FOR XAVIER’S

And then when I was still in the first standard,in 1970,I vividly remember,my school turned a hundred years old. There was a huge fete,they used to call them fetes in those days,not melas,and I think my entire close family visited,some 153 of them,to sample the school food from the various stalls.

I was in Class I B and my teacher was Nirmala D’Souza and I liked her a lot and seriously contemplated proposing marriage to her once I was older and more mature,possibly in December 1969 or maybe it was November.

Last month my school turned 140 years old. I went back for the fete. And to meet my friends from the Class of ’78. Walked through the iron gates into the proud old stone building.

Primary school on the left,lunch room,undoubtedly with the same stale smell of a million schoolboy lunches,on the right.

Walked in with a phalanx of friends,who’d stood shoulder to shoulder with me,through countless assemblies. They all looked the same,talked the same,used the same long forgotten gaalis,and remembered the same people like Jadya Babu and Patla Babu.

In fact,everybody was exactly the same as they had been 40 years ago. Except that everyone now wore long pants. Even as we walked in,the memories came rushing back,flitting happily around us like long forgotten ghosts. The adolescent crushes on pretty teachers affectionately called “Dishoom” (did our poor teachers ever know the nicknames we gave them?).

Playing “stone football” in times when no one had the money to buy a simple rubber ball,a thousand games played at the same time,beige uniforms mingling seamlessly with flying beige dust,stones flying everywhere,how did anyone know whose stone was which?

Or having celebratory pellet fights at the end of each year’s exams,pellets made of tightly folded paper catapulted by the simple means of an otherwise harmless rubber-band to sting an unsuspecting posterior.

Or having pole fights,which,if you have never had a pole fight,meant skinning up massive goal posts which the Fathers greased so that nobody would have pole fights,then dangling from the crossbar and kicking at some other idiot who had not had the good sense to clamber up some other greased pole.

We walked onto the tarred road at the back of the school,past Brother Navarro’s First Aid room,past the staff room.

Past pretty young girls,aliens in a boy’s school,ironically selling school memorabilia.

My school badge. Smaller than I remembered it,and with a modern stick-pin rather than the old fashioned safety-pin that I struggled with every morning.

Then into the massive school compound,squared off by stone buildings and stone benches. Now filled with grey haired schoolboys,chattering excitedly,just the same as they did during long recess.

Adi Godrej.

Deepak Parekh.

Even the Chief Minister,Ashok Chavan,incredibly also a Xavierite,he went up immeasurably in my esteem.

And the teachers: Raphael,D’Costa,Bianca Valladares,Alice.

And Father Bulchand,perhaps the first time I have seen him sitting down,now in a wheel chair. And as the evening wound down,the band played the old march-past song,and we hollered out our own not-so-secret version:

“Nelson,he had one big ball…

Churchill,he had two,but small…”

If you know the rest of the politically incorrect words,do sing joyously along.

Once more,for Xavier’s:“Nehru…”

(adipochas@yahoo.com)