Seventeen years after leaving school, upon less than casual reflections, the answer to all these questions for me is YES. And all these events had their moorings in my illustrious school career, memorable for me - nightmarish to a whole lot of others at the receiving end. Like the five core elements of life, these five great events in my life in St. Lawrence went on to shape my being for the future in store.
Around the time my voice had somewhat healed to a modest tenor and the markings of a great beard was first noticed, my great friend Apu procured, on extended loan, a bicycle from his father. Notwithstanding the fact that while seated my feet were at least six inches off the ground, I tried my utmost at riding this contraption. Success came at last, the delicate art of balancing was mastered and from the large school ground I graduated on to the roads which run around the fields. The world was a race track and there I was racing down the middle with the trees whizzing past, without a care in the world. Then the unexpected happened. A tree to my left suddenly walked into the middle of the road. I crashed, got up and rode again. Two hundred yards and another tree felt like crossing the road. And came off the better placed. I crashed again and yet again. The habit has stuck.
The change from a small preparatory school next door to a high school with such a large outlay as St. Lawrence is a big one. A change of this magnitude leads to a lot of conflict in the mind of a child as well as giving rise to tonnes of thought, remarkable in innovativeness. But what good are ideas if not shared with a friend, nor used to score strategic advantages over your enemies or not laid down before the world for its perusal ? Our great epics, we are told were never written down but merely passed on by word of mouth. Thus what could have been recorded history went on to become hearsay evidence. We were going to rectify all that. So it was that with this great mission in our minds we set down to spread our hard attained enlightenment, beginning with fellow mortals in our alma mater. Writing equipment was procured in multiple colours and we chalked our way through the entire school. It started at the primary building, spread like wildfire to the entire school until it came to the steps of the school chapel when Fr. Prefect decided enough is enough. The best feather duster in the school appeared to perform a dual role, the feathers to clean away the chalk and the stick to absolve us of our sins as well as preventing further intellectual onslaughts.
A year passed amidst the most severe censorship of our talents. Meanwhile, familiarity with the surroundings of the school instead of breeding contempt seemed to make us grow in strength, stature and an ever increasing sense of physical power. Uncharitable though it may seem, our plight was that of a victim of Down's Syndrome, the immense shackle on mental freewheeling culminated in desperate physical acts of pedantic heroism. Towards the south eastern corner of the school premises where the present chapel stands, a dilapidated outhouse of the adjacent property laid bare before us immense challenges. Ghosts ten feet tall and breathing fire were our peaceful neighbours and we spent many a luncheon hour in their proximity. Problems arose however when lesser beings by the name of humans started frequenting our sacred shrine. We did not like it one bit. Rather than a desecration of our shrine of a thousand ghosts, we preferred to raise it to the ground. Ritual bombardments with brickbats stripped away the already broken door and windows and drove away the humans from the shrine, to our school itself and straight to the prefect’s room. If memory serves me right, the long march from the primary to the secondary building with the monitor’s badge carelessly stuck to shirt sleeve was more prolonged than the feather duster session that followed, twice now in as many years.
The inevitable fallout of this was the fool’s parade with the Fool’s Hat (Boka tupi) placed securely on the head which proclaimed numerous achievements in school, namely failing in exams, creating a ruckus, beating up enemies and participation in mass movements of a dubious nature. At the time with the hat on and roaming the corridors of the primary building I really felt foolish doing the rounds by myself without a companion, but after twenty five years I am more inclined to accept that the real fools were the spectators who were too afraid to join in.
We came of age with the liberation war in Bangladesh. A trench was dug at the farthest corner of the school, at the very place of our earlier ghostly adventures. We won the war for India and for Bangladesh from this very trench. Our able forces took turns on four days of the week (Fridays being set aside for more mundane matters such as studies) to neutralise and eventually to vanquish the aggressors. We did it with such finesse and finality that very soon there was no longer any need of having a trench at all. This sense of satisfaction has not left me till date.
Memories fade in time but there is definitely a place for them in the subconscious. It is from this subconscious that memories activate and to some extent regulate our thought process, going on to give the finishing touches to our characters. None of the five events I have described has been an end in itself but has rather induced physical boldness at times, thwarted unwarranted curiosity on other occasions, encouraged voluminous deliberations and may be even allowed me to just have fun in a number of situations, but my memory has always delivered to me the message in bold capitals that my school has shared with me these five big happenings which in turn have left big impressions on my curriculum vitae.