Memoirs of an Auxilian Hosteller

The summer of 1997 was at its peak the day I first entered Auxilium College, Katpadi (so that’s what the ACK, stamped on the back of all the chairs in the auditorium, stood for!) What was it about the place that made me decide to study there?? Was it the fact that I was shunning city life after having had my heart broken? Was it that I wanted to escape into anonymity after an academic debacle shook me to the core and shattered all my confidence? Or was it that I wanted to show off to my younger sister, who was now staying away from home in a hostel (all grown up) … hah! what you can do I can also do … see?

            I missed my gang of friends terribly and thought that this beautiful college, nestled among hills and tucked away in the middle of nowhere, was just the place for me to mourn all that I had lost in life. Since I didn’t know the language I wouldn’t have to make any conversation with anyone. Since I was so far away from home I wouldn’t have to meet anyone I knew. All I was aware of was a sense of calm that had descended on me as I looked up at the statue of Our Lady while passing through the college gates.

How wrong I was!! Two weeks later, after having waved goodbye to my father, one of the sisters introduced me to a dusky complexioned girl with eyes that were just dancing with mischief. Sanuja was in my class, BA English, and the next few hours passed by in a whirlwind of new faces and unpronounceable names (Tirupurasundari, Vijayachamundeshwari, Shreevidhyalakshmi … I was lost at the very first syllable!!!). Sanuja went on to become my partner in crime for all time and life became one hell of a roller coaster ride.

I will never forget the first night I spent in the hostel. My very first roomies – Manjula, Margaret and Bhavani – three of the quietest girls in the entire college and me with my gunthroat voice!! In those days the hostel rooms had NO fans and a big bright supposedly zero watt bulb in every room. BIG problem!! I NEVER got sleep unless the room was dark. I tossed and turned but was soon faced with a far more worrying problem. Forget lying in the sweltering heat within a mosquito net, forget the absence of the fan and the presence of the light, forget the fact that I was a thousand miles away from home … I was hearing the sound of anklets!!! My mind raced to all the damn horror movies I had ever watched and the night was spent in saying countless Hail Marys!! The same thing happened the next night also. I finally asked Manju one evening if she too had heard these sounds. She gave me a weird look and then looked down at her feet and then at the feet of all the other girls around us…all of them were wearing anklets!!!    

            How can I forget the midnight snacks, the late night adventures, the whispered talking after the last bell, the wardens (in their grey or white habits) appearing like ghosts for a final check before they themselves retired for the night? What about racing to catch adjacent bathrooms for myself and Sanuja, so we could bathe and still keep talking to each other? Manju and the many times she came with me to the loo at night, because I was too scared to go by myself? Maggie and her akshaya patra of a snack bag?

            The very best thing about hostel life is that it functions as a microcosm of the big bad world outside and is yet, in more ways than one, a home away from home. Whether you are an only child or have a small army of siblings (like I had) we are indulged in so many ways at home that we don’t realize that we are being indulged in. But in a hostel one of the first things you learn is that you are just one among many and that “I have never before” is a phrase that is of no importance to anyone except yourself.

After my first night in the hostel I went to the warden sister with a list of complaints about my room and asked for a change. She smiled at me and said “There is no other bed right now. When I get a bed in another room I shall let you know.” My room was changed, twice, when I went to the second year and then again when I was in my final year. As was every other students’ room. In the second year I went to the warden again with a request for a change of room. My room was near the staircase and every morning the mad rush of early birds who wanted to get ready at the crack of dawn, dropping buckets and mugs and what else in their hurry, was not letting me sleep. Once more she smiled and told me “Let me check. Come back to me in a week’s time if the noise is still disturbing you.” Given time, one gets used to any and every thing – perhaps one of the most important survival skills one can ever hope to acquire, for life in a hostel and out in the world.   

            Another fun part of life in a hostel is the infinite variety of people you get to meet and know, who teach you all sorts of things, from how to be to how not to be. One of my classmates was this extremely sweet girl who would beg others to act as her alarm clock and wake her up, either to study for exams or to just be on time for college and study time and meals. People would quail in fear when requested to do so because she would abuse with the most colourful of regional abuses and slang when attempts were made to wake her up. Once up she would be mortified and so apologetic and contrite that it was a laugh just to see her apologizing for what she had yelled out in her sleep. After seeing Manju in tears more than once I took over the job. Since I didn’t follow Tamil it made no difference to me whether she was abusing me or singing ragas and shlokas!!

