That is the view from the balcony of my home early morning at 6.30 just after I get up. Yellow and orange flowers - all bright and beautiful - they seem to be mocking at the concrete grey of the buildings. I tried my best to capture the nature alone from my balcony itself - but the grey will not leave my lens!
On the road to my office, these yellow flowers keep following me. Reminds me my school days in hot dry Sivaganga. We used to have our annual examination in the month of March - sitting and sweating under these yellow flowered trees. I think many of us did not own pair of slippers - hence had to walk it up to school, avoiding the tar-road and keeping the tender feet on the muddy part of the road!
Once in school, even with exams starting in next 30 or 15 minutes or so, we used to collect these yellow flowers and make patterns right under the tree. The hot breeze that blows once in a while would wait for us to complete a complicated design and blow the flowers off. that was fun and frustrating... so we decided to sit around the flower covering the "outside " with our half / long skirts and continue the design. Fun days! Girls who would get a nice big zero in the exam, would come up with beautiful geometric patterns with flowers. No teacher noticed these designs nor encouraged us to think further.... it was all fun and fun only. Lots of creativity... like a mountain or forest river running wildly...towards ??? just for the joy of running !!!
The organge flowers tree used to give a kind of big fruit which had a huge nut inside. The petals taste little sour and we figured out that if we pluck the flower when it is really very young and eat the petal, it tastes very good. So our hunt used to be on for these tender ones. The discarded ones ( for being tasteless) used to land up in the flower-kolam.
There was a rich girl ( the only one who used to come by car to school) in our small place - she had an amazing talent to draw huge figurines on the soil with her toe. She had to generally wait for her driver to pick her up in the evenings - all others would have just walked ( literally ran away) from school, whereas this one used to stand drawing girl / boy / man / woman figures with her toe on the mud. I kind of used to feel shy to talk to her ( I think her richness was the block for me) but watch her toes drawing figures. She used to be really good. She never had interest with the flowers or colours. Her canvas was the mud in front of classrooms and her brush was her toe!
Come Inspection day or Independance day ( I remember how heated arguments were there for the correct spelling of independance - we did not have dictionary and internet was not even conceived then ) or Republic day or Teachers'day... The whole class used to be formed into multiple groups with the class leader ( most of the years I was the class leader, which in retrospective sounds very unfair to myself also ) allocating work to each group. Think of it now, there used to be no rebellion - each team would just do what was told - absolute obedience!
So, sweeping, wiping the floor and the black-board, windows and all sundry place in the class-room is job for one team. The real bonus for this team is the chance to write on the blackboard - the welcome message or wishes on the occasion etc. They will bring colour chock-pieces and make it very colourful. We used to think - more colour - more artistic - more happiness!!
Bringing drinking water in the earthern pot and stocking enough water for the whole class and distributing it in small tumblers in an orderly way without wasting the water is the job for the second team. Bonus for this team is the chance to drink additional glasses of water ( that too, out of turn - which no body can object, if it is done by the member of this team)!
Third and fourth team will prepare song and dance or a skit depending on the occasion. We used to really write songs - meaning, compose the music based on some latest filmy tune - but the lyrics used to be totally original lyrics written by a group of us - joint venture - in Tamil. I regret not having copy of all those beautiful songs that we wrote !! We never understood the value of the artistic work we were doing. We did things for the sheer joy of doing.
The dance steps would be choreographed by ourselves and the practice session will go on for a week - there used to be some small misunderstandings, arguments on the particular step or on the way of dancing ( like, how to move the neck or waist or some other part of the body!!)... but everything gets settled soon and there is so much joy in getting ready for the D day. The question of make-up and dress used to be a daunting one for all of us. Basically, all of us were from very middle class families and hence had hardly 3 or 4 sets of clothes. Still we used to figure out how to make each dance or a skit with the perfect costume! So, we used to choose only social theme - as the costume would be simple dhoti and shirt or a saree and blouse - in case we agree on some mythological or King/Queen skit, we used to make the swords, waist-belt, crown, armlets, anklets etc. - all with cardboard and paste them with shiny paper that we had collected through out the year from cigarette packets.
I remember the huge collection of cigarette packets we all collectively held as our precious treasure - we had come up with a lot of in-door games using them. The smell of tobacco used to be intoxicating. We will pretend that we donot like it - but we used to take the empty packet to the nose and enjoy a good round of breathing-in to take the smell in !!
If you are thinking that our class was unique this way - no - you should know that each and every class had similar style of functioning. So when the dance / skit / song session is put up to the chief guest - there will always be a healthy competition to see which one is really good. The good dancers, good singers, good script writers, good lyricists used to be noticed by the teachers and they will utilise their services for the annual programme.
My elder sister used to be a great story-script-writer and a good director, though she will never act herself. She will command from her seat and everyone else will simply obey her. My cousin is a good dancer, actor, singer. Another distant cousin was again a good actor. So these two used to be always paired as man and woman.
The madisars, pancha kachcham, regular saree, mythological looking saree, bharatnatyam costume - everything used to be "managed"by the set of these 3 girls using simple dhotis and sarees. Nothing was difficult for them. The person wearing it should be ready for few pin-pricks while on stage, that too while doing a particularly difficult lifting of a leg or an arm.... otherwise, the show used to go on with the pin-pricks, and nobody would ever know that the dancer is undergoing some 5 pricks for every movement......even blouses - for any size, used to come from the same source and the wearer has to manage wearing it and look appropriate!! Fun days... there was not a single paise spent on anything... only hours and hours of work and jokes and laughter.........
OK, coming back to those yellow flowers, yes, you brought back memory of Government Girls High School, Sivaganga. Fun filled days!
I hope I get to meet Vasantha, Subhadra, Meera, Lalitha M and Lalitha S, Ramani and all the other 25 to 30 girls in my batch! I miss you guys!!
