About mango trees and delinquent behavior

I read the review of Madhur Jaffrey’s book “Climbing the Mango trees: A Memoir of a Childhood in India,” written by Lotus on her fabulous blog. I have my own childhood memory to blog about. Those who are from the Indian subcontinent will of course relate to the significance of mangoes and mango trees in our lives.

I studied in a convent school. To my non-Indian readers, catholic schools in India are not parochial schools but are in fact secular! My school grounds covered if I am not mistaken, an area of about +/-7 acres. There was the main school building, the convent and then the auditorium building. We had a beautiful cluster of mango trees in the backyard away from the school buildings. Our principal, Sister C was a martinet. Her main aim was to make all our lives miserable. She hated all of us, especially me, because she wanted all of us to be prim and proper ladies and I refused to toe the line. She always compared me to my older sister who was ever so gentle and always had a lady-like demeanor as opposed to yours truly who was a total tomboy! Sister C hated my guts and minced no words to let me know that.

When I was in the ninth grade she punished my class including me (or rather especially me) and made us stay the whole day under the mango trees. This was in late March when the academic year is ending in India and is also the onset of summer. During this time the trees are laden with raw mangoes. My classmates and I had a ball because we ate raw mangoes and played Holi (festival of color) with color, which typical to convent schools was banned. At the end of the day when she summoned us to her office our faces were smeared with ink, water colors, chalk, crayons, which were our make-shift Holi colors. That was one of the best days and highlights of that academic year! We had three divisions “A,” “B’ and “C,” with around 35-40 girls in each class. The following week my class told the girls from the other two divisions about this fun-filled “punishment.” So we all decided to harass her by screaming in unison, one class after the other so that she once again sends us to spend the entire day under the mango trees.

We had only one male teacher in our school, who taught drawing in an all girl’s school. The poor guy is an extremely mild-mannered man and is an accomplished artist who graduated from my alma mater, Sir JJ School of Art. He spoke broken English and spoke a rural dialect of Marathi therefore became a butt of my classmate’s jokes. I couldn’t join in because he used to teach me oil painting after school hours and I was scared of my mother and the consequences were he to complain to her! I am still in touch with him and even today he tells me how well mannered I was. Little does he know why? Anyway my classmates started harassing him almost reducing him to tears. He rushed to the Principal’s office to complain about us. Sister C walked in our class to find out who the miscreants were. At that very moment the next class, on cue, started screaming. She ran to the next division when the third class started screaming. She ran from one classroom to the other like a chicken with it's head cut off. Finally she summoned all of us and someone squealed to her what the great plan was. She was livid! That person even told her who all were behind this.

She called me (gee I wonder why) and four other classmates or brains behind this operation to her office. She went on and on about how we were a disgrace and totally un-ladylike in our behavior and how disappointed our parents will be etc. The entire time in her office I was thinking about my mother and the consequences. Suddenly she called out “V’s sister” (she never called me by my name but called me “V’s sister”). I looked up and she asked “What do you have to say about this?” I shook my head and stared at my toes….my thoughts still on my mother and the ominous consequences. Then she asked me “What do you want me to do?” I looked up and noticed the quote above her desk, which I read loud with a poker face, “Father, forgive them for they do not know what they are doing.” My other classmates started giggling.

Sister C offered me two alternatives; one that I would run around the grounds five times and then write 100 times, “I will not be insolent and will always behave in class,” in my notebook OR she will talk to my mother. No prizes for guessing what I chose! By the way, that afternoon I added “insolent” to my vocabulary. Thank God it was easy to guess it’s spelling….otherwise I don’t know what else she would have done to me. She called our behavior “delinquent like.”

PS: Out of the five of us; I am an architect, my two classmates became doctors, one has a Ph.D and the fourth became an engineer. Fortunately, none of us landed in jail as Sister C had predicted that afternoon!