Dodging Eating (Junior School Part 1)

My school began with Nursery. I was put to Nursery A, in Ms Nalini's class. Though as a child I found it difficult to pronounce her name, and never quite got to doing it right, she supposedly made everything easy for me and my classmates. My parents still claim that she's the best I could've got, and brought out the best in me. They fondly remember all the action songs she taught me, that I used to perform at home.

A line that has remained in my memory from my earliest years of school is 'Nursery babies go to class.' Owing to the said nursery babies leaving school earlier than the rest of the school, they also had their recess just before the rest of the school. They were let free to roam in the small section of the playground near the basketball court where there was a selection of swings installed into a sandy pit.

Those colourful swing sets, which were never enough to satiate a class's appetite for swinging, were the point of attack as soon as the recess bell rang; the tiffin box was not. But when the bell rang for the second recess and the building poured out a horde of Didis, the nursery babies were pelted with 'nursery babies go to class' accompanied with pointed index fingers. As a nursery baby, I always longed to get out of the receiving end of these orders, and took great pride in delivering the same to my juniors, when I graduated to Kindergarten.

I was not a child interested in eating. My parents had a hard time trying to devise ways and means to ingest nutrition into my body. The tiffin box was the greatest burden I had to carry to school and the object of inspection the moment I got home: a moment filled with dread for me - will it be empty? I was never sure, because I was never the one who ate my tiffin. But when, with a smile on seeing my empty tiffin Amma would ask if I ate it all, I knew what the correct answer was, and gave it.

But this peaceful arrangement got disrupted when Maria and Mom came home.

The year I joined, the school was celebrating its silver jubilee, and there was to be a big celebratory event at the Talkatora Indoor Stadium. Every student of every class was to participate in dance or song. Nursery class was presenting a couples' dance. Owing to my short hair I was given the role of a boy. I don't remember what the song or the dance was. The costume included a bright red cardboard apple hanging from the neck by a silver ribbon, a plastic fork and knife in either hand, and a straw hat.

The only remnants of that dance are two photos. One was taken in full costume at the balcony of our RK Puram house, where Varghese Uncle happened to be visiting us with his camera. This picture was enlarged and framed, and currently rests on the unused pelmet of my room's door. The other picture was taken by the school photographer while the dance was in progress. Of the couple only the girl-child's face is visible; only the back of the head is visible of the child who played the boy. This back of the head looked like mine, and the nursery-me felt that the girl with long hair was my partner in the dance. This is how the photograph ended up in our album from the photographer's stack of produce displayed at school for sale. I still don't know if the child with her back to the camera is me.

Maria and Mom came home on one of the days we had stage practice for the final event. Maria was a very good friend in Nursery. She helped me out of trouble every afternoon. While the school got over at 1.40 for the rest of the school, the nursery children were let off at 12.30. When we waited, squatting on the reception floor, for our parents to come pick us up, I would reopen my tiffin box to finish off the remainder of my efforts of the recess: which was the entirety of the tiffin, maybe a nibble or two less. This is where Maria came in: she would finish up my tiffin in a few gobbles.

This probably happened for the first time when I'd taken bread-jam and omelette for tiffin. My parents, under the impression that they've finally determined what I liked to eat, started sending me bread-jam and omelette for tiffin everyday. And everyday, without fail, Maria would come to sit next to me on the reception floor, and promptly finish my tiffin, making my parents very very happy.

Pappa had come to pick me up from the practice at the stadium on the Bajaj Super FE. He saw Maria and Mom waiting for a bus, and offered them a lift, after tea at our place. They agreed and came home. My parents were both surprised and in admiration of the way Maria had grown. She was almost a foot taller, and must have weighed twice as much as me. Seeing an apple on the table, she asked my mother, "Aunty me ye khalun?" My mother assented, slightly envious of her appetite, because her own daughter had none.

Maria's Mom first praised her appetite, and then raised the curtain on our act: "Everyday after coming home she (Maria) tells me that I ate her (mine) egg today." My parents were crestfallen, I was terrified. Surprisingly, I didn't get a scolding. I was merely told to stay away from Maria, and to try and eat my tiffin myself.