            College life was equally fun because we would be seeing the same faces all over the college – girls from other departments, the sisters from the convent, the support staff who lived on campus, the teachers and students who lived in the vicinity of the college and who dropped in on holidays and after college hours. As clichéd as it sounds, we were all one big family. Amidst all the grumbling about the rules the sisters made for us, the mess food which always HAS to be the worst in the world, the salt water that we had to bathe in, the blanket ban on all males between six and sixty from entering the campus, the sneaky efforts made to smuggle in cameras and radios (hey, this was eighteen years back!!), somewhere along the way I realized that my three years in ACK would soon be over. And things hadn’t quite worked out the way I had planned.

            I had made friends for life (yeah, I’m still in touch with loads of my BA friends and a reunion is in the pipeline), more than I had ever thought I would. I had picked up a smattering of Tamil, enough to understand and be understood and definitely more than enough to provide enough fun amongst my friends, even today. I was in love with Ajith and had my classmates in love with Sharukh Khan, after having regaled them with stories from his blockbusters (ostensibly while doing group study of Milton’s Paradise Lost Book 1). Twenty and thirty syllable names now rolled off my tongue with buttery ease and I had even learnt to wear a sari all by myself! I was totally able to rock the southie/madrasi look now, complete with flowers in my hair, those infernal anklets on my feet, bangles and bindis and kajal and all!    

            Today I look back at those years spent in ACK with so much of longing. Now married and responsible I dream of turning back time and going back to the Auxilium of my time. A time when I could be as crazy as I wanted to simply because I had equally crazy friends. A time when I grumbled about the Saturday morning cleaning, not knowing that, years later, I would still be following it like clockwork in my own house. A time when following the dress code meant that tee-shirts had to cover your butt and be thigh length. A time when there wasn’t easy access to the internet and mobile phones and the highlight of the month was the Tamil movie played in the auditorium.

            I could go on and on and on about my Auxilium, my college and my hostel, my teachers and the convent sisters, my batchmates, classmates and roomies, the service staff and the annas in the mess. From them all did I learn compassion, empathy, friendliness, team spirit, confidence, humanity and, more than anything else, acceptance. They all are my Auxilium. The Auxilium that was such an important part of my past and an even more important part of my present and future, for I am and will be but what I learnt from it, all those eighteen summers ago.   

Dem questions!!

Boy! Can I talk nineteen to the dozen! Wherever I have gone I have been blessed with enough and more topics on which to have a very vocal opinion on and an equal number of friends with whom endless discussions on just about everything are the norm. Our vocal abilities have been legendary. One of my friends can sit and talk to just about anything, a door, a dead phone and even a deaf relative. We used to joke that she wouldn’t even notice if the person she was talking to died, she would just assume that he/she agreed with every word of what she was saying! Another friend went with her gang of college friends for a movie and yakked non-stop until people around them actually got up and left the movie hall in disgust! Yet another of my friends would sit and talk and talk and talk while her boyfriend would just gaze into her eyes. Oh yeah, they were very much in love because he loved to hear her talk and she loved him for letting her talk!!

I would come home from college everyday by about 3:30 in the afternoon and by 5:00 I would be on the phone with whichever of my friends was free at the same time. When my mom asked me what I had to say to someone I had last seen barely two hours ago all I could do was roll my eyes….duh!! Did she really think I would wait for over twelve hours to tell her about the cute guy I saw on the bus back home??? Even today, decades later, after something earth shattering has happened in my world, my husband takes one look at the constipated look at my face and asks me “What happened? No one is free to chat now?” That happens when my bestie is busy nursing her father and father-in-law, my sister with her kids’ exams, my mom with her latest grandchild and my neighbor with visiting relatives, all at the very same time.

And the questions…perhaps it’s my OCD at its outspoken best, but I cannot get myself to do anything unless I’m convinced about the reason for it. There was this guy I knew at my first job, who used to go red in the face whenever I asked him or anyone near him a question beginning with “Why”. One day, totally exasperated, he asked me, “Is it because your name starts with ‘Y’ that you feel bound to begin every question and answer with ‘Why’?” God bless his sweet heart!!

