SANTA TO THE 10 YO LIVING IN THE BOARDING SCHOOL
Ever since I remember, I’ve been living in a boarding school. I was small, or a little younger or older than your idea of a small kid, when I was sent out; my parents told me it was for my own good. I had looked up to them with those nut-brown eyes full of tears and had asked, “What good would it get me if I don’t get to live with you?” They never replied and I never got to know.
A dormitory with white walls and use-me-as-a-mirror clean white floors, bunk beds sequenced in lines, the same colour of bed sheets stretched on each mattress, kids dashing around yelling, shouting, doing things nobody knew why and, then, enters a fat-bellied man, one hand caring only for his moustache arch and a cane in the other which he continuously bangs on the floor to create echoes that would spread terror among the hostellers. Well, that’s at least how I was told that school boarding are. My siblings would make it even worse for me to accept that I was to spend the rest of my school life being a part of such disarray.Ever since I remember, I’ve been living in a boarding school. I was small, or a little younger or older than your idea of a small kid, when I was sent out; my parents told me it was for my own good. I had looked up to them with those nut-brown eyes full of tears and had asked, “What good would it get me if I don’t get to live with you?” They never replied and I never got to know.
A dormitory with white walls and use-me-as-a-mirror clean white floors, bunk beds sequenced in lines, the same colour of bed sheets stretched on each mattress, kids dashing around yelling, shouting, doing things nobody knew why and, then, enters a fat-bellied man, one hand caring only for his moustache arch and a cane in the other which he continuously bangs on the floor to create echoes that would spread terror among the hostellers. Well, that’s, for the least, how I was told that school boardings are. My siblings would make it even worse for me to accept that I was to spend the rest of my school life being a part of such disarray.
The phenomenon, however, was way too different.
I was allotted a room to share with five other girls; two of my age and three elders. Blank faces but smiling lips asking who I was and where I was from, all staring at me, while I curled my knees with my hands sitting on my bed (they told me that it was mine!) and was trying to absorb the situation. Nobody was aliened, nobody to eat me raw — but then the 10-year-old in me couldn’t hold back her tears anymore and began to cry. The girls began to look at each other while one of them told all that she would go and get the warden. I began to cry more; I didn’t want the banging cane to heat my tiny palm on the very first day of my expected beginning of disaster.
Enters a lady. I shut my eyes, with no wish to witness a round face lady with an awkwardly big mole right next to her nose, her curly black hairs messed around her elongated earring, which she probably would have been gifted by her son whose wife disliked her for being a ruthlessly rude and do-this-and-that-and-all-work mother in law. I felt somebody sit beside me and a hand coming near my left cheek. The following movement running in my head from the stories of hostels my siblings had earlier told me was a tight slap leaving the entire of my face to burn red with pain, but instead, soft fingers slid the hair off my face and put it carefully behind my ears. I began to cry more; I missed Mom. And in the next moment, I knew, I was sobbing wrapped in her arms and she moved her hands with love over my head tapping it while I slept.
I didn’t see her face that day.
Wearing the new crisp white uniform with a Delhi Public School logo on my shift’s pocket, I walked to the dining mess of our campus with my roommates. Maa had packed my bag neatly with her masters in ironing clothes as well as in doing all that she does. In the corner of a bench, a lady with open hair, probably because she had just bathed or because she liked to keep it free and loose, was sitting. Her eyes, the colour of amber, lined perfectly with the kajal adding wonders to her dusk brown skin.
My mirror reflecting the image of a hostel warden crashed into powders of glasses when I was told, “She’s our warden. Greet her when you meet.”
She was so beautiful.
My hostel life and I’m certain that almost everybody else’s, is white for the people coding the stories in black, or vice versa, but surely not similar.
Since then, I have known that woman to be playing with younger kids, laughing with their laughter; her hands mudded building their castle of sand. I’ve known her sitting with the teenage ones, listening to their words about hormonal issues and influences (anything goes bad in teenage, blame hormones: world’s rule) and advising them with the best of her life experiences; her hands holding theirs in every decision they make. I’ve never known what they talked but I, somehow, trust her advice to have worked each time. I’ve known her meeting our parents when they’d come visit us on month ends with a smile that won their hearts too; her hands joining with gesture to greet them. I’ve known her scolding us to eat our vegetables when she would notice us eating junk all day. And I’ve known her hands even feeding us and then laughing at the faces we make.
I’ve never seen but I know: She was the one who hid in the corridors and faked the sound of Santa’s sleigh riding in the sky; her hands decorating the accommodation with lights, bells, papers and ribbons and it was her hands, while she would hush slip into our rooms when all of us would be snoring in slumber (I know! People do it so bad. No wait, did you mean me? Duh, I don’t), placing gifts beside our pillows.
And to me, she is the best Santa Christmas could bring me those years.
While packing my bags now, having completed my schooling, with so many hostellers joined and befriended, and later parted to live the other, and hopefully a better, part of their lives, the wardens changing, I carefully put in my bags the pile of letters, cards and photographs from them, I now know what good did it get me, even if I didn’t get to live with my parents.
