Splash goes the school shoe on the brimming puddle as tiny lumps of mud place themselves gracefully on the white uniform of the zealous students. Drops of water cling to the girl’s ponytail as she hears the school bell and frowns at her delay. Students befriend the rain during their school days, it is the perfect excuse to skip school but also the perfect reason to attend it. On those rainy days, they can join their desks together, get their thinking caps on and form their own secret society of scholars. They keep their drenched multifarious umbrellas gathered in a corner forming an artificial rainbow of their own.
When the exam season dawns upon them, it blows in with its winds, a storm of stress. The rhythmic tapping of our feet, girls twirling the loose strands in their hair, and the cadence of the frantic turning of pages of the textbook, create a magical polyphonic harmony accompanied with the pitter-patter bass of the raindrops. After the examination is completed, the question paper lies deserted on the desk. The students decide to to give it new life, as a paperboat. They make creases on the paper just like the attentive crinkle between their eyebrows, and soon it is ready to sail.
It is ready to sail on the sea of their dreams, through the crests and troughs of their thoughts. The petrichor emanates their ambition. On closing their eyes, they playback a montage of memories. Raising hands, sneaking in vernacular when the teachers weren't listening, turning the desks into make-shift drums for their own concert, monitors writing names on the board excluding their friends. One day when they will no longer call these rooms and corridors, their home, they will reminisce and the ring of the school bell will echo through their hearts.
The writer Ritwija Sarkar is a student at Delhi Public School Ruby Park, Kolkata, West Bengal.
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