Migration

Long ago, I lived in an old house surrounded by periwinkle bushes. A river flowed near by. We reared chickens and harvested eggs. Summer storms brought on a surfeit of mangoes. Then mother decided we needed better education. 

So we loaded every piece of furniture we owned in a minitruck and moved many many kilometres away. I still remember sighting the truck on top of the Mahanadi bridge, all our stuff covered precariously with a tarp behind. That was some summer day in the mid nineties.

By the time we reached our new home, the clouds had burst open. Ours was a two bedroom flat on the ground floor with a barren front porch. The soil looked like nothing would ever grow on it. I missed the periwinkle and the mangoes and the tall hibiscus trees that flowered in hundreds.

But soon I began to belong to the new place. I was so young and malleable. I joined a new school. I was about eight or nine. It wasn't the posh little montessori my little brother went to where they were taught vegetable painting with lady-fingers. 

I went to a bridge school. A school that would help me bridge the transfer from my older school in the village to the new english medium school in the city. The main motive behind the migration afterall was better education. 

The school I went to was nearby. I remember it being really tiny. Classrooms were as cramped as bedrooms and benches were pushed against one another. The walls has holes. I made a few friends. Somehow I never missed my old school from the village. Perhaps there was nothing to miss about it. Except a cartoon I had painted, framed and gifted to the principal before leaving. The principal was elated and he hung it on his wall. I longed to go back to solely procure that painting.

But the new tiny bridge school grew on me. It finished sometime in the afternoon and I always came home and ate lunch. One day it rained quite heavily and a friend of mine was stranded in school as nobody came to pick her up. I swooped in and suggested she come to my house.

Oddly, that day mother was at work and father was home. My little brother recited the rhymes he had been taught that day. My friend and I were both treated like guests in my own house. Father served us platters of fryums. Garnished and all. Glasses of fanta. And a plate full of boiled eggs, sliced into halves and sprinkled with pepper and salt. 

There were like half a dozen eggs on that plate. I had absolutely never felt that pampered. Eggs were special food for some reason. You always had one at a time. My friend was flabbergasted and decided to stop by often.

She never came again. I changed schools and joined where my brother went. On the first English test, I had scored 9 on 25. After years of crippling inferiority complex, I could barely adhere to that school. Somehow I always felt as if I was being pushed over some kind of edge. Never felt at home or safe anywhere for a long time that followed.

Failing

When I was about thirteen, a girl from the class above mine, flunked and came to sit in the bench behind me. She shared the bench with another girl who had flunked along with her. The teacher had made them sit together so that they could share their shame as well. But they didn't get along well at all. Almost immediately I started becoming friends with her. There was this innane frankness about her. And happiness. She was always giggling, chatting, laughing. Even as a kid that young, I remember being sad, afraid, angry. So our opposites attracted, perhaps.

She used to get idlis and curried peas in her lunch box. Everyday we began sharing lunch. We went to the water filter together to fill our bottles. We sat with each other in PT class. We talked, almost constantly. I had made a new friend. 

I used to be good at studies, I was almost about topping the class then. So it was an odd match. Even when my friend was repeating my class, she kept scoring badly in tests. Not that it hampered her joy. There was this certain effervescence about her that was inerasable. 

Since she was the weakest in math, her dad found her a tuition teacher who came to her house two days a week. I joined for the class too, along with a few other kids from the neighborhood. I now think I went solely because one of the senior boys was a neighbour of hers, and he I had a pretty bad crush on. But that's another story.

Our math teacher was excellent. He totally was a game changer for me because he made me like math. He caught me sleeping with my eyes open a few times and made fun of me adorably. But with my friend, he was more strict because he had promised her father he wouldn't let her fail again.

Her father was a businessman. Their apartment was big and flashy. My friend wore fancy clothes and was dropped off at school in a gigantic car. Often after the tuition I would stay back at her house and watch TV or just chat. And be treated with delicacies.

I told her everything that was on my mind. But she hardly ever shared anything. I imagined she had nothing going on in her head. So I let it be that way. Soon we passed out of school and parted ways. We wouldn't see each other for a long time. Because we had nothing in common anymore.

I started the gruelling journey of preparing for college entrance examinations. She casually meandered through 10+2 in a different school. I heard from somebody that she burnt her hands when a pan of hot maggi titled and fell off the stove. I didn't call her then, because I was just being me. Somehow that would be the last memory of her I would keep.

We weren't even friends on facebook. Wonder how that happened.

Then one day, when I was about eighteen or so, I heard she fell in love and eloped. With an older guy. That sounded so chain-breakingly liberating at that point in time, to me. I didn't even have a boyfriend. I was just fat and studious. 

More years went by, life really dumbed me down. That happens. A person I worked with invited me to his kid's first birthday. I happily obliged. At that party, I was lounging with a plate full of buffet Chinese food, when I saw a beautiful ten year old girl running around in a princess frock. Her mother loudly warned her to be more careful. It was my effervescent friend from school.

I was besides myself with joy to see her. She looked exactly the same except chubbier. Her daughter was only a younger version of her. She held a little baby boy in her arms. Her husband was a relative of my colleague's. We talked even though we didn't have much to talk about. Even though there was nothing to say, there was so much. I welled up inside. And yet, she was just smiling, giggling, like not a day had passed and she would pop open her lunch box and idlis would emerge. 

Safety-pin

I don't know how much a sense of shame men possess, in the mundane coming and going of things. Women for one, average day-to-day women are built to be ashamed. A hint of unintentional cleavage would crumple her. So I didn't know about you. 

Although sometimes when you would walk up to me and say hi, and chat while fiddling with your wedding ring, I would notice, in the folds of your shirt, a bit of your chest visible between buttons. Suddenly being conscious of it, I would look away. You wouldn't even know why I did what I did, finish our terse chat and walk away.

So, the other day, when you walked up to me, like a little boy, that you sometimes are and asked. In a nimble voice. If I had a safety-pin. Something had ripped your buttons open. You were holding your shirt together with your fingers. 

A trifle taken aback, I didn't know whether to stare at your face or your buttons. I involuntartily fished out my hand bag and started rummaging through all the pouches.

Simultaneously regretting that why being a woman I wouldn't keep basic stuff like a safety pin or a clip or a rubber band handy. Some women I have come across are so sorted, they carry everything from a snack of salted almonds to headache pills to scarves and god knows what not. And here I am, struggling to find a mere safety-pin.

You patiently waited through my dramatic search. I looked at you hopeless. I didn't have a safety-pin in my bag. You half smiled, perhaps and began walking away, still clutching your shirt together.

I asked someone else. She had one and fished it out immediately. I borrowed it from her for you. Although I didn't say it to her in as many words. And walked to you and handed it over. You grinned. This time, totally.

And right in front of me pinned your shirt right back. I didn't know where to look anymore. So I ingulged myself and inhaled that vision.