Those Annual Academic Adventures

Childhood is a romance, a looking glass of many colours through which we saw life. No one day seemed like another, no one thing was the same, the blue of the sky transformed to purple and gold and the twilight was awash with the red of the setting sun, the rain gave way to sunshine and summer passed into winter. At the beginning of every school year, I remember the excitement of shopping for school text books and exercise books as we referred to them. A major thrill was the brown wrapping paper and the labels that would be carefully carried home and spread out on the dining table. How impatient was the wait until mum or older sibling obliged with measuring and cutting this to size of the required books and covering them! What a joy it was when we were old enough to take care of the task ourselves, but by then other distractions beckoned and it did tend towards being viewed as a chore. Label sticking without messing up the cover, was an art, there being no gum tubes to ease the job. Writing one’s name and upgraded class number offered a sense of great self-importance as well. Those days we were thoughtfully provided lockable desks so we did not have to cart the load to and fro daily- just the ones needed for homework. The other annual delights were new uniform and shoes. Every day was an adventure of sorts, running with the sun and racing with the wind. Each day was replete with its own tender joys and gentle sorrows. School was all about friends, the strength of togetherness that made us feel greater than our separate selves and a good book opened the doors to many an enchanted evening. Food meant warmth and love and appetite, flavours emanating from the pots and pans and wood fires in the yard, trails of swirling smoke, the tantalising smell of rice and vegetables cooking and the fragrance of that got transformed into chapatis for our lunch boxes. Suddenly the dream run is over and the adult world has taken charge with its complexities, its compulsions to live up to others, to taste the short highs of success and a long trough of failure, to adjust to a dystopian time.  To grow up we learnt is to live in a bewildering present, to live in an uncertain future to reconcile yourself to the tragic inevitabilities of life.  But once in a while we live our lives backwards and hope ” something that will just be there like tomorrow’s sky”. We can only look back with nostalgia, memory mixed with longing, happy that we had those days as our kids get ready for their annual adventures. As I look back, I am reminded those words of Wordsworth ” Wither is fled the visionary gleam, where is it now the glory and the dream”? We were all children once, long ago. 

Kodandera Mamatha Subbaiah