Fly on the wall

If I were asked to recount my school years, I will draw blanks… Of course I remember the school building (a white imposition over the serpentine lanes of Sealdah) … at least I think I do, but the problem that is they are all enmeshed in a hopeless little blob of a memory… so much so that I cant distinguish one from the other … the classrooms, classmates, teachers, tiffin breaks… the classroom must have been like any other … rows of window on the left, opening to the chaos of Sealdah’s Kolay market; in front, the weathered, white, blackboard, on which the teacher’s weary hand probably scribbled words they wanted to emphasise, their fingers covered in chalk dust… the teacher’s desk and chair on a foot-high platform… the walls must have been oilpainted in an antiseptic shade of green, devoid of any tenderness and comfort… there must have been a forgotten cupboard at a corner, full of books from previous years and coloured chalks which were never used (except for teachers’ day when the class captain would carefully calligraph a special message for the teachers)… my class must have been a microcosm of the world, populated with boys and girls waiting to grow up to be (hopefully) responsible, successful, future citizens … maybe they are important people now and I hear about them every now and then, maybe I don’t… the thing is, as much as I want to, I can’t distinguish any particular aspect of their personalities… Was Soumya‘s apparent calmness an act to hide his insecurities or was he really the Buddha, as everyone referred him to? Was Paromita, the pretty, shy girl with bangs, any different from other pretty girls with bangs in my class?

Oily, plastic wrapped tiffin boxes… scab-covered knees… teachers with vulgar, lipstick-smudged lips (I know I shouldn’t caricaturise them, but what to do?) … strains of a forgotten school song… early morning traffic on the Sealdah flyover… that’s all I remember of my schooldays… that’s all I want to forget…