A School Without a Name

In the year 1980, we lived somewhere in Dhock Khabba off Murree Road in Rawalpindi, Pakistan. That’s where I went to my first school but that was for a very short while. As far as I can remember, I studied there for hardly a couple of months and it was at that point of time that my father got a government job and we moved to the servant quarters located at the back of the office building.

That house was approximately 15×25 feet in size; there was one room, one veranda where the kitchen was positioned followed by the smallest courtyard possible. We were six people living in that small house… talk about a close family.

Once we had moved to this new place, the obvious choice for schooling was the same school where three of my uncles had studied. I honestly don’t remember its name but it was a public school nonetheless, run by the Government that is.

The school consisted of just one huge hall; it was in fact an abandoned jail barrack situated off the Airport Road close to the now extinct Adiala Jail. Thus the school hall had thick walls which kept it pleasantly cool during those scorching summers and terribly cold in those terribly cold winters. It had many windows but they were all located near the ceiling while the ceiling itself was more than 25 feet from the floor. Even more surprisingly there were small holes in the roof, deliberately made and covered with a steel canopy. Actually, that allowed more rain into the hall than light. And to make matters more cheerful, there were nests of sparrows all over the windows and roof holes. So many times, a nest would fall on the ground with either the eggs or little kid-sparrows still inside. And then half the school would be busy in rehabilitating that nest to a safer location.

It was a primary school, up till grade five that is. There were six classes, with grade one divided into two sections called KACCHI and PAKKI; I may loosely translate it as AMATURES and PROS of grade one. For each class there was one long mat and if the class grew larger in number of students, another mat would be laid down next to the first one. There was no concept of students sitting in chairs; there were only three (intact) chairs in the school, two for the teachers (since there were only two teachers in the school) and one for an occasional guest. Sometimes, rarely though, more than one guest would show up; that was fun.

Each morning when we arrived at the school, we would pick all those rolled up mats, unroll them and spread them over the hall floor in a clear and simple pattern. A student would sit on the mat with his/her bag resting in front of him/her at the floor. Sitting at the corner of the mat was a privilege which only the most manipulating student would enjoy. Once the day would end, the mats were again rolled up and placed in the corner of the hall. This practice was adopted because any possible overnight rain could destroy the mats … remember those holes in the ceiling?

My school bag was made of some old piece of cloth and was sewn by my mother who had placed two larger than normal sized buttons at the front which I utterly disliked because they looked funny; not that the striped bag looked anything serious. Each morning my younger brother, elder sister and I would get 25 paisas each (25 paisas is quarter of a rupee). In those days, (talk about sounding old) we could do plenty with that kind of money; I mean there were those tiny button biscuits which one could get five for five paisas; there were those “malta” (orange) toffees which you would get four for 25 paisas; there were Mayfair’s chocolate toffees which were two for our one day’s pocket money. I remember there was this one kid in the school who would get like ten rupees everyday; he made the rest of us feel bad about ourselves. He left the school after a month he joined; that school wasn’t for him anyways. We were glad he was gone.

Even with that kind of pocket money, we managed plenty of things. I remember a Dollar (good old days when Dollar was only a pen brand) fountain pen would cost 2 rupees and I saved for about three months to finally get my hands on my first ever fountain pen; I still remember that red color fountain pen which was my most prized possession at that time. Each time, at recess, I went to the nearby cafeteria ( which was actually for lawyers of the vicinity since the District Courts were situated right next to the school), I would ask the shopkeeper how much that fountain pen cost fearing its price might have risen. But it didn’t, at least not until the day I proudly held all that change of five and ten paisas in my hand and put it on the counter to finally ask that shopkeeper, “Can I have that red Dollar pen please.” That was something; that was thrilling.

There was a reasonably sized empty ground in front of the school hall where we could hold classes during the winter when it would get extremely cold inside. There was no electricity in the school so there was no concept of fans or heaters. During summer, sometimes we would lay those rugs under the two trees that stood in the middle of that ground.

Two most integral parts of our bags were a ‘steel slate’ and a ‘wooden plate’ (called TAKHTI), both worked as notebooks, well not the kind of notebooks we are used to today. The slate was used for rough work such as math calculations and we used a white chalk-bar (or a “sleti”, a mini chalk) to write on it. The writing was easily erasable since there was a little hole at the side of the slate to which we tied a piece of sponge with a string. We would keep the sponge wet and one rub of it, and we had a clean slate. Hmmm, sounds suspicious, doesn’t it?

The Takhti however, was a different story. It was a flat plate of wood, which needed some specially made clay to be rubbed on it and once the thin layer of clay would dry, the Takhti was ready for writing. We used a hand made pen carved out of a small cylinder cane. We would dip the nib into a bottle of black ink (which we would make ourselves since only dried grains of that ink was available and we had to dilute it to make it liquid ink), and would write on that Takhti. Before we would start writing, we would stretch some straight lines on to the Takhti so that we would write with horizontal symmetry. While the slate worked as our rough notebook, the Takhti had dual purpose, we would do a part of our homework on that and get it checked in the morning and then again, during recess we would all wash those Takhtis, apply the clay again, put them in the sun to dry (or wave them vehemently in the air if there was no sun) and then there were fifteen minutes allotted to us to do a part of our class work on it again. This class work was checked right before we left school and anybody who hadn’t done the class work was spanked with a WOODEN stick; and quite often with the same Takhti itself. Irony of situation.

