Following my tenth-standard exams, I went back to my grandmother’s for the summer break like I did every year. Here each day passed by painfully slowly, one long dosa-filled lunch stretching out into a chai-filled evening as I was dragged from one distant relative to the next. These relatives always spoke to me about how brave and handsome my father had been, and how beautiful and fashionable my mother, and told me anecdotes about my parents which I had heard so many times before.
“Your father was such a strong man, who served the country in many dangerous zones.” It seemed to me like my father would have been a perfect fit for Residency School, much more than I. My mother, they said, looked just like an actress and that she was the apple of my father’s eye. I couldn’t imagine how I, of all people, could be the son of such a lady.
Earlier, these relatives had seemed kind and sweet, and their stories interesting, but now they just seemed boring and their stories, repetitive.
I also began noticing how different I was from any of them. I dressed differently from my cousins or young boys, always tucking in my shirts, never leaving my house without a collared shirt or with dirty shoes; I ate differently too, never using my fingers even with rotis and rice, because it was not allowed at our school.
The most noticeable thing though was the way I spoke. My English and even Hindi was distinctly different from everyone around me. All of my cousins spoke in what the junior school matrons called pidgin English, rapping us on the knuckles if we even used one word. As for my grandmother, she began sounding more and more like the administrative staff at school.
There were other discoveries too. I had always thought all schools were like Residency School, but I began realising that the school I went to wasn’t a normal sort of school. I remember my grandmother telling a distant aunt that I was a student of Residency School; she dropped her samosa and her eyes became as round as a tea cup.
I began noticing more and more how people treated me differently when they found out that I went to Residency School and that too on a scholarship – my grandmother always mentioned this fact – and also my stellar marks, as if she were the one responsible for all of it. They asked me annoying questions. Residency School had featured in a few films and they asked me, star-struck, if that was how the school really looked. They made me speak to their children, who usually did not have an iota of interest and then they always made me promise to tutor them to pass the entrance exam of the school. I usually took one look at these dull-eyed children, thought of my muscle-head tutees and immediately missed Residency School, even the nerve-wracking times of the board exams.
Looking back, I realise I was coming to understand for the first time that not only was I different, but that in some way I was privileged, which was the strangest thing for me to digest because I had never felt like this, not once in my life. This truth became further more evident when I noticed the other schools in town, the untidy uniforms, the dried-up lawns, and the buildings, smaller than our smallest junior school boarding house.
Why were we different?
It wasn’t that the children who came to Residency School were that rich, many were sons and daughters of erstwhile maharajahs who had lost much of their fortune over the years, and were studying on subsidized fees. But where they came from, they were important, and they brought that importance to the school. It wasn’t anything blatant; we all wore the same shoes, socks and even underwear, but it was the way they walked, the way they wielded their bats, the way they flipped their hair. It was privilege from beginning to end, and this is the culture I soaked up like a sponge without even realizing it. It was also this privilege that now made me realize how banal everyone I came across in my grandmother’s town was.
As the days went by in this small dreary place, with nothing to look forward to at all, I realized what an integral part of me Riya had become. She was the first thing that I thought of when I woke up, the last thing that I thought of when I fell asleep, she was always there somewhere in my thoughts and now being away from her, it caused me almost physical pain. It was the strangest thing I had experienced. Thinking about the fact that I had 73 days, 1,752 hours and 105,120 minutes before I could see her again, my heart would swell and tremble and lurch, leaving behind pain worse than anything in my leg.
When this heartache of mine was especially bad, I tried to sit down to write a letter to her, but then when I held my pen, no words came to me and I couldn’t think of anything to write to her that wouldn’t be really dumb. Plus, I knew that she wouldn’t want to read anything beyond two to three lines.
Thinking about her so much, Residency School became to me a fantasy land; a verdant world of sparkling jade fields and its ruby red track with Riya like a vision loping around; the grand marble building with its sculpted dome, even my odiferous, noisy dorm seemed to be some sort of haven.
Earlier I felt that being here, being there, it was all the same, but for the first time I felt that Residency School was more my home than anywhere else and I wished very, very badly that I could be there.
After a while, I simply couldn’t stand it anymore and I feared that if I had to stay at my grandmother’s for any longer, I would end up like my cousins – eating noisily, dressing untidily and watching pointless shows on TV. So I took the drastic step of writing fervent letters to the school saying that I had to come back to campus to study and prepare for engineering entrance exams. The authorities agreed to let me return – only because a student getting into IIT would be as good for them as it would for me – and twenty-one days after I had arrived, I departed from my grandmother’s home and came back to my own. Yes: after ten years, Residency School had finally become my home.
Excerpted with permission from Nikhil and Riya, Ira Trivedi, HarperCollins India.