Living The Life

Hello everyone, my name is Rishabh and today I'm gonna tell you all about my life! So, it all started when I shifted from Pune where I had lived for 4 years of my life. We had taken a plane to Delhi and were staying in our house with minimal furniture and other stock. We had shifted on the 7th floor and it seemed pretty high to me compared to our house on the 4th floor in Pune. 

When we first came to our new society, I was scared because I had a fear of lifts and this lift was shaking when it went up. I held on to my mom for the first time when we got in but then I got used to it. I had to.

It was like beginning afresh, like a second chance to make a lasting impression on the people of my school. I was very excited to go to my school because we had left at the end of my holidays in Pune but since different states have different plans for the year I had to wait till the holidays in Delhi were over. I was desperate and couldn't wait for my new life to begin, I could be a different person here and nobody would know because everyone I was to meet didn't know me.

And so there began my first day of school. My mom had dropped me off at the gate and I went in. I had remembered my class because before the school closed for the holidays I had met my class teacher at PTM. So I went to my class room and found that it was empty but the lights were switched on.

It was a totally different classroom. There were six batches of two tube lights each for illumination, all of them equidistant, There was a big window at the other end of the class which was covered in an orange curtain and there were wood and steel chairs and tables in five rows with six in each. The floor was covered in seemingly random arrangement of mostly white and less of yellow tiles which was new to me, the teacher's table was in an 'L' shape with one end against the wall and the other was in the open. Attached to the table was the teacher's cupboard which had a big compartment and one small with two and one door respectively. At the bottom of the cupboard which was made of wood was another compartment of two doors which housed the subwoofer and CPU of the projector.

Not far away was a wooden frame outlining the two white boards which was also new to me because I had always seen the black boards on which we had to write with chalk till 4th and now I was in 5th. The frame was a lot bigger than the boards themselves and in the shape of a rectangle which almost covered the whole of the wall. The student's tables were positioned facing this frame. A third of the walls were covered with white tiles and the next third was covered with wood and the last third was plain white plaster along with the ceiling. 

As I entered the class room I found out that the door was also made of wood and right next to it was a metal dustbin with a garbage bag fitted into it. This was exciting, a new class meant new friends, new teachers, new enemies and new lovers!

I looked around to my right and chose the last table in the first row to sit on. There was a lot of wood work in the class, I noticed as I sat on the yellow wood and steel chair which had a slightly inclined table for easier writing position. The table had a small but long depression in the front which served as a holder for pencils and other quick access stationary. I was impressed.

So I sat down quietly with my head between my hands on the table, waiting for my new classmates to walk in through that door any moment. To me it seemed like a long time before someone actually came in, let alone notice me. Two girls walked in through the door chatting with one another like they were best friends from a long time. One of them was short and the other was taller than the other, both of them had curly dark brown hair and they were in skirts which went a little ways below their knees, exposing their calves which were bare and half sleeves shirts which were buttoned up except the top ones. Later I found out that it was the summer uniform and this was new too as we had only two uniforms for the whole year. One for regular wearing and the other for sports.

This school was one of the branches of the same school I went to when I was a child. I was born in Delhi, Sarita Vihar and I had spent my first two years living with my nani at her place. When I came back to live with my parents, we had shifted to Indrapuram and there I used to go to a feeder branch for my upper kindergarten and later I went to the main school.

So back to the class room, the girls sat down on the first table and kept their bags on the table while I kept mine hanged on the side hooks. They continued to chat for a while and then when they looked back they saw me. It came to them as a surprise because I had come after the holidays and generally the newbies come at the start of the term. The expressions on their faces were priceless and worth capturing. Their expression was like girls in a party who didn't notice the man behind who was trying to move through the crowd.

Anyways, once they noticed me they came over to my table and asked me the general questions like, "What's your name?" and the rest of the 'w's in English. I never knew that these girls would become my best friends in out group of five friends, especially the taller one. There was something about her that intrigued me. That day I was introduces to the rest of the class and these two girls spread the news of coming of a new student and it spread like wild fire.

That day I was seated with the topper of the class or as her name meant the flute of lord Krishna, Vanshika. I was also informed that the language which I wanted to take as a third language, 'French' was taught here from 4th and I was a year behind. Luckily the French teacher was nice and she helped me out. 

I was taken on a tour by the girls I had met in the morning of  the school and they showed the whole building during the break. I got to know their names Jia and Chitrangdha. They had one more best friend who was Manvi. I was surprised that on my first day of school I had got three best friends who were girls! 

It was the best first day of new school that anyone could've asked for and the first year went by like this. I had gotten straight A's in all of my subjects through