Since there were only two teachers in the school, it shouldn’t have been difficult for me to remember their names, but the fact is, I never knew their names in the first place. We simply called them, Headmaster Sahib and Kacchi Waley Ustad (the teacher who taught the first and second grades). The Headmaster was a chain smoker and had that thick smoke filled voice which would fill our hearts with fear because he was harsh most of the times. He would always come late, and would appear from the corner of the street next to the hall walking with that arrogant walk of his. Each morning we would pray that he would take a day off and never came back to school ever again, and each day he would appear from that corner, sinking our hearts down to our bellies. Thankfully though, he would leave half an hour early as well; that was a relief.

The Kacchi Waley Ustaad came from a village at the outskirts of Rawalpindi. Quite often, he would come to school riding his horse; yes, a horse. Now that I think back of him, I don’t think he had ever gone to college, but I believe he was good enough for us lot. He wasn’t harsh, he was actually cruel. The Headmaster sahib would sometimes spare some of us who would really beg him for forgiveness; but not kacchi waley ustaad. He had many wooden sticks; we would often think he has ruined all the trees of his village by making all those wooden sticks for us poor souls. One of the most fearsome things he would do was to ask for random table equations at the end of school-time.

All the school, all classes (consisting of no more than fifty students), would stand up in lines and one by one he would ask us random table questions. And he was FAST, we had to keep up or otherwise the last thing we would hear was a swish of the stick and pain would follow. He would go on asking questions like;

3×7?
6×9?
4×8?
9×6?
6×9?

The last two would really confuse us; we would take a moment to think of the similarity and the difference between the two and bang. Quite often we would be walking back home with our hands folded tightly under our armpits. Given all the chatter in the morning while coming to school, we didn’t speak much on our way back home.

Along with all the subjects we studied; there was this one subject which didn’t make any sense to me. We were supposed to memorize some alphabets starting from A B C and ending at X Y Z. I absolutely had no idea what that was all about; I did memorize them though … was there any other option? It wasn’t until I went into grade six and a new school, that I finally figured out it was a language called English and there were people who actually spoke it. Yikes.

The recess time was the best time at school. We would play all the sports, including, Cricket, Hide and Seek, Pittu Garam, Pakran Pakrai and so many more. Pittu Garam still remains the most thrilling game I’ve ever played. At about five minutes run from the school (I say run, because we never believed in WALKING during RECESS) there was this vegetable garden, guarded by a farmer, where there were fresh carrots, cucumbers and Shaljams (I don’t know what you call that in English … ABCs remember?). Even though the garden was watched over, we would still make our way in and uproot some of the vegetables we liked and would run back while the farmer would run after us for a while cursing us, but of course he couldn’t keep up with our speed. That was fun, until one day we read our lesson on the concept of theft and how it was not approved by any religion as well as social and ethical norms. So we had to give up on our beloved fresh lunch during recess.

I only remember a handful of my schoolmates from that school. Once we were out of that school, none of us really bothered to keep in touch. We were just too suppressed mentally that it was a relief to know that we were done with that torture cell. I remember once I saw a few men wearing the white uniform of inmates, their legs chained with rods up to their waists that would make it impossible for them to run, or even walk properly. They were carrying large cubicles of water hanging by the wooden rod placed on their shoulders; they were fetching water for a police officer who lived nearby. I looked at them and thought only if they had been enrolled in this school they would know life is much more difficult than that. Losers.

One of the best things about that school was that any day when it was cloudy and there was even a hint of the possibility of the forecast of rain, it was declared a holiday; since there was no way we could have stayed inside that hall with muddy floor. Sometimes if it had rained for a number of days, we would get prolonged vacation since the hall had turned into a pond.

And how is it possible that I be at some place without a love interest; regardless of my age. I wouldn’t really call it love or anything, since I had no idea of any such concept at that time but there was this one girl, one of the only four people from that school whose name I remember (I am not going to name her here though) but she was fabulous; yes that’s the word I guess. She had short hair, was full of life, and would play with us in every game we would play; even maar kutaai. She played that game because she won it every time; I mean none of us really had to heart to beat her up. We were in the FINAL YEAR of the school when one of my class fellows, my best friend of that time, asked me to write a love note on his behalf … to her. That was difficult in two ways; one, I liked her too and didn’t have the heart to write any such thing to her on someone else’s behalf; and two, because I absolutely had no idea what on earth a love note really was.

But I did write it for him; his name was Asim Nawaz Khokhar, the only guy whose full name I remember; he was my best friend after all (or beast friend after that day). I don’t have a clue as to what I wrote in that note but I can so clearly recall sitting on a stone at the corner of the street after school time, writing that note. What can I say; my first ever creative writing … well now you know where all the romance in my writings stems from. I don’t remember what happened to those two and to the note, all I know is that I was out of the equation. Fate prepared me for a long similar journey coming ahead in my life.

A few years back, I went back to that place to relocate my school but it’s gone now. They have made lawyers’ offices there. The Government records may still have reference to that school; but for now it only remains alive in my memory.

Tags: Memoir

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