Days of Tic-Tac-Toe

 

We have all been counting these days, these dark ugly days, and praying that they get over soon. For adults like me, who fortunately has a vocation that falls in the ‘essential’ category, life has been more or less fine. But think of our kids, those bundles of energy , cocooned up for and endless time inside their homes and peering into their laptops and mobile phones, trying to catch on with the ‘online knowledge’, with the Indian Constitution, French Revolution, Newton’s laws, algebra , calculus and Pythagoras Theorem – and more, trying to grasp everything in the confines of the four walls. Extraordinary as these times are, I try to recollect my own days in school when the best way to block incoming calls when the teacher threatened to call the parents was to put the landline phone ’s receiver off the hook so that a constant ‘busy’ tone thwarted the teacher’s efforts.

In the last pages of our note books, we had an entire world of indoor games – ‘name-place-thing-animal’, ‘chor-police’, ‘FLAMES’, ‘XOX’(tic-tac-toe). And the mathematics class was spent mostly (by backbenchers like ‘you know who’) wondering how to use the divider in the geometry box or by savagely making uncountable stabbing dots on the pristine white eraser. While the front-benchers wrote copious notes when the History teacher explained in details about the Quit India Movement, many of us kept the yawns at bay by filling up the ‘o’, ‘p’, ‘d’, ‘b’, and similar letters in the textbook with our fountain pens.

On the personal front, my most feared class was the Art class. Having been unable to even draw a mango properly, I resorted to the safest option chosen by many of my generation (read ‘the 90s kids’), that is sticking to drawing the ‘scenery’ – the sun popping out in between the two hills with a blue river flowing down, and a hut and tree sitting pretty by the river-side! And yes, sometime during our discussion with the geniuses in the school bus on the way back home, we also got to know that if we sharpen the pencil and put the waste in hot water, it will become eraser after a few days; now it’s an altogether different matter that we did not get the desired product any time. In this context, I also recall another episode, and this is true ONLY for the 90s kids. Remember Ramar Pillai?  This gentleman claimed that he had prepared ‘herbal petrol’ from commonplace plants and herbs. While I was too eager to actually find out what herbs the man used to make petrol and the laboratory requirements for the same, I distinctly remember trying out preparing petrol at home by boiling leafy vegetables and leaves from the flower-garden with salt and lemon juice , albeit with not-so-good results. 

These days the school kids are swanky and practical. And I too regarded myself so when I was young. Thoroughly inquisitive and enterprising as I was, I remember collecting peacock feathers and trimming them to proper sizes and putting them inside my story books and textbooks – not to use them as elegant bookmarks, but rather I got to know from some legend that if I keep a peacock feather inside books, it will give birth to many more feathers! I did come across many such ‘senior’ legends and geniuses in school who filled me up with ‘intelligent’ garbage. One such information handed out was that only the black part of the black and white ‘Camlin’ eraser could erase ink. Due to this misinformation, I spent a good part of my school days using the white part of the eraser for erasing ink by first licking the white part. Today, after authenticating the fact myself, I know that both the white and black parts can erase ink.

And what did we do when the teacher was either late for her class or was absent? Yes, we spinned litchi-seeds attached to match-sticks, and we rotated out pens on the table (desk). Mimicking the teachers was a vocation reserved for the artistically talented ones. The more adventurous ones got busy smearing the teacher’s table with chalk dust so that when the teacher leaned on it while teaching, his trousers would get a clear chalky impression.

In the absence of proper extracurricular activities like abacus, piano classes, tennis, swimming, etc., free time was actually ‘free time’ for us. We went out to play seven-stones, kut-kut, ghariyal-paani, hetaali and balancing marble in spoons. Another favourite activity was sneaking into the kitchen when our mothers had their mandatory after-lunch siesta, and opening that alluring tin of Amulspray and putting spoonful of the heavenly milk powder hurriedly into our mouths. And savouring the ambrosia little by little by sucking the sticky mass in our hard palates – it was heaven!

And then there was this extra edge over others when you owned the ‘pen-pencil’. They came in two varieties; one, with extra slender graphite lids, and the other type which had multiple graphite tips which needed to be rotated when the previous one wore out. Losing a piece of such a tip was one of the worst nightmares that we had.

Munching on Poppins, Eclairs, tenga-morton, and proudly displaying the Phantom cigarettes on our lips, we had a very different childhood. I tell my kids and their friends, and they roll their eyes and they wear the same expression which we had reserved for our parents when they had told us stories about their childhood. The memory of the long drawn ‘Gooood morning ma’am’ in our classes remind me of the different air and the uplifting charm of my school days when there were no online classes or smart-tech tuitions. The loud shout of ‘stand in line properly’ from the PT teacher echoes in the corridors of my mind, and I realize that the most beautiful raindrops are perhaps those that cling to our eyes, bearing silent testimony to everything beautiful and fragile that still endures. And outside the calculus of real and imagined agendas, rests the days of the kids of my generation, the 90s kids, when life was just different, and where we had effortlessly and happily belonged.