At the halfway crossroads of life, whenever the rain falls a certain way, I am carried back to the slopes of Jharipani, where Oak Grove School sat amid real oak groves. It was almost too real, as if the hills had been placed there on purpose just to tear the fog out of the clouds. We lived high enough for mornings to arrive in pure gold, and low enough for the skyline to turn from sunflower yellow to the deep purple of jamun whenever October climbed in.
As the country simmers yet again in the protests of the young and the restless, I am reminded of the crackle of arguments in our Mussoorie days. The Mandal Commission storm of the early 1990s, and later the early calls for a separate hill state in 1994–95, which eventually became Uttarakhand in 2000, were the big background noises of our childhood. As kids, all between 8 and 18 years of age, we had little inkling of what happened outside the school gates. Newspapers arrived 24 hours late, television was a weekly entertainment box. Current affairs, for most of us, meant the imaginary affairs boys carried around in their heads with a girl, usually chosen and thrust upon them by batchmates. We had barely heard of government policies, laws, bylaws, acts, or any such serious adult business. Political anger was a completely alien concept. And yet these two waves changed the air in the hills forever. We began to sense the mood of the mountains. I believe it was around early 1990 when the Mandal Commission became the rage across the country. As the recommendations were announced/implemented, the country erupted into protests and counter-protests. Those undercurrents, and the over-estimated emotions that came with them, reached Jharipani too. Since we were mostly not allowed to step out of the building, and certainly not out of the campus, we overheard things knowingly and unknowingly. Teachers spoke in hush-hush tones of protestors coming to the school, passing by, or pausing outside the campus gates on their way to Mussoorie or down to Doon. We were far too young to judge anything happening around us. In fact, we were so blissfully oblivious that Protestors were not our celebrities! Anyone who had seen protestors crossing the road became our Superstar of the Day! And if someone had actually interacted with a protest group, that person instantly became Super Human.
We were made to believe that it only mattered if they came very near to us. I think some of us secretly wanted that to happen. Most of us were just ignorant and quite happy with life being delightfully uneventful. We had no idea we would somehow become part of the story. But, we did. School closed, and we were sent home. For the first time in my living memory, I experienced the Lucknow Durga Puja of 1990. Those ten days deserve a story of their own. They were life-changing for me. More of that later.
Jharipani sharpened every feeling. Dormitory beds were always cold. Quilts and blankets were only warm enough if you stayed frozen in one single position all night like a museum exhibit. Sweaters were warm, but mufflers itched. Shoes stayed polished only until the last step out of the dormitory, after which they immediately became honest again. Every boy learned to carry loneliness with comic pride. Jharipani made everything easier to bear. The people of Jhits could tell from a child’s face whether he or she was hungry, missing parents, had been dhunned by a senior, or had been caught red-handed doing something and was now waiting for the final punishment verdict. Then there was the weather. The mist would roll into the classroom so thickly that we could almost gulp its wetness. The fog would swallow the Doon Valley whole. Rains would fall without pause for days and weeks, and yet nothing ever felt gloomy. And then the sunshine — freshest, sharpest, and warmest in the most completely unfair way. I could go on forever. Jharipani was our secret, the one the mountains kept from the world below.
The next great commotion came in 1994–95, when we were the senior-most batch on campus, in Classes XI and XII. By then we knew a little more than before, though not nearly enough to pretend we were wise. We still had our daily superstars and superhumans, and we remained gloriously ignorant for a while. But not for long. We ended up shouting slogans over trucks and buses arranged by local Mussoorie protestors, driving up the hilly roads, and having the time of our lives. We reinvented our sports cheering cries into pro-Uttarakhand slogans. “Water-Water Steam Steam — Pull Together Uttarakhand Team!” was the best one I remember. There were many more. I think one ran to the tune of “Uttarakhand do, Vikas lo!” We would laugh ourselves breathless at our own brilliance. It was nonsense, of course, but it was our nonsense, and we shouted it with the confidence of people who believed they had discovered the language of revolution. We became deadly serious the moment outsiders were around.
Best of all, and a full-length movie story material – As per curriculum, senior boys who chose Arts would walk to the Girls’ School for Political Science and Geography classes. We staged a magnificent story about what those passing protestors had supposedly done to innocent boys, our batch. That, naturally, led to immense tension and life-scaring possibilities. Eventually, school closed down, yet again! Am pretty sure, the lead actors will be reading this bit soon. Let us connect, offline, my bouyzzzz!
Children do what children always do: we turned history into child’s play. Still, even in all the mischief, something serious entered the mind. We did not understand the full meaning, but we could feel its shape. Teachers and staff spoke of identity, fairness, pride, and the right to be seen. These were very large words for 12- to 14-year-olds. Jhits, once again, taught us to digest big feelings in small doses. What remains strongest in me is not the politics, but the beauty of those days. The early winter sunlight falling across us. The monsoon paths turning slippery and dramatic, every step a negotiation. The evenings arriving shyly, and the sky seeming almost within touching distance.
Oak Grove gave us not just schooling, but memory with altitude. It gave us the hills, the hunger, the cold mornings, the broken slogans, the first stirrings of civic life, and the strange, beautiful lesson that childhood sits playfully hidden in the corridors of our lost and forgotten stories. We remember those years with tenderness, because though we are no longer boys and girls, and though the slogans have faded and the country has entered yet another wave of change, the hills remain. In their silence, I still hear the echo of our voices — half play, half protest, fully alive.
1996 Batch
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