A gentle stroke in my hair and a gentle kiss; my mother embraced and woke me up. The clock struck 10 and I was happy as a lamb. As I got out of my bed, I noticed that my cousin was gone and here I was, enjoying the sunshine. The feeling of getting up late while your siblings and cousins struggle to wake up early is a heavenly one.

I loved my school, at least for the first two grades, since the school started at noon for kindergarten. Being in an all-girls school and that too a convent one is never a piece of cake, the experience can be a roller coaster ride though. My day in kindergarten started with an hour of all the KG-I and the KG-II students clumped up in a hall (we called it the millennium hall) singing poems and prayers. After so much of forced singing sessions, we moved to our classes, in a proper line just like the ones formed by the ants. Well, we were so tiny we surely resembled ants. The best memory of my kindergarten was always going back home sleeping in the back seat of my school bus. The happiest two years passed and the struggle for the rest of the 12 years began with getting up at six in the morning.

As we grew older, more discipline was expected out of us. The dress code included bottle green colored tunic and hair tied up in ponytails with black ribbons adorning them. This scheme was mandatory from Tuesdays to Saturdays. On Monday the dress code was all white with a red, blue or yellow ribbon, according to the house allotted. I always envied the ones who studied in public schools. They wore cool dresses and enjoyed their lives to the fullest. As a child, I always wondered about the Christian students going for catechism while the other students learned moral science. Moral Science, the science I learned not from the lessons taught in the classroom, but from my experience outside the classroom. What was taught in the catechism class? It is still a mystery to me.

Also Read: Things I Learnt in All Girl School

As the years passed swiftly, I realized that friendship knows no bound. The friends I made were the true gems in my collection of memories. The school days were fun until the 6th standard. There were separate buildings for primary (KGI – Vth) and secondary (VIth – XIIth). As I reached the 6th standard things started changing. I got surrounded by so many new faces that my school felt like a whole new world. The atmosphere of constant competition made me a book worm. Convent schools especially mine, may or may not focus on the overall development of a child but kept a strong vigilance on speaking and learning English. I remember till 8th grade I got the least marks in English. No matter how much effort I poured in, the result was always heartbreaking. To improve our written and spoken English the only mantra our teacher chanted was to read, read and read. And so I began to read a lot of novels. My first book was a novel authored by, the first pick of every novice “Mr. Chetan Bhagat”. From there on I found solace in reading books. And eventually, it did improve my grammar and vocabulary. This is why I guess most of the convent students are grammar nazis.

Since I was in an all-girls school, every faculty including the headmistress was a woman. It was like a mini world full of women, you can move your eyes all around and all you will see are women. The headmistress and other nuns in the school were called “Sister“. Rumors were that one of the most painstaking and adamant principals of all times was heading back. She still reminds me of a character from the “Goosebumps” series, the creature teacher. The worst nightmare of all the students came true. She was back, with more regulations to impose and make our miserable lives even harder to bear. The list of rules became longer and stringent actions were to be taken against the rule-breakers. The dress code from 9th to 12th grade was changed. Instead of the tunic, we had to wear a salwar suit with a jacket. Yes, you heard it right, a jacket with green and cream-colored checks, over a cream-colored kurta and a bottle green colored salwar. Believe me, it looked much worse than you can ever imagine. The cherry on the top was that we have to tie up our hairs in two ponytails teamed with black ribbons. Inspections were made regularly by the volunteers, anyone with long nails, wearing nail paints and kohl, without a hairband or ribbon, without polished shoes and clean socks was not allowed to enter the premises. When someone was found violating the rules, a note was written in their bottle green colored dairy ( I never understood their love for the color of a bottle guard). If the number of remarks exceeded three, the parents of the respective child were called and a warning was issued. Breach of any rule after the warning would result in the expulsion of the student. So we had to live with this horror for the rest of our school lives.

Amidst the tiring routine of continuous eight classes (with just a 30 minutes break which was later reduced to 20mins.) we had some fun ways to rejuvenate ourselves. Once in a year, we had fete, annual day or sports day and the happiest of all the Christmas holidays. The fetes were always amazing but only the students from our school were allowed to participate. Also to keep the students away from the other gender popularly known as “male”, no male above the age of 10 years was allowed in any functions on the school campus. My school is one of the reasons I had a hard time accepting that girls can talk to boys and that’s not a sin. We were given lectures on how to be pure and away from sins. The word “boys” was synonymous with the word Voldemort, a character from the Harry Potter series. The apocalypse would end the world if we spoke of a boy in our school.

Also Read: Things My School Taught Me

The competition was getting tougher, the school felt like a prison, puberty was hitting hard and the ones who made my school days tolerable were my friends. Since we had survived our school for so many years, we had devised some ways to dodge the rules. We started bunking classes in the name of the practice, the morning assemblies were filled with chuckles, we ate lunch in the middle of the lectures and enjoyed getting punished. We found our joy in the scolding and tried to break as many rules as possible. It sounds cool but as a result of being the most indisciplined batch, our trip got canceled. But we did not give up, as we dreamt of it since we entered this new building. Even though we were taken to the same water park every year, as a venue for our school picnic, we always looked forward to the school trip. How could we let the principal get away with this? So, there was civil unrest in our batch to somehow save the trip. We adopted the age-old method of non-violence, the peaceful strike. All of us gathered in the ground, around 300 students standing in front of the principal’s office trying to pressure the system to succumb to our demands. As the saying goes “United we stand divided we fall”, we all stood united like the seven sticks (representing the seven family members}, which can’t be broken when held together(we were taught this story in our moral science class and we do have an examination for the subject). The result came out, as one of our teachers came out of the principal’s office and it was beyond the expectation. The trip was canceled, once and for all. All of us kept cursing our principle, the whole year and in the blink of an eye, we were in the 12th grade. The last year in school took us by surprise, we went for the school trip to a nearby hill station and that was the best trip of my life.

My school life was not a usual one, it was difficult and stressful. I fell many times but I had my friends to pull me up. Though there were many things I didn’t like about my school, yet those very things made me a fighter. I didn’t realize it at that time but those hardships made me who I am. And there are times when I do miss my friends, teachers, those benches, the tiffin boxes, the zero periods, the physical training periods, the Christmas carols, the chapel we prayed in, the morning prayers, the school bus and most of all, the feeling of seeing my friends the next morning .

I am proud of my school for carving us into such beautiful diamonds and my friends for teaching me that they can make even the hardest times, the most memorable one.