Take me back……take me back to my school days. Weren’t those days wonderful? My school was close by; I could walk up after hearing the first bell! However, I used to go early and my mother used to ask me, “Are you going to sweep the school?” Fortunately this trait still remains with me.
At school lessons were slow and easy paced. There was no tension, no cramming, not much home work, no competitive exams to aim at and lots of time for play. We had a school playground and a much larger one opposite our house. Games we played used to change seasonally. It was goli (marbles) for some time or eru-pambaram (wooden top spun with a string wound around) at other times. Running, catching and hiding were all time favourites. In higher classes, the games matured to football or cricket.
We had a variety of fruit bearing trees in our largish compound. There were mango, jackfruit, guava, sapota (chiku) and chambakka (rose apple) trees. Stinging orange-red ants used to infest these trees, giving hell to anyone trying to climb them. I could pluck mangoes from our terrace thus fooling the ants.
There was hardly any traffic on the roads. We had the widest road (70 feet road) in town in front of our house. All the cars were black in colour and probably, even life was in black and white.
Life is a one way street. There is no halting or going back. I can only dream of going back to those days. What the hell, I can at least dream!
