THE YOUNG, OLD GIRL

Luckily, the quiet does not stretch too long. “How much did you get in your boards?”, I catch a snatch of conversation as I head to the principal’s office. Jyotsana Brar, the current principal, came to WGHS after I left school, but it doesn’t feel like I am meeting her for the first time. Mrs Brar quickly appoints Saanya Gupta, the Woodpecker House vice-captain, as my guide and friend for the day. I had never thought I would need someone to show me around school. “You may find yourself lost. A lot has changed here,” was Mrs Brar’s advice. It has.

The school is one big integrated unit now, unlike 10 years ago when it was a collection of little buildings sprawled around. The juniors lived in No 17, the seniors in No 12 and I spent many evenings arguing with the guard to let me to walk to No 6, my dormitory, just to get that out-of-school feeling for five minutes.

Saanya is joined by her friends Meher Kairon, Isshrat Shergill and Fajr Dar. Now I have a group to call my own. The feeling of unease slips a little. Isshrat is holding a copy of Gregory David Roberts’s Shantaram. “Have you guys read the latest Harry Potter?” I think up the first popular name that comes to me. I get a well-synchronized “YEAH” in reply. Then I am grilled about my subjects as I near the Tadpole, the new tuckshop. Welham never allowed girls to get any food from outside. No chips, biscuits or any snacks. For all these important evils, we depended on the school tuckshop.

The Tadpole is a far better version of what we had. They even get chocolates.
In school, I was an Artsee like so many Welhamites today. “People usually ask if we are in the Commerce or Science stream. They don’t consider Arts as a choice but at Welham, Arts is the strong stream. We are encouraged to take the choice of subjects we want, be it history, political science, psychology or maths. The Artsees are the pure bloods here,” declares Meher. “And what are we, half-bloods?” retorts her Commercee friend.

The conversation drifts to life in school. “You guys had it so much easier. Everything is so disciplined now. There is hardly any freedom and we are so often told to keep the noise down,” complains Fajr as we pass a ‘Control Noise Pollution’ poster.

But isn’t discipline good? Shraddha Sinha, a SC, or what is a Class 12 student in the Welhamite dialect, tells me, “Discipline is good, but we are constantly under control. We are not allowed to access the Internet anywhere in the school. We can’t have a mobile phone or even an iPod.”

That isn’t really too unreasonable a stricture, I think to myself. But at dinnertime, I realise what makes Fajr chafe. Noise during meals was always discouraged but now it is forbidden. As I enter the dining hall, I find most girls leaving their meal and trooping out as the house captain looks on implacably. “We were making too much noise, so we have to go out and return,” says one of the girls sheepishly.

That makes me rewind to a conversation I had with well-known columnist and commentator Madhu (Puri) Trehan, who joined Welham in 1959. “The first time I walked past the iron gate I saw the unthinkable. A group of girls had locked their geography teacher inside a car and were pushing it out of the school. I knew immediately that I was going to love this ‘wild place’”.

For Trehan, Welham meant “the madhouse moments.” For many others, the school, set up by two English women, H. S. Oliphant and Grace Mary Linnell, remains an inspiration. “It was a wonderful experience, almost magical,” I recall Brinda (Das) Karat telling me. Karat, who passed out of Welham in 1962 and is a CPI(M) Politburo member now, still remembers founder-principal Grace Mary Linnell: “Miss Linnell taught us the importance of reading, forming an independent opinion and to remain completely secular in outlook. That was the essence of Welham. And these ideas have remained with me.”

I remember the school for all the illegal midnight feasts (MNFs) and lazy summer afternoons on the prayer platform or the peacock throne, the concrete bench with a tiny peacock painted on it near the prayer platform. Expectantly, I look towards the bench. But it’s empty. The new princesses have forsaken it for the moment as they rush around preparing for the Founders’ Day celebrations. The bright red hibiscus shrubs that hid the throne from the prying eyes of the teachers too are gone.
School has made many such small and big changes to ensure a more organised way of life. There is a separate room for each extra-curricular activity.

At the new basketball court, the dance practice for the Founders’ Day is on. Vinod Vanchani, who was also our basketball coach, had proudly told me earlier that the new court has the same flooring used at the Olympics. I fall back to peer at the turf. Later, while looking for Saanya and her friends, I meet Anjali Srikanth and Subia Ahmad. Anjali shows me the dress she is holding in her hand. All set to be a fashion designer, the 15-year-old has already got herself a portfolio.

Subia joined school in Pre SCs (Class 11) because she wanted to study history and her career councillor told her that Welham has the best faculty for the subject. She agrees but adds: “Beyond history too, Welham is the best.” Subia’s pride is infectious. And the girls around us scream a big, loud Yes (I join in too).

It amazes me to find so many girls at school with a career plan in place. School captain Amanat Thind tells me she has decided to study in the US after Welham and that she has already taken her SAT and TOEFL. I find many girls poring over SAT books around the campus. “America offers a wider variety of subjects ,” Amanat tells me. “You can do theatre studies and law at the same time there. There are so many prospects,” Isshrat had also told me. These girls know how to dream big.

By now, I am impatient to see the dorms. As I cross a small gate and head towards what was for me No 6, I see a car approaching. But even before I can cross the road, a guard appears out of nowhere. “Ruk jaiye babyji,” he orders, standing before me, arms spread out in protection. I have a lump in my throat and I fight back the tears. As an Exie, I might not accept the new, changed school, but Welham never stopped caring and protecting its little ‘Babies’, even when they become ‘Old Girls’.

I finally catch up with Meher and Isshrat at dinner. I am told that the menu has been completely revised. There is pizza, pastries, cheese sandwiches, keema cutlets and a lot of sinful cheese. In our rickety dining hall with wooden benches, we had only dreamt of such delights. But in the smart white-chaired, soundproof one, the girls gorge on the goodies, with an eye on the calories.

At the Bulbuls’ senior dorm, the ‘now versus then’ debate flares again—about how we had more fun and they don’t, how we had MNFs and they don’t, how we had six socials and they don’t and how we broke so many rules and they can’t as they are in the “most disciplined school in the country.”
But then the fun actually lies in breaking the unbroken rules, not in the ones that have been tried already. And students, well, they always have their way. Thankfully that hasn’t changed.