My life as a student……

School was the most dreaded place for me..I think I started my school in Cotton Hill school Trivandrum..I have no memories of those days.

The one I remember well is 4^th standard of Baker Memorial school in Kottayam. I think that was the class when I started learning English. The class teacher Sosamma Kochamma taught us English and I admired her for her beauty and her neat dress. She used to wear cotton sarees neatly starched and ironed. Another thing I can still remember is her smell. She had the smell of bread and milk….

Sosamma Kochamma would walk in between the benches and when she reach near me, I would inhale all the smell I could hold..

All my admiration turned into an aversion with a single incident.

We progressed in learning English, from alphabets to words. Then the day came when she gave us a surprise dictation. It is true that I couldn’t write even a word she dictated. Nothing entered my head. When she came near my bench with that stick beating on the desks, I got frightened and started scribbling something with a bent head.

She asked me to stand up and to my utter dismay she declared that I was copying the dictation from the girl who sat near me. She snatched my notebook and sent me out of the class. If she had looked into the book she would know that she was wrong. I was the worst student but I was honest. Getting zeros in Maths and English didn’t bother me as much as that. This incident disheartened me so much that it was another excuse I made to myself for not showing any interest in studies. Thus the image of Sosamma Kochamma shattered inside me and I lost all enthusiasm in going to school.