The Foundation Stone

The banyan tree noticed him from afar as he walked towards the temple in the measured pace and calm of a man in his seventies, surprisingly slim and little else but the grey of his hair would even give away his age. The old banyan in the centre of the Bhavan’s campus, standing in the corner acknowledged his familiar presence with a sway of her crown, home to several egrets, herons and water birds that fished in the Bhavan’s pond in that campus, that seemed less green with every passing year. She counted her years not by the locks of hair she let down to support her age but by the number of times women wrapped its girth with a circumambulating thread around on the day of Vata Savitri on Jyeshtha Poornima each year praying for their husband’s longevity. The young girls returning to Pallonji Sadan late evenings from college, imagined the tree to be a haunt of ghosts. The campus then was greener and the banyan hosted many more species of birds than its now manicured look and hodgepodge architecture; held many more secrets in the folds of her green shrubbery of love, learning and laughter. 

The Street Classroom

In 2002-3 I had spent time trying to help make a street school with a friend Aruna Burte. This write up chronicles those days which surfacing often in my thoughts. Those children have all grownup and many have even left. But their laughter and mischief fills my heart.

Twenty pairs of intense, sharp, clear eyes set in frail and small bodies, peering into your face trying to listen with concentration interrupted by restlessness and distraction can be unnerving for even a seasoned teacher not just an ill prepared one like me.  It was 2002 and I was a novice teacher unnerved with my little classroom impossibly filled with raucous children hell bent on doing anything but sit steady and listen.  But it was not that their restlessness was driven by ill intent, they seem animated by spirits stronger than their frail bodies could handle. But then those faces were in their own way remarkably diverse in colour and character and told me tales that I had never heard. Their little bodies were clothed with colours of playing in the dirt, some torn, few mended, few slipping to reveal tender limbs or shy bottoms, faces smeared with dust and tears or of the dried ice cream around chin and cheek, tousled hair, one pigtail with a missing ribbon, another with a broken clasp, one with sores on his feet, one who had waded in the gutter, many with a wide grin in an endless inventiveness of childhood pranks. Their satchels were as diverse as themselves and the state of their books and notes made me feel faint. The satchels’ real treasures were broken bits of coloured glass, some forgotten half eaten fruit, a feather, a drawing crumpled between books, chocolate wrappers, matchboxes, empty cigarette boxes, felt pens with missing caps, pencils with chewed ends, a magnet etc. They would give a sweet smile that would make one swoon at its innocence and resume their pranks of pulling a girl’s pigtail, or passing another’s pencil box across the room, or eating up someone’s tiffin box. I was helpless and crestfallen not knowing how to handle my little class.