My husband, in the days when he knew me before marriage, used to hate two things about me, so he and his friends tell me: one, that I would always have my nose stuck in a book, and two, when my nose was out of a book I was either eating or talking!! He once asked me, extremely hopefully, “When you are an old hag and your teeth all fall out, will you keep shut at least then??” “No way,” I shot back, “I’ll find something to make some noise with!!” When our son was born everyone expected him to start talking early because he had a jabbermouth like me for a mother. He said his first word at eight months – “ma” – and then never said anything for the next couple of months. By one and a half he would use only a few monosyllables that I understood: “aaa” was ‘car’, “baa” was ‘bus’ and “boo” was both ‘book’ and ‘balloon’. That was the extent of his vocabulary and, time and again, I would be accosted by well-meaning people who wondered whether my son had a hearing or speech disability. I would shut them all up with the words, “He’s my son. Once he starts talking he’s not gonna shut up. Wait and see.”

All too soon I realized the true meaning of a word that was much bandied about in the course of the many years I spent doing my graduation, post-graduation and doctoral studies in English literature – ‘irony’. My son’s vocabulary soon progressed to bi- and polysyllables. By three he was talking nineteen to the dozen and by three and a half the much dreaded questions began. Every sentence that today comes out of my four year old’s mouth is a question, all of them beginning with “Amma, why dem are …?”, “Amma, where dem are …?” and “Amma, what dem are …?”

Today I understand the agony of being bombarded with countless whys and wheres and whats, at the most awkward of places and in the highest possible volume a child can attain. This past Sunday, while at mass, my son was busy examining closely a statue of the crucified Christ. The questions ranged from the innocent “Where are the nails?” and “Why is Jesus black” (the entire statue is painted black, heaven knows why) to the embarrassing “Why is Jesus’s underwear chewed up?” (on noticing Jesus’s loincloth). And now I remember reading a definition of ‘puberty’ in Readers’ Digest decades ago: “Puberty is that stage when the kids stop asking questions and start questioning the answers”. What am I gonna do then, with dem questions and answers??   

The Man in the Moon!

Today, while reading the story of ‘Why do dogs howl at the moon?’ to my four year old son, I found my eyes welling up with tears. It is actually one of the better stories I’ve read, of the many that are available on the same topic. The dog and the rabbit were the best of friends even though they were poles apart (one loved carrots and the other meat). One day a spaceship appears and a moon man comes out of it, aims his stun gun at the dog and zaps him. The rabbit, however, at the very last minute jumps in the way, takes the blow and protects his friend the dog. The dog is knocked unconscious and when he comes to he finds his friend the rabbit missing. He runs helter-skelter searching for his friend but none of the animals seem to know where his friend is. And that’s why, on full moon nights, when he sees the shadow of his friend on the moon the dog howls out and calls to his friend, whom he has sorely missed. The best part of the story was the author asking us to not throw stones at dogs when they howl on a full moon night, for all they are doing is calling out to their long-lost friend, the rabbit.    

Why did this story bring tears to my eyes? There is, for many people, nothing more romantic than a moon-lit night or a walk by the beach on a full moon night. The moon, in all its many shapes (full, half, crescent, sliver), has always held an undeniable attraction for me. Thinking back to my childhood I wonder whether it was all those Enid Blytons that I read, where wonderful things began to happen as soon as the moon slipped out of the blanket of the sky? Or was it the many Georgette Heyers that I soon progressed to, where lissome lasses fell in love with roguish rakes by the light of the full moon?? And of course, how can I ever forget all the horror flicks my siblings watched by the dozen, where the full moon and a few lonely scattered clouds set the stage for all sorts of werewolves (from my childhood, none were as hot as Taylor Lautner’s Jacob), vampires and ghoulish fiends.

When I fell in love for the first time I would steal glances at the moon in the sky and wonder what he was doing. Was he also looking at the moon and thinking of me? Perhaps it is then that I conceived of the moon as this big bright mirror in the sky that would reflect my love and longing to him, when he looked up at the sky, at perhaps that very moment. For years after, moon or no moon, I would think of him as I nursed a broken heart and cried myself to sleep.

What is it about the moon that is so achingly beautiful, so romantic, so tragic and yet, so magical? Perhaps it is the fact that, from time immemorial, lovers have met and loved and parted by the light of the moon. Even today, I find tears in my eyes every time I remember the story that Wolverine narrates in one of the many X-Men movies, the story of the Wolverine and the Trickster. Now who in their right minds wouldn't want to go console someone as delicious as Hugh Jackman?

