Stuff, part 1

I saw a couple of posts on Hari’s blog, on memories and how people tend to forget a lot of them. And I guess that made me dredge up all of those I’m capable of recollecting :) I can’t remember too much about what other people did, sadly. Anyhow, here’s the censored carefully edited version ;)

UKG: I used to be a friendly, kind, caring and helpful kid (emphasis: used to be). One fine lunch break, I walked in on this monstrous guy (B) picking on my best friend (S). I (the puny one) tried breaking it up, but to no avail. So I did the only thing I could do…I ran to our class teacher and told her exactly what had happened and recited the exact word(s) B had called S. I believe he called him a butthead (that’s the rough English translation of it anyhow) which was a pretty blasphemous term for a KG kid. On interrogation, the bloody traitor (S of course) flatly denied the accusations against B and called them baseless. I got a tongue-whipping from the teacher, and later, an ass-whipping from B. I think I started not being that friendly or kind or caring or helpful.

Then there was this *little* incident which people were talking about for a pretty long time. J1 had a bowel movement while class was going on, and found J2s class diary a pretty darn convenient place to go poo-poo :| Even I had an incidence of temporary incontinence, but to my credit, it was in my shorts.

We had this kid named Anto Jose in our KG class. He used to sing, dance and act pretty darn well. Sadly, he left school after that year, and none of us knew what became of him. Apart from the grisly rumours spread by (lets just call him) RumourMan, that is. The rumour was that he lost his life in an accident with an auto-rickshaw. So if anyone knows an Anto Jose (he’ll be around 20 at this point in time) could you please let me know?

This one time, I was climbing up a tree along with some friends. Big, huge senior guy jumps out and scares the living daylights out of me. I fall off the tree and land on a rock, on my head. I don’t remember anything else that happened in the UKG (Duh!)

First standard: I don’t think this qualifies as a memory exactly, because it’s more along the lines of a series of fragmented pictures. I remember that people used to run behind me during interval time, because I had developed this taste for chocolate pastry, and used to have a snack box. Apparently, it was not just me who had a taste for pastry, chocolate or otherwise. The one thing I do remember about the first standard was that we had a classmate who went by the name of John Valiaveettil. He had this big geoid head, and used to speak amazing English. He kinda left school that year as well. All of us used to play with this small toy gun he had (he was a pretty fun guy to be with).

By this time, we had a gang in bus number 1. There were 5 of us, if I remember correctly, including this amazingly funny guy, Donald Don Bosco. As was the tradition, he left school in a year or two as well :( I used to really like the guy.

Second standard: I had to bear the disgrace of receiving zero marks for an English paper. Hey, it wasn’t my bloody fault. Nobody bloody told me that we had to write the paper in bloody cursive! I thought it was just another weird thing that I had to study (albeit in the first standard. I had never really understood the point of it then. They all looked like squiggly lines to me. No, wait! Or was it my handwriting? Ah, I forget!).

Third standard: I was an extremely hyperactive kid, and used to bang some part of my body (my knees, most of all) up every single day. So much so that my aunt referred to my knee as PWD road (I’d like to refrain from commenting on the work ethic of PWD engineers as ma is going to read this at some point of time and shall surely be bashing me up, even for this harmless allusion). I had banged my left knee in around two places and my right knee in around 6. Dabbing warm potassium permanganate solution on both of them was an everyday routine. My aunt, who visited us every day, took up that task (yes, the very aunt who christened my knee). At this juncture, I had cut down on my activities because my dad wrapped my knee in thick gauze every morning to prevent further injury (and hence further frolicking about). Well, it finally healed (to an extent) and I was gauze free. I was happily running around in the playground when this guy J jumps off a bloody tree and lands on my knee. I yelled at him and went back to class trailing blood all down my leg. I went home and told everyone that a guy had jumped off a tree, directly onto my knee. I seriously doubt they bought that explanation. I don’t quite remember now. I do know that I was more careful after that (well, except for a teeny accident that involved my left leg being skin-free from knee to ankle).

We started Hindi in the third. One fine day, my Hindi teacher called up my parents and told them that I’d be flunking miserably in her subject if I was to continue being the way I was. My aunt (not the PWD-road-wali but her sister) decided to take charge of my Hindi lessons. She used to come home every evening and teach me try to teach me try to distract me from the shiny and/or flying object that had transfixed my gaze upon it at that particular nano picosecond. We had this book that had pictures and the Hindi word for the object in the picture written below it. In bloody Hindi!!! Clever kid that I was, I shouted out randomly chosen Hindi words that I had heard in class. I got randomly pinched for that as well. I guess I finally got the hang of it, because I didn’t flunk even a single Hindi paper. Thanks auntie!

Mid-term time! It was an English test. I was already staring out the window longingly as the question papers were being distributed. (At this point, I’d like to point out that we had only ever written two essays…I believe the topics were ‘Myself’ and ‘My Pet’). I wrenched my head away from the general direction of the window and wrote the essay. After the exam, I thought I had done pretty well. Then we got the answer papers back. It seems I hadn’t done nearly as well as I expected. The teacher had royally cheated (I didn’t know the existence of the word ‘screwed’ at that point) me there I thought…until I got back home anyway. Ma took one look at my essay and burst out laughing. I snatched the paper away from her (appalled at her reaction to my painstakingly written essay) and read it. I had written the title pretty neatly. ‘My Cow’ it said.

Me: I have a cow. His name is (I don’t remember). I take him out for a walk every evening…

And it went on, with the exact same words of the essay ‘my pet’.

Me: What’s so funny?

Ma: Read the question!

Me: Write an essay, in not more than 100 words, on ‘The Cow’

Ma: …

Me: @#$&!!!

Ma: *snicker!*

Me (blushing): The cow, my cow, what’s the difference? For all she knows, I could be an actual kid with an actual cow, and I’d treat him exactly like that!

Ma: Honey, a cow’s female.

Me: @#$&!!!

Moving on to less embarrassing memories…we had a really *good* teacher in the third, have I mentioned that? Not our Hindi Miss, but our class teacher. Let’s call her Mrs. S! Extremely austere looking, and with a boy-cut…yea, that about describes her. She was nice…and by nice, I mean the nice Harry Potter means when he says ‘She’s nearly as nice as your mum’ in a letter to Sirius. Yep, that particularly virulent strain of nice! A lot of us had this fad of spouting our extensive Hindi knowledge, which pretty much extended to ‘tumhaara naam kya hain?’ and ‘mera naam (insert name here) hain.’ Every time she heard someone ‘flaunt’ their Hindi, she’d walk up to them and let loose a tirade, in flawless Hindi, starting with a 120 decibel ‘tujhko Hindi maloom hain?’ and it all went downhill after that.

Professors in college sometimes throw chalk pieces to attract the students’ attention. Thankfully, she didn’t throw too many of those at us. She preferred to chuck wooden scales. There was this one instance when some poor bas soul sitting on the bench behind mine got hit with one. We were all shaking our heads and expressing our deepest sympathy, when she called out “sorry, that one was meant for ganesh!”