Those were the good old days, and admission procedures in schools were not remotely as nightmarish as they are now. My family superstitiously believed that I should not go to school before I was five years old. A heartrending accident had taken my sister’s life when she was a few days short of her fifth birthday. Only when the ominous period was over for me, therefore, did my parents consider exposing me to the perils of the school space. That was, however, in the middle of August, hardly a time for school admissions. Yet they could afford to be scornfully oblivious of registration, shortlists, admission tests and waiting lists. My aunt, who taught in an elite Delhi school, was confident of my admission there. Being childless, she had never availed of the perk of having her children educated for free in the school. She was senior to the then principal and had supposedly guided him through his teething troubles in the school. She had taught him how to walk an administrative tightrope between factional divides. Surely my admission could be taken for granted after all this. On the day following my fifth birthday, she took me by the hand and deposited me in the custody of a kindergarten teacher. Only then did she inform the principal that she had “admitted” her niece. There was nothing underhand in all this. She did it with the aplomb befitting one who was part of a child-friendly system that sustained certain innocent privileges and did not thrive on cut-throat competition. The principal, in his turn, meekly protested that admission was over for the year and that no seats were available. When she told him the poignant “reason” why she had not registered my name earlier, he wondered why she had not requested him before to reserve a seat for me. However, not being able to turn her down, he suggested that I attend class anyway for a year, after which I would automatically get enrolled in Class I. Till such time, my name would not be on the attendance register, and my parents would obviously also not have to pay fees. I did not exactly understand what was going on. I was happy to independently interact with a peer group outside the familial fortress, but it hurt my self-respect in a perplexing way not to hear my name announced during roll call. My parents endlessly narrated to everybody that I had started attending school although there were “no seats” in the current academic year. This was too much of a humiliation to take after being omitted in the attendance record. In my injured pride, accompanied by all the mustered anger that a five year old is capable of, I vehemently protested that there were chairs in my classroom, and that I did have a seat.
