Typical.

The teacher has a kind demeanour. She wears a summery dress that has butterflies printed on it. Her eyes dart around the classroom while she teaches grammar.

On the rather dusty blackboard, John eats a mango. A few lines below, John is eating a mango. Dangerously close to the edge of the board, in cramped handwriting, John has eaten a mango.

The children don’t care. They colour pencil shavings with wax crayons. They squeal for no apparent reason. They stand up and say, “Teacherwaterteachertoilet.” The teacher ignores them and calls on one tired looking boy to write out answers on the blackboard. He walks up to the front of the class, stopping on the way to thwack another child’s head. The class laughs manically. The teacher doesn’t look particularly kind anymore.

The boy stands near the blackboard, playing with the chalk, making geometric shapes with his finger. The teacher, in a calculated sweet voice, asks him to write out the sentences in the past tense. The boy turns to his classmates for help. They stick out their tongues at him. The boy who he earlier hit has a triumphant look and is raising his hand chanting “Iknowthenaswer”

The teacher gives up and sends him back to his seat. She has already taught them tenses thrice in the past week. She sits in her chair and looks defeated. One child stands up and holds up a picture of a mango he drew and coloured when he was supposed to be studying grammar.

The teacher sighs, turns her back to the class and starts erasing her writing.

By the time the bell rings, the children are throwing pieces of chalk at each other. John, his preferred fruit and the teacher grudgingly make their way to another classroom.

What colour do you think in?

In a large box of crayons, I always used up the blue one first.

I would colour everything blue. Blue people with their strangely shaped heads. Blue dogs. Blue sunsets.

They asked me to look around and see if these things were actually blue. It didn’t matter. I liked my blue people. They spoke to each other, their round mouths moving ever so slightly. They played in the fields, the blue sunlight making them squint. They shook their webbed hands.

There were children in school who made fun of me. They showed me their colouring books. They had soft brown coloured people. Pink coloured candy floss. You are stupid, they told me.
The teacher once asked me to hand over the blue crayon. She said I had to learn to colour things with other crayons.

The blue people disappeared off my pages. They probably played elsewhere.

I started writing in art class then. About these people. I would write about how they were real people, with real thoughts. I created a parallel universe where these people had jobs and they ate cornflakes in ceramic bowls for breakfast. Their children went to schools and they had loving pets in their homes.

My teacher handed me the blue crayon one day. She gave me no reason for returning it.
I realized it then, that although I preferred blue over all the other colours; I didn’t really care about colouring stuff. I actually cared more about the people around whom I wove these stories. I had come to enjoy the imaginary lives I created.

I put the crayon back in the box and continued writing.

Summers

How many things from your childhood and youth will you remember when you’re 70? Will you remember how you ate cookies when you were specifically asked not to? Will you remember how you got mad at your siblings because they made fun of your handwriting? Will you remember what your first kiss felt like? Will you remember the bad stuff too? The people who failed you and the people you failed?
There is a part of my childhood that I will never forget. We’ll call that segment – Summers.
My parents didn’t really trip over themselves with the ‘let’s-enroll-our-children-in-a-million-summer activities’ and I don’t think I could have been more grateful. While some of my other friends who weren’t as lucky went to learn to stitch, swim and sing all in a day, I would run around the whole place with playful abandon. Exams would end in the first week of April and what followed was 2 months of nothing to worry about. The funny part is when I look back now, I wonder whether there really was anything to worry about back then.
The days in the summers played out in pretty much the same way. I would wake up late, drink tea (that tasted as close to milk as was possible) and then I would put on my shorts and my rubber slippers and go down to a friend’s place. Sometimes we would watch cartoons; sometimes we would run out and get an early start to the day. We played lots and lots of cricket. Building cricket with building rules and a rubber ball. If there was a secret place where all the lost cricket balls could be found, I can assure you that there will be a small hill of cricket balls with our names on it. I have had the good fortune of playing this game with my friends who not only liked playing it but also were surprisingly well read about it for their age. In hindsight, if that part of my life was taken away, I’d enjoy cricket a lot lesser.
By the time lunch came around and it got too hot to be outside, we’d drag ourselves home long enough to have lunch. Soon after, we’d be back to play cards in the stairwell or monopoly in someone’s home. The family members of children my age must have cursed our energy back then, because there were days when I think we played, shouted, fought and spoke non-stop for the whole day.
Evenings were always the same mix of cricket and climbing on walls to hide in a game of hide and seek. A friend of mine who lived on the ground floor had his kitchen window exactly where we played. We would huddle there, out of breath, and knock the window pane until his always-smiling grandmother handed us steel tumblers full of cold water. The feeling of cold water on a parched throat isn’t one I’ll be forgetting for a while to come.
In that brilliant time between dinner and bedtime, I’d read hungrily, taking in as much Enid Blyton or Hardy Boys or whatever else I could before my eyes shut out of sheer exhaustion. I would fight with my mother if she forgot to bring back new books from the library.
When we went back to school in June, in our sparkling new raincoats, our faces a few shades darker thanks to the playing in the sun, it was a strange feeling. A mix of excitement of a new school year and the inexplicable sadness that summer had ended.
There is this song I like a lot by Joni Mitchell. It’s called Urge for going. The lines that get me every time are “I had me a man in summer time/ He had summer coloured skin” That’s where I get the blog name, because that is just such a lovely description of colour. It has multiple layers in meaning. Every time I hear it, I feel a different feeling.
But, had I heard it as a kid, when I probably didn’t know better, my mind would go back to June 15 th , when we took with us our summer coloured skin to school, year after year. Where each time, we were a summer older, a summer wiser and had under our belt one extra summer worth of memories.
When I am 70, I’ll probably remember this feeling. The feeling when you run out of the summer, as the inky skies pour down on you, and you go to school with a bag full of freshly covered books and there is the excitement and the comfort that your whole life is ahead of you.