Part 8 of my Life in Wadi

Jayachandran called me up last night while I was posting my blog. When I started I hoped that the blog will attract attention from people who existed in the vicinity of those space time coordinates I am writing about. I also hoped that people who knew me well and those who didn’t know me as well, would gain a deeper understanding into what it was like growing up as the son of a clerk in a factory township in the 70s. I am glad to see that my hopes are not being belied. My only request to those friends who stumble across the blog and find it interesting, please forward it to all you know so that Wadi, like Malgudi becomes an iconic town.

While we came to the new school that Devassia built, (I guess I have been calling it “the school that Devassia built” for too long now. Let us call it by its proper name, The Saint Ambrose Convent School now. Or to ease up on the typing, let’s call it SACS, though such abbreviations hadn’t quite become the norm in those days. The SMS culture was too far in the future and even HAHK, DDLJ etc. were two decades in the future. QSQT, the first in these series was a decade away. Still let’s call it SACS. As I had mentioned, we had 17 students while in 4th Standard. We got a class teacher called Thavaseeli Miss, who was a Christian girl who hailed from Tamil Nadu. Frankly the name sounded really silly and meaningless to us at that time, but as time passed, I learnt that Thavaseeli meant a person who practices penance as a matter of routine. This teacher didn’t betray the meaning of her name. She was very soft spoken. She stayed in the convent, which is what we called the nunnery attached to the school where the nuns stayed. A nunnery I have seen, and since, learnt from experience and from reading authors like Dan Brown, is a very harsh place for a young girl like Thavaseeli. We used to see her weeping silently many times. It was assumed that the sisters may have been harsh to her. We all liked Thavaseeli. The first Principal of the school, the one who took over from Mrs. Saldanha was Mary Jane. We called her Mother and the other nuns, sisters. Frankly with their Habits and names we didn’t really at that think of these sisters as women or men, but a new formidable gender altogether. Mother Mary Jane was one of the kinder sisters I have encountered. By the time we reached 7th Standard we were 15 students. The two who dropped out were Kanniappan and Bhaskar. It is about them that we will talk about in the next post and talk about the other 15 at a later time.