As they say, the perfect relationship/man is not real and a real relationship/man is not perfect. Perhaps that's why the moon, for me, is all that is perfect, all that is magical, all that is enthralling and all that is too good to be true. Like his love. Like his promises. Like his kisses. Like his smiles. All perfect and none of them real. My man in the moon!!  

Reality (poem)

REALITY

Our eyes met
I was drowning
deep into their green depths.
He smiled
a sparkling smile
and lit up my life.
I broke the spell and looked away but yet was haunted by that look.

He said my name
slowly, pronouncing it
as no-one had ever done before.
I looked up
at his mouth, his eyes
and was spell-bound again.
This time I did not,
could not look away
but remained under its sway.

Untill he reached for my hand and pulled me to safety.                         - Yasmin (1994) 

Morning whispers (poem)

This is a poem which won the first prize in my college's poetry writing competition, decades ago, when I was in the final year of my BA. I thought it was crap, at that time, and guess what?? I still do. Why I'm blogging it?? Just to sorta have my writing down on record....maybe when I'm a famous writer one day you can get down to this and say "Hey, after crap like this if she can be famous, then why not me?"

And then again, one needs to understand the circumstances in which the poem got written. It was one of those thingys where the topic or first line is already given and this is the one topic that appealed to me. The deal clincher was that the competition was being held in an hour that I desperately wanted to bunk...don't remember which hour but my bet is on Prose. So, I sat in the room for the better part of the hour and started writing only when my HOD popped in to check on the progress of the competition. That it won the first prize is more a statement of the fact that there were less than ten people in the competition and only four from the English department!

Morning Whispers

Morning ...

A wintry wind

blowing over the white countryside

rushing through narrow city alleys

howling, biting, freezing, chilling.

Morning ...

A waft of spring

pervading the countryside waking up to spring

tiny flowers beginning to bloom amid the busy city lanes

purging, replenishing, energizing, thrilling.

Morning ...

A hot blast

drying up tender spring blossoms

torrid rays causing salty streams to trickle down heated foreheads

enervating, sweltering, sapping, scorching.

Morning ... 

An overcast sky 

rumblings from gloomy clouds frowning over shrunken rivers

glaring at the city's dust and grime

sultry, enveloping, threatening, sulking.

Morning ...

A light drizzle

the sparkling greenery of the earth

the freshly-scrubbed look of the city

refreshing, invigorating, cooling, soothing.

Morning ... 

A nip in the air

reds, browns and oranges of the woods

fallen leaves swirling around city-parks

rustling, swishing, hastening, surrounding.

Morning ...

the beginning of another brand-new day

so much to be done

so much to be seen

so much to be heard

so much to be learnt

so much to be felt

so much to be experienced

eternal, promising, full of hope.                                                            - Yasmin (22/11/99)

                                                                                                                     

There is no God?

As a young girl lost in the world of books I would, ever so often, come across ideas and thoughts expressed so beautifully that I thought they were perfect. That no one would ever be able to improve upon them. So I would write these ideas and thoughts down. Many of them were about friendship (so I could have something unique to write in my friends' slam books, although they weren't called 'slam books' in my time) and love (because I was just waiting to fall in love with MY guy and I wanted to have all the right words ready).

In those days I was a voracious reader of Readers' Digest and in one of the issues I came across this article by Jim Bishop, titled "There is no God?" Need I say that it swept me off my feet with the power of its words. At that time I was neither religious nor spiritual nor anything (which is pretty much what I am now) and yet I took the time to copy the entire article down. I forget which issue, which year. I guess what appealed to me the most was the manner in which the author had both begun and ended the piece - the same sentence, one a statement, the other a question.

Over the years I forgot where the article was but from time to time I would make mention of it and wonder how I would ever get my hands on it again. To my surprise, I recently found it while searching for something. I decided to type it out and keep on my computer and so, today, I'm posting this article for which I claim no credit, other than endorsing the idea that this is what is meant by a thought PERFECTLY EXPRESSED!!

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There is no God?  - by Jim Bishop

There is no God. All the wonders around us are accidental. No almighty hand made a thousand million stars. They made themselves. No power keeps them on their steady course. The earth spins itself to keep the oceans from falling off towards the sun. Infants teach themselves to cry when they are hungry or hurt. A small flower invented itself so we could extract digitalis for sick hearts.

