A leap back in time - stories from my school days

Before I get to the main topic, the lady I referred to in my previous post came to work today in a beautiful dress for the first time!!! Alright, at least I provided some inspiration to cheer up the workplace a bit with some girly eye candy.

Now, coming to the topic of this post - I met my music group last night. One of the nice things about this group is we always end up talking about fun non-music related stuff (what do you expect when you put seven girls in a room?). And yesterday it was about - our school days. I had written this up a few months ago when I had taken time off from work and remembered it after this conversation. Thought I'd put it up here.

I went to an all girls’ school, in Secunderabad, India. It was a grey building – everything was grey, inside and out and it bore an uncanny resemblance to a jail. The school was run by a group of Roman Catholic nuns with an iron hand. The administrators tried very hard to instill discipline, piety, and moral values in us (we had a mandatory class called Moral Science every week). They also tried to make us well rounded by having classes such as S. U. P. W. (Socially useful productive work, dubbed by many of the girls as Socially Un-Productive Work), language classes (Sanskrit or Telugu) and sports (Sanskrit was almost extinct even in those days and most of it was taught in English).

One thing engraved in my memory is the dress code in school, a code that was stricter than that enforced by the Army. This code was particularly enforced during the so called sports period. Starting from your hair to your shoes, everything had to be just so, or else you could expect to participate in a barbecue – your own. For straying from the dress code implied spending an hour roasting under the merciless Secunderabad heat on bare knees watching other girls frolic. The most complicated aspect was the hair. The luckiest girls were the ones with very short hair for they did not have to bother about it at all. If you had hair that was between 12 and 15 inches in length, you were expected to tie it up in two pony tails, and God forbid if a single strand went astray. If your hair was between 15 and 20 inches, you were expected to wear two plaits with black ribbons to hold the ends. If your hair was over 20 inches long, you were expected to wear two plaits with one important condition: the plaits had to form a perfect U, and again God forbid if a single strand went astray.
Next was the uniform inspection. We wore a white shirt and a skort like pleated skirt in navy blue. The shirt had to be blindingly white. And (this is my pet peeve and always got me into trouble) everyone had to wear a tie. Yes, you heard right – a tie. Imagine hundreds of girls wearing ties in scorching 40 plus heat playing basketball, baseball etc. I still get shivers thinking about that thing. It was like a rope around my neck always threatening me – you do one thing wrong and you will be strangled.
Then the accessories: all the girls had to wear their house badge – no excuses for forgetting your badge. But the piece de resistance was the shoes. Shoes had to be polished white with liquid white polish. The tiniest speck of dirt resulted in barbecuing. There were some naive girls who put their enterprising skills to work and "polished" their shoes with chalk. Boy, did they get into trouble! The last thing that was inspected was nails (thankfully only finger nails). Thank God for teeth that could be put to good use when we forgot to trim our nails.

Despite its scary appearance the school was one of the most prestigious and popular schools in the city, particularly with the boys. It was the school where upper middle class and rich girls and wannabe fashionistas went. I loved going to school – it was my escape in to a world filled with exciting characters. I was surrounded by girls from vastly different backgrounds than my own – they spoke different languages, they ate different food, they had completely different lifestyles than my own. And some of them were extremely intelligent. I had this one friend who had pondered the concept of God and the origin of the Universe at the age of 11. We once had a conversation that went something like this:
P: I don’t believe that there is a God.
Me: Then how can you explain your existence?
P: My birth can be explained by science.
Me: (guessing where this was heading) OK, how do you explain the origin of all living species?
P: They came from dust.
Me: How did the dust come to being?
P: It just did.

I was somewhat unsure about whether or not I believed in God. My mother was moderately religious while my father was not. The closest I had come to divinity was when I watched the movie Ben-Hur. After this conversation, I felt a bit awed. How did living matter come from dust? And come to think of it, I had no idea how my birth could be explained by science. During this time, I went to a cousin’s wedding. During the train ride from Secunderabad to Madras, I had come up with a theory on how I could have got out of my mother’s tummy – doctor cuts it open and fishes me out. However, I was still very confused about how my cat had given birth without having visited a vet. As it happened, there were a couple of older boys at the wedding that I became friends with and one evening the conversation meandered to just this topic. I was introduced to the theory of the birds and the bees by teenage boys who were kind of amused at my innocence. I was mortified and spent the rest of the evening going to great lengths to avoid them.

More tales to follow - this time I mean it as I have already written them down.