and keep talking about all the time,what I have learnt is life can be so much better when you make up your mind up to be happy and enjoy life as it comes,even now when i miss those giggles and those long conversations i close my eyes and think about all the good times I've had and a spark of happiness infuses inside me and tells me why life is so worth living...