The earth gave itself day and night, tilted itself so that we could get seasons. Without the magnetic pole man would be unable to navigate the trackless oceans of water and air, but they just grew there.

How about the sugar thermostat in the pancreas? It maintains a level of sugar in the blood sufficient for energy. Without it all of us would fall into a coma and die.

Why does snow sit on mountain-tops waiting for the warm spring sun to melt it at just the right time for the young crops in farms below to drink? A very lovely accident.

The human heart will beat for 70 or 80 years without faltering. How does it get sufficient rest between beats? A kidney will filter poison from the blood, and leave good things alone. How does it know one from the other?

Who gave the human tongue flexibility to form words, and a brain to understand them, but denied it to other animals?

Who showed a womb how to take the love of two persons and keep splitting a tiny ovum until, in time, a baby would have the proper number of fingers, eyes and ears and hair in the right places, and be strong enough to sustain life?

There is no God?    
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Gardening and me...

"What the hell do you do in that garden for so long?" a friend of mine recently asked me. Every time he called or came online to chat I would be in the garden or going to the garden. Yeah...most people who knew me as a child would be stunned, more than anything else, to discover that the adult me is an avid gardener.

In fact, only yesterday I had a conversation with my dad who asked me whether I remember a child of his who would be forever down with a stomach ache or a head ache the second my parents (avid gardeners themselves) would announce the mandatory 'garden time' on weekends!! God, there was nothing I hated more than gardening then, especially when it meant that I had to pull my nose out of a book and get into a place that was full of creepy-crawlies and dog and cat shit and horrible kid brothers who would be scampering around and knocking you into rose bushes and bougainvilla pots. Sure, I loved watering the flowers ONLY. I couldn't be bothered with weeding and turning the soil over and manuring and anything else. Yet, like everything else in my childhood, it wasn't without its fun moments. How can I ever forget my mom, a botany teacher, hopping around like mad after realising that she had just picked up a long juicy earthworm with her bare fingers while loosening the mud around the marigolds?? As you can imagine, after having a hearty laugh at her hopping around in her nightie and screeching all sorts of gibberish, it was the only excuse I needed to put down my own trowel and get back to the arms of my pirate in Daphne duMaurier's Frenchman's Creek.

Marriage brought me to a house with a large garden space. My father-in-law had planned to build a second house in that space for his younger son (my husband) and had, in the meantime, begun a nice vegetable garden. Before his dreams were realised his time on earth was up and over the years that space had been used on and off by the many tenants who came to occupy the ground floor house. After my marriage I found this large space, that was both dumpyard and sometime garden, and was bitten by the gardening bug.

Gardening was tough, especially since my new-found passion was shared by no one at home. My husband and his older brother had none of their father's interest in gardening and all my mother-in-law did was reminisce about how her husband had grown truckloads of vegetables all by himself. In fact, my brother-in-law would make it a point to come and stand on the balcony every time I was weeding the wasteland (as I called it) and encourage me by saying "Its very difficult ya. What you are pulling out now will grow back again in two days. Its a waste of time." These very soothing words ended one day when I lost my temper and told him "If you can't come and help me at least don't discourage me ..."  

In those early months of marriage my husband would, after much cajoling and begging and pleading, endeavour to show his love for me by helping me out in the garden. After exactly thirty seconds of weeding he would ask me "Baby, can you get me a stool? My knees are aching." After a few minutes he would want me to come and wipe the sweat off his brow. After another five minutes he would want me to come and clear the few weeds he had uprooted from near his foot. After ten long minutes of back-breaking labour he wanted some cool lemonade to quench his thirst. Well! needless to say I stopped him from helping me out in the garden as it was much more work for me having him help me garden. And yet, after all these years I'm left with the niggling suspicion that ... maybe, just maybe ... it was a brilliant scheme hatched by my husband to be let off the hook for the rest of his life!!  

Finally...

Well, here it is!! I've finally taken the plunge into the ocean of blogging. Today I find myself in a terrible place...teetering on the brinks of a depression, yet again. I go into terrible zones, the dankest recesses of the mind from which return seems almost always impossible. But then there is something irrepressible in the human spirit, in MY spirit, and, as my dad puts it, I "bounce back." Yet, the time spent in those zones take a toll on me and those around me. So, to save everyone and myself a whole lot of bother I finally decided to use the magic of words to wrest me from the desolation that threatens to envelop me. Its late at night, so I guess I'll let this suffice for now.