Race against time : Prelude

2004
Nagpur

Dad dropped me and my sister at the school gate. My sister joined her friends and headed to her classroom. As I was about to pass through the school gate, one of my friends met me and said :

"You forgot your SUPW bag!"

I realised that to be true. I did place that godforsaken thing near my school bag but forgot to bring it along in a hurry.

Now let me digress a little and explain what this SUPW bag was. It was a bag you made using plastic sheet and decorated it as you liked. This bag was later used to keep your assignments of the SUPW class.

But what was the big deal? Who took that period of the time table seriously? The "Socially Useful Productive Work" class was a pain for most of the students and for all the parents, because, hello? Do you expect that students did all that art and craft by themselves? No! They were completed using inputs from parents and sometimes they ended up making the whole of it.

But being the kid that I was, I didn't want to be pointed out in the class or to be punished for being insincere. The time of morning assembly was drawing near. Students in queues had already started trickling out of the school building to the playground, where the morning assembly was held. There wasn't any time to lose.

So I ran! I ran back to my home!

With my heavy school bag still on my back, I started running back towards my home. To my little feet, the distance from the school to back home was a lot. I kept running. I passed by the usual landmarks I saw everyday, now in a blur, because of the tears welling up in my eyes. The thought of being late for school was also something I dreaded, among many other things. After a point of time, I was aware of my breathlessness but my feet didn't stop.

I encountered an old lady, going in the opposite direction, who asked me something in Marathi. I didn't understand a word she said and in all my awkwardness, I nodded and kept running! Perhaps she thought of me to be crazy to be running in the opposite direction of the school at that time of the day.

After a lot of running, I finally reached home - out of breath and in tears and that alarmed my parents. After I managed to tell them the reason behind this endeavour of mine, my dad was furious - for putting myself through this unnecessary ordeal, for something as frivolous as that SUPW bag. Mom intervened and asked him to drop me back, lest I get late for school.

It was just a few hours into the day and this high drama episode had taken place. I was dropped at the school gate again, this time with that wretched SUPW bag. There was a bit more of running to do. I ran to my classroom at the first floor and back to the ground, in the queue of my class at my place, just in time.

All sorted.
Or maybe not?

The last period. SUPW.
Though the teacher was very much present in the school that day, he didn't turn up for the class!

To this day, my dad teases me for that incident and all the family (myself included) has a good laugh over it! :D