Chapter Six
My School Life
I was five when I started school. There I became friends with Kuruvana Pankajakshi, a neighbour and a classmate and we would walk to school together. Since, we were not old enough to wear ‘pavadas’ or skirts, our clothes for school consisted of an inner loin cloth covered with a poplin ‘mundu’ or waist cloth. I, the younger of the two, didn’t really know how to manage my ‘mundu’. Time and again, it would come loose and I’d be left standing, hands in the air, waiting for Pankajakshi to tie it for me.
Up until India’s independence, our school day would unfailingly start with a benediction in praise of our king, the Maharaja of Travancore, Sree Chithira Thirunal. Kerala in those days consisted of three separate provinces of Travancore, Kochi and Malabar. We lived in the Travancore province and so our school would start with the prayer ‘Vanji Bhumi’, Vanji being another name for Travancore. The spirited prayer would end with us all loudly crying out in unison, “Let the ruler of the land always be victorious and let him take away all the problems of the people”.
Reciting poems was one of our regular classroom activities. Two children at a time would be asked to stand and recite together. I would stubbornly refuse to be paired with anyone but Pankajakshi. If the teacher didn’t oblige me immediately, I would stand up, start snivelling, then crying and when questioned, I would insist on being partnered with my friend. I cried for everything back then and was labelled a ‘touch-me-not’ by my mother. In school, the teachers humoured me. Our reduced financial status in society notwithstanding, we were still privileged children and generally, teachers took great care to treat the children of the Warriem well. It helped of course, that the principal of the school had a soft corner for us.
From standard five onwards, I started attending the middle school for girls in Pallakori, Kottarakara, which was two and a half miles away. It was 1946, I was nine years old and we had to walk the distance twice daily. The journey to school was exciting mainly because I had Pankajakshi with me. I loved everything about going to school. It was the time of the freedom struggle. The atmosphere was charged, and the locals were all caught up in the fervour of the freedom movement. Grown-up girls from the neighbouring high school would organise small processions calling out victory to Mahatma Gandhi and our teachers would organize us into neat little rows to cheer them on in their mission. If they had small flags or other handouts, they would share them with us occasionally and we would participate in the activity as well. For years to come we children believed that it was our active participation in the freedom struggle on that small route in front of the school that won the country her independence in the following year.
Needless to say, the atmosphere was jubilant after Independence. For the first time ever, the traditional dance form of the Kerala ladies or the ‘kaikottikali’, was performed at school to the accompaniment of a Hindi song. I still remember the line calling out to Lord Krishna to help take our boat across the stream of life: “Ab tere siva kaun mera Krishna Kanhaiya, Bhagwan kinare laga de meri naiyya.” Of course, at that point Hindi was still an alien language to us and none of us knew what the words meant. Now that it was the new official language of the country, we learnt the alphabet in the first form of middle school. There were a lot of activities in school. I participated in sports and in different competitions and won a few prizes. One of my early memories was of me dressed in fancy dress as a farmer fully equipped with a spade and a cap singing a few lines and acting the part. Then there was the time I remember applying a naturally made red colour or ‘chayam’ on my face and dressing up in a white shirt and pyjama to present myself as a white-skinned man. The costume and the impassioned recitation of “When I was an Infant”, an English poem we had learned at school, won me the prize. I was happy because I knew it would delight my mother’s heart. She was always excited about the small prizes I took home.
In the third form of middle school there were three other girls who were also always in the spotlight. I remember them because they were extremely smart. One of them, Indira chose to devote time and energy to the study of Hindi and joined a private class to do this. She persuaded me to go along with her and thanks to her, I wrote two government exams while still in school. Much though I would have liked to continue, I couldn’t because I also had to help out at home. She persisted though and made great strides in her study of Hindi. She was the kind of girl who worked to get whatever she wanted and passed the ‘Visharadh’ or the final exams in the Hindi course. The next girl was Kamalamma. Fair, thin and very smart, she was good at studies and did very well for herself. The third was Vanajakshi. She was a strong, confident and quick-witted woman. In what was a traditional society, it was unusual to find these qualities in women. Unlike me, who came from a village, these girls lived near the school and were townsfolk. All of them secured first class in the Secondary School Certificate (SSC) or the tenth standard board examination and went on to acquire a college education. My formal education, however, stopped when I graduated from school.
When I was in middle school, I also learnt basic singing. There was an old teacher Achuthan Pillai and it was from him that we learnt many songs. I chose singing over sewing as a subject in school and it helped to lay a firm foundation of this art in me. What I really would have liked was to learn to play an instrument, which I did much later in life when I took up the veena, a string instrument used in classical Carnatic music. However, with neither the means nor a favourable environment when I was in school, I never voiced this desire. But after I graduated, I grabbed every opportunity that I could to sing. I would be present and available to sing at any local celebration. I would sing the prayer at every public gathering possible, to the point that I got called to sing for political parties when they had meetings in our village. I refused to limit myself by officially affiliating with any one political party. I preferred to practise their songs at home rather than going to rehearse at any party office, thus maintaining my neutrality. The love of music meant more to me than any political ideology, with the result that I stayed clear of politics and I was able to maintain harmonious relationships across different groups in the village. My guiding principles back then, and later in life continued to be ‘sukham, samadhanam’ and ‘shanthi’ or comfort, contentment and peace.