Chronicles of an Indian school

The ability that makes your cheeks red.

I grew up in the city of Lucknow, situated in the Gangetic plains of the northern parts of India. As a kid, I went to this grade school, which was a private school, yet I don’t know why, named as a Public school. Perhaps they wanted to look as a public school. Their tuition fee was cheap, maybe that could have been a reason. But, surely they had some good teachers.

Teachers who taught well, and disciplined kids even better.

It was my first day at school after I have graduated from Grade-5. Grade-1 to 5 was a primary school. So, once, you graduate from a primary school, and move on to Grade-6, you would find totally new teachers. Strangers who haven’t taught you before; whom you would be scared to meet, since your peers from senior grades have already told you how ruthless they were.

I remember that funny feeling inside my stomach when I left my home that very first day. I didn’t want to go to school. It was scary. But, I had no other options. So, as an eleven-year-old kid, I sucked it up, not that I knew what it meant to do that at that age, and rode my bicycle to my school.

I used to have an inspirational wallpaper on my computer’s desktop sometime ago. It said, “Sometimes the fear won’t go away, and you will have to do it afraid.” Now, I realize why it has resonated with me for all these years.

I don’t remember a lot from what happened throughout the day. It seems everything was new, and it went well, or as expected. But, I do remember some glimpses of my Hindi teacher. She seemed like a sweet person, and was polite in her speech. But, she had this weird superpower of making people’s, mainly 11–12 years old kid’s cheeks red. And this is not by using any sorts of color, of course. More bewildering is the fact that she was proud about it.

We were supposed to have some kind of “pin-drop silence” which I still haven’t figured out why the teachers used to say a lot. It’s not that they were doing any scientific experiments, which would be disturbed by high decibel levels of sounds that talking kids make. I wonder if they say the same these days.

I still remember that part of the day. Perhaps, it was a summer afternoon. Our Hindi teacher had just met us. And…

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Tameera Corporal is a professional website designer, graphics creator, business administration trainer, and published author. She loves to write code, articles, and books and is a lifetime…