Fine the machine must have ground because the first proper school I went to was St Mary’s Academy, Meerut. I was seven and I was admitted to class 3 in the middle of the year. That this was on my mother’s insistence I know because the class teacher looked on me sceptically for weeks and even smiled sarcastically. Like home-schooled children, there were many things I did not know, subjects I had never encountered, and interpersonal etiquette I was unfamiliar with. And of course I was too young for the class and so habituated to a solitary existence that I was struck dumb at being there. My mother continued to work with me at home in a parallel school. She went over everything that was taught and made sure I had it down pat. She wrote out the questions and answers that were my homework and I copied them conscientiously. Then she made me memorise them for good measure.
It worked perfectly. I stood first in class. I became the darling of teachers. I got a double promotion. I never saw the face of class 4 and went straight to class 5 at the tender age of eight. The only thing I remember about those earliest two years is the feel of books and copies, the sweet touch of well kept paper, my attaché case, my desk in school, my exams returned with full marks, my ready response to questions no one else could get, and the feeling of well being all this produced.
By the end of class 5 I had become hooked to topping and success. That this was my mother’s project was evidenced by the note for posterity left by my teacher in my class 3 marksheet, “Congratulations! Nita has come first—just as you said!”
Meerut was an education, too. It had a Nauchandi fair that seemed wild and exciting. It had other officers’ children to occasionally play with. We had two Alsatians, Blackie and Kitty, who could be made to race madly in the back lawn. We had a cook and personal servant called Shankar. He introduced subtle traces of “the real India” into my life. I credit him with the formation of the anthropologist in me. He told me about his village, about fairies and witches, and about some of the people in the city. I learnt to bicycle and he accompanied me to school every day, I on my blue bicycle, he on his. I was considered small enough that he was in charge of my bathing and changing, getting into bed, and of course, all my meals. I had a brother who was the cutest possible infant. My brother taught me to be an older sister and to love mothering and babying.
On my birthday—it must have been my seventh—I got a book that became the first book I personally owned. I mean a sizeable book. It was hard cover and was called Girls’ Library or something. It was a typical volume of the fifties for English schoolgirls. I turned the pages over again and again, looking hard at all the pictures. It was too difficult for me, but I waited, and at some point I could read it. I became the sweet girls in nicely billowing frocks walking on heaths and cliffs. All their adventures were mine.
Class 6 and part of 7 were very different because, as part of the risk his job entailed, my father was posted to a backwater called Sitapur that had, apparently, no school of the calibre I could study in. So I was kept with my grandparents in Allahabad, the seat of modern schooling. My grandfather was a District Judge. My grandmother was an artist and matriarch. My uncle, my mother’s brother, was twelve years older than me, studying engineering.
Another bungalow, this one even vaster. The dog stayed outside, and there was a cow. I never got to know the servants. No visiting friends and not a single friend ever came over. Occasionally a trip to the river to swim. An occasional badminton game with my uncle. Otherwise afternoons and evenings of sitting curled up in my room reading the Children’s Encyclopaedia from cover to cover.
That was my real education. The Children’s Encyclopaedia was addressed to two English children my age, John and Jane. They learnt History and Geography, Science and Music, and got to do a crafts project every week, and French with their mother. The boundaries between my real life and the life I lived through this set of books got blurred. I forgot the girls in billowing frocks who walked on heaths and moors, and became John and Jane, who sat primly at a little desk on little chairs and listened to their mother with her narrow waist in a straight dress.
I spent a fair amount of my time with my grandmother. She had a rash that had to be painted over and I got the job of brushing on the paint once a day on the back of her neck. She had a complicated puja that I regarded warily. It had those biscuit and toffee tins from England whose recycling proved the end of an era. Nani was too authoritarian for me. I fell in love with my faraway mother as I might not had I lived with her.
As for my grandfather, Nana was a dictator. He played several roles, all very seriously. He sat in his courtroom chair with a wig on. At home he wore a dhoti and kurta, awoke at 4 am to meditate, and ate things out of bowls. They were both strict vegetarians and the food was delicious. The cow mooed. We had our fill of dahi and panir and khir and ice cream. I itched to do things, I did not know what.
My father got transferred to Agra and I got to go home. Agra had a St Patrick’s for me and a St Anthony’s for my brother. They were real missionary institutions, just like Allahabad’s St Mary’s. Thank God, I would say with my hindsight. If I had gone to imitation convent schools, I would be a different person. If my father had continued in university teaching and not joined the government, my fate might have been that. Government service, convent schools, real education, all came together. Family separation, loneliness—that was only a small sacrifice on the way.
Nita Kumar
