alma mater
I grew up in a secluded boarding school on the foothills of himalaya. an authoritarian place where we owned the same umbrellas, hairbands, socks, and sixteen pairs of uniform, with our unique 'numbers' stitched as identifiers on every belonging - including underwear and pencil pouches. we withdrew proxy money as colourful coupons from make-believe banks using cheque books and then pooled them in groups to spend on tuck and bun-tikki on the weekends. Students posed as bank clerks, and canteen officials and we took turns to monitor dormitory laundry and hygiene. the internet was alive and thriving in the real world — but with limited access to media from the inside, we wrote letters to communicate with loved ones twice a week. we grew ingenious skills with limited resources — inventing games out of pebbles and pinecones, and making birthday cakes out of biscuits.
It feels like a dream when I think about how we woke up while the stars still shone, so that our basketball coach wouldn't be disappointed. or the stamina I had to run five kilometres to qualify for camp. the discipline to practice our dance routine for months with blistering feet. And the tears we'd shed if we lost that basketball match, or dance event.
I’ve surely become complacent since. They say luxury is the easiest thing to get used to, and after boarding school, everything somewhat resembles luxury. Your own clothes? More than one helping of lemon tart? The first few years after school, I'd gauge everything and everyone against that experience. I’d diss people who weren’t generous with their belongings, and judge those who locked their cupboards and complained about shared bathrooms. I learned quickly that not everybody’s measurement of ‘one second’ was the same. I also realised that despite my all girls upbringing, I brought more sexual information to the table than my peers.
Presumably all high school experiences are a little weird, but imagine it in perpetuity for months. We were possessive about friendships and disrespectful of personal boundaries. We were egoistic and maniacal. We were hormonal and confused. We were naive and impressionable. all stemming from a misplaced sense of entitlement, expectations and fear; And despite being the sheltered dystopia that gifted me a confused sense of self and boundaries, boarding school taught me to deal with change in marvellous ways. I've lived in five cities across three countries, since, adapting to shifting systems and relationships. It has made me better at conflict resolution than most, and taught me that people are usually better than their opinions.
It's been more than a decade, and sometimes I feel a tinge of bittersweet nostalgia when I hear auld lang syne, or smell that tree which blossomed in October on campus; I've met a few friends since — eager and nostalgic, we always make plans to meet again sooner. But boarding school mates become family in a way that makes you not want to meet them too often. We'll always be metaphorically tied together by the umbilical cord of an institution we called home for eight surreal years, but we've seen each others' strangest, ugliest adolescent selves in a way that you might not want to revisit more than once a year.