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.