Those unbelievable school days

Imagine a class having an average of 60 to 70 students and the teachers somehow remembering every name. Representation Pic

When you live as remotely as I do, many things about your past life feel like fragments from a dream. The systems are vastly different, as are the social norms, not to mention the languages. I wonder if I'll ever not experience moments of culture shock. For example, when you drop by someone's home, it is not a given that you will be offered anything to drink or eat. Only at our South Asian friends' homes is there always chai on offer, and sometimes freshly made pakodas. It isn't a lack of hospitality on the part of the locals here, it's just not necessarily a coded form of etiquette, unless you have specifically been invited. Cafes are really the meeting grounds for daily catching up, gossip exchanges or a game of cards. It's the ‘third place' for many, and since, in Italy, the price of a coffee is regulated, you never pay through your nose. It's possibly cheaper here than many cafes in Delhi or Mumbai.

There are no such things as school uniforms. Also, until kids are in primary school, they aren't even taught to write. Kindergarten is basically a playschool. The ‘Kita' - daycare for toddlers under three - looks amazing. There's a wait list because they are particular about one caretaker managing no more than five kids. There's a concept here of ‘Jahrgang' (pronounced ‘yaargang'). It refers to all the children born in a specific year who will be classmates until they are done with school. The 2022 Jahrgang, which is our child's group, has 24 kids in total. I think this shocked me most, because it wasn't until my final year in college that I ever sat in a classroom with fewer than 20 people. There was one year in school when there were 81 students in just my class. I went to Holy Cross High School in Kurla, where each standard had up to six classes. Imagine each class having an average of 60 to 70 students and the teachers somehow remembering all our names.

It boggles me, still.

Recently, my batch in school organised a reunion. We were known as the centennial batch, because we passed out the year our school turned 100 years old. I couldn't attend, but I saw photographs and felt astonished by how many of us there were. I couldn't remember everyone's names. I couldn't remember my immediate classmates. I had been elected head girl that year, and I was so busy organising extracurricular activities that when I got my SSC results, our principal, Fr. Adrian Fereira expressed surprise at how well I'd done considering I spent more time outside the classroom than inside. It was funny, because he was often the reason I not in class. He loved to encourage and enable us to do a range of outside-the-box activities and was always summoning me to his office to co-conspire with him on some project or the other. Thinking back to my school days, although there was a fair share of bad days, like when I failed Maths in Std VI, there were many incredulous days, like when my teachers saw in me potential, when they validated my talents. I felt so ‘seen', even though there were hundreds of us.

I saw glimpses of celebrity kids at an Ambani school and somehow this felt so removed from the school life I had known. I started thinking about how I never felt like our school and college life had ever been represented on screen or in books. Our immediate frame of reference pop-culture wise remains American school systems, whether public or private. I remember watching American sitcoms and serials as a kid and wondering what it meant to have a ‘locker' or wear what you wanted to school or have your own desk and chair. We sat three people on a bench and the benches were organised in rows. The teacher decided the order so that the shorter students sat in front and the taller ones at the back. Boys and girls sat together. We kept our bags under our desks, I think, or behind us, I don't remember. It always felt cramped and uncomfortable, but we never complained.

When I meet the mothers who grew up here, I feel frequently alienated, because they share intimacies on account of all the years they spent together. My memories feel more and more distant and dissonant from the world I currently inhabit. I imagine they will become stories I share with our child who might digest them with a touch of incredulity, the way I still do when my mother talks about growing up in Portugal-occupied Goa. I'm counting the days until I land in my home city (12), to be reunited with my childhood and adolescence and to pig out on everything quintessentially Mumbai.

Deliberating on the life and times of Everywoman, Rosalyn D'Mello is a reputable art critic and the author of A Handbook For My Lover. She tweets @RosaParx
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