Schools of thought

SOCIETY

Did you hear what happened at Loreto?" began my friend by way of greeting on the STD call from Lucknow.

She can happily bear the provincial life, I certainly can't; and we have both moved on so much that we don't really have very much in common except occasional keep-in-touch calls and memories of our school days.

Many of these involve Loreto. Not that either of us ever studied there "" should I say thank god... like I would have all those years ago?

We studied, you see, in the other school. If there was one rivalry that could rival Edberg vs Becker (yes, in those days), or more appropriately, Graf vs Sabatini, it would have to be the one between La Martiniere (Girl's College, the full, rather un-posh name of our school) and Loreto Convent, Lucknow.

We wore tunics, they wore salwar kameezes, we were affiliated to the ISC, they to the UP Board, we were Protestant, they Catholic, we had "socials" with the boys' school, they didn't, we had a sister school in France ("Lyon", we'd take pride in rolling our tongues) they didn't, we bunked school and roamed around Hazratganj in our uniforms (and didn't get expelled), they didn't because there was only one gate that would be locked...

In general, we were believed to be either tomboyish and unbecoming or "fast" and dubious (though I'd still call it "daring"), while they were the delicate ladies, the kinds who'd go on to marry bureaucrats and spend the rest of their lives supervising table settings! Or so we scoffed.

On rainy days, when all other schools in Lucknow gave their students a welcome day off, we, at La Martiniere trudged on.

Sometimes miserably because this, after all, was a Saturday "" a half-day, which could easily have been demoted to a no-day but for Ms Cornelius, the SUPW teacher, the elderly spinster who made us slog over stitching and embroidery, all in the name of Gandhi and charity while she read M&B romances "" though that's another story.

"...But even Loreto has declared a rainy day," my mother would point out, unhelpfully. "That's only 'cause they'd melt in the rain," I would say disdainfully, and pull up my socks.

But back to the present. "Some of the girls fainted," giggled my friend, taking an uncharitable delight in the trauma of some students who saw the "manifestation of Lord Jesus Christ in human form", as the nuns who'd invited a "medium" to demonstrate his occult art in the school termed it.

My friend and me spent a very pleasant half hour after that talking about this and that and, in particular, about antiquated institutions whose role-models remain kerchief-sniffing Victorian damsels to this day. "Loreto is still rolling them out," declared my friend before putting down the receiver firmly.

Is it? Did it ever? Or are such views plain prejudice? If I remember right, the same school also once employed a gutsy teacher, who, as the legend went, single-handedly foiled an attempted robbery and rape by the simple task of picking up a stick and telling the assailants to get out of her home.

But more importantly, would, say, a more privileged Modern School child in New Delhi have reacted in the same way as the girls from Loreto did? Or would s/he have merely laughed cynically at the mofussil mumbo jumbo?

Then again, I guess, there is something to be said about the girls fainting "" hopefully in incredulity "" rather than blindly extolling the miraculous, the way many of us did when Janet drank milk and sea water at Mahim turned sweet.

And finally, here is a prayer to the Lord: give us many more old-fashioned institutions that would include planchette sessions in their curricula but deliver us from hardline goons and vandals. Amen.