School days at Garrison Primary School Dehuroad

You just don’t know what appeases the rain gods. For days they keep holding dark clouds above that wouldn’t shed a single drop of rain and then suddenly they smile and shower Pune with spells of non-stop rains.
I was getting habituated to the constant humdrum of rains. They went searching into my subconscious, opened files after files of hidden memories that were locked, sealed, and forgotten.
How to cope when a fragment of your fond memories peeks out and instantly hides away, challenging your inquisitive mind. Well you chase after it into your mind mine and drill down the remaining.

So there.. these pitter patter droplets drift me back to those days at Garrison primary school, Dehuroad.
I must have been in the first standard then and Miss Elizabeth was our class teacher. She was a world of beauty and charm.

Those days at Primary school,  we little ones were always found clustered under those shady banyan trees or fiery gulmohar trees or  under those green neem trees.

There was one such huge Banyan tree where little kinder garters  settled down for lunch. Vidya my classmate had a huge group who became the banyan tree diners since they often
lunched there.

I was such a lost sheep then.. never could be part of one group at a time. I flitted with the seniors who came in the bus sometimes or sometimes lunched alone in the nook of a neem tree. How I used to envy the diners there ... specially during rainy season.

Once Vidya the chief of the banyan tree diners invited me over to the tree.  That was just once that I sat there. The place was extremely uncomfortable. Slippery wet branches and hard seating. That was the end of my jealousy trips for the banyan tree diners.

Aarti Naidu one of my classmate... ...Remember her as a little rye seed.. Once sitting on a stone slab, we were discussing about God. Wonder what could primary graders talk so much about God... but then God was a vast topic to be discussed. 

I made a statement... "God is there everywhere". Must have picked it up from Church or may be from my Papa.. and there were others too who nodded their confirmation. Some said, God is inside the tree, some said God is inside the class, others said God is inside our dabbas too. That was when our fiery Aarti Naidu jumped up and came up with "God is there inside this very stone that we are seated on." 
I was flabbergasted.... I could have accepted God to be in the skies, trees, school, class but to imagine that God is right there inside the stone slab that we sat on kind of unnerved me. Luckily the bell rang and rescued me. 

while I write this, the rains are still droning full-fledged with that tip tip noise. There was some poem of rains that we read during primary times... keep missing on those words, even when I remember the tune.... That’s the same about recollecting the memories of our school days. I get them in bits and pieces and could never catch them complete.