Fourteen

I can’t remember when I first started hating school. It was more of a gradual feeling that began to pervade me each day, less painful than heartbreak but hurting more than a stomach bug making me stare up at the ceiling each morning and wish for a few more hours of darkness to stave off getting up.

I invented my own little litmus test for deciding the value of getting out of bed each morning. If, while I stared up at the grey ceiling slowly being pierced by rays of gold, if I could think up one good reason to go to school that day, no matter how trivial or boring the reason , I would get up.

As a result of this method I often found myself trekking up that imposing hill whose sole purpose seemed to be disheartening me more than I was already. It seemed as though the percentage of decline in my spirits was directly proportional to the incline of the hill.

About halfway up was the hardest part; it was right before one of the other high schools in the area and around there the pavement would level off somewhat to give the poor pedestrian a breather. There was a huge tamarind tree there and as tamarind trees are notorious for the amount of leaves they drop, I would find the path here thinly blanketed with countless greenish and brownish tiny leaves that crackled slightly underfoot. It was here, at this brief interlude on my journey that I would lose my resolve almost entirely.

I think I was a bit like those leaves; just leading a seemingly pointless existence that was ruled by the whims of others who couldn’t care either way about my own will, just destined to be part of a cycle which had been going since long before my time.

One day in particular, I remember taking a taxi up the hill because it seemed like a good way to cut short my misgivings. I had pierced my ear that weekend because it had been my birthday, I think. I had had my mother write a letter to my teacher explaining that as soon as the hole was healed, it would be removed. It was the upper part of my ear and the cartilage would take longer to heal and would be more sensitive than if it were simply the lobes.

I promptly gave the letter to one of my teachers and explained my situation upon my arrival. She was taken aback because it was against school rules to have such a piercing. Fortunately she was not a mean teacher and merely told me to keep it covered lest another teacher took offense at it. This was reasonable I suppose because breaching rules was something prestige schools apparently strove diligently against.

I’d gone a week safely but was caught the following Tuesday by the Mrs Singh, the Dean of the Form Fives. She was a notoriously strict woman who loved giving out marks for the slightest infraction on the school rules.

Upon spotting my piercing, she immediately asked me to take it off. When I explained the situation, stating that the wound had not yet healed as well as the fact that I had signed permission from my mother she decided that she would discuss the matter with my teachers before coming to a verdict. I could tell she was displeased so I really didn’t hold out that much hope.

When the bell rang for recess that day, I headed towards the cafeteria with my friends. The race to get to the cafeteria in my school was indeed a gruesome one and at the start of the bell’s clanging girls would tumble out of their cages and rush en masse to the tiny ancient structure that was totally incapable of tending to us all during the half an hour excuse of a lunch period.

I was a master of the art of imperceptibly but firmly pushing my way through the sea of bodies overflowing from the tiny white booth. It was like a civilized version the City Gate rush for transportation. I was soon tended to by one of the cafeteria ladies all of whom the girls intimately addressed as “Aunty” despite a lack of familial relationship in most instances.

On my way back from the cafeteria, with the spoils of my battles clasped triumphantly in my hands, a group of Form Sixes passed by my friends and I. The Form Sixes were, to the lower forms, much like the occupants of Mount Olympus; they were a seemingly aimless bunch who gave off the impression of having no fixed occupation or schedule and were prone to wandering around the school for no apparent reason while occasionally lording over the rest of us with their rank. This group in particular was comprised of one of the handful of boys that were admitted to our school from our brother school and who – despite them usually being lacking in visual appeal – always seemed to manage a herd of giggling, friendly females upon entrance of the school gate. The rest of the group was mainly the aforementioned herd of females but one in particular immediately struck my attention.

She was, like her counterparts, giggling for no apparent reason and clutching one of the oversized books from the library which was a fashionable accessory that had the effect on others such that they assumed learning – or the pursuit of learning was an occupation of its holder. However it was not the book I cared about but rather her hair. Though conforming to the style of stylessness that was all the rage, her hair was sporting the brightest of streaks that no amount of genetic mutation could naturally account for.

Her hair had not one but three of these white-ish blonde snakes with flecks of green running through it. I stared at her out of the corner of my eyes curiously because while I had hidden my ear piercing she was nothing if not advertising her dyed hair that was equally frowned upon by our school.

As soon as they were out of earshot I quickly asked my friends if they knew who she was. They seemed shocked to know that I was unaware of her identity and informed me that she was, in fact Mrs Singh’s daughter.

This news stunned me as I thought she should clearly have seen her daughter’s hair and if not her then someone must have pointed it out to her before.

The next period after lunch was English Language, a subject which though I loved it, I was doomed to dislike because of the uninspiring and exasperating succession of teachers I’d had. The current one was fresh out of Teachers’ College and still had that ‘new’ smell to her though she tried to cover it with an aggressive attitude. I was on her blacklist because once, when she had been lecturing to us about not paying attention, I’d noticed that she had repeatedly been using the wrong tense of a verb over and over again. When I’d innocently questioned her about it and caused smothered eruptions from my peers, she’d calmly replied that it was immaterial. I found her statement to be a bit contradictory to her previous message but I had let it go as the bell had rung.

Now as she was going on about something or the other that would no doubt end in an exercise from the unexciting textbook that was severely outdated, there was a call at the door. It was Mrs Singh.

She asked that I be excused for a moment in the smiling way of one who knows she cannot be refused and I obediently met her outside the classroom.

Still smiling, she explained to me briefly that after discussions with the other teachers, it was decided that I had to remove my earring. While I hopelessly pled my reasons to her, she let me know that the decision was final.

“You see”, she explained in that gentle sympathetic voice, “if we let one student break the rules or if we make a rule just for one student then we’d have to make rules for every single student as everyone would want to do as they liked.”

Silly as it may seem but something inside me which had been cracking for the longest time finally broke. The illusion which had been cast over my eyes since childhood shattered and I saw that teachers were merely humans. I had once foolishly believed that they came of nobler stock than the rest of society and that the title ‘Teacher’ meant something beyond a name. Our school advocated the infallibility of teachers and I suppose I had at some point allowed myself to be swept along such a wave. I had thought it was merely my limited viewpoint that had caused my doubts and that I would one day come to understand. That it was my own inexperience that caused the fault whereas others already possessed such knowledge from long before like the way they knew the cues to kneel during mass or the way their knees never seemed to want to give out during one of the priest’s more long winded prayers that had a strong soporific effect on even the most agile mind.

I returned to my seat silently fighting back furious tears. It was not the punishment or even the punisher that hurt me because Mrs Singh, hypocrite though she was, was merely part of the system. A system that had existed long before I or even my parents had ever been conceived. Despite the best efforts to argue to the contrary I realized that the school was never built for the likes of my parents or me but rather the daughters of the plantation masters. Mrs Singh who curried favours in the form of her daughter’s breach of rules was only ever a good servant; the true masters belonged in the twenty per cent preferential admissions each year. They were the little white envelopes that got sent out to parents before each school event. The master was the stammering girl in class who could barely read above the third standard level but had somehow made into all her subjects of choice. For all their extolling of the virtues of Jesus, faith was not the real power in the school.

At fourteen I realized that it was not just the school that was flawed but the whole country. The masters had not changed much; the ruling class remained very much intact if one took the change to look at the board of directors for most businesses in the capital. Someone else was playing the pipe but the same person still called the tune.

That day I lost more than my respect for teachers, I suppose it was a loss of belief entirely. I felt exhausted if anything else. It was exhausting to imagine the years to come with nothing whatsoever. I wondered why fight at all? Why try? Why believe? Why care?

That evening as I left the school, I saw the Vice Principal warmly bidding farewell to Mrs Singh and her daughter who were also getting ready to depart. She then hurried over to greet two of the parents who had come to pick up their daughters. She did not greet the other parents. I found the whole damned thing amusing suddenly.

It is a harsh lesson to learn at fourteen but I suppose if it must be taught, these are the best years to learn them in. Teenage years are a time filled with frustration and confusion as one seriously begins to find oneself. It is a time when, though the horizon seems to be expanding rapidly, the world appears much too small still.

I look at myself now, this cynical, jaded being filled with mistrust and misgivings and then I see the same reflection on all those around me and I wonder when they learnt the way of the world. I also often wonder if I grew into the type of person my thirteen year old self could have ever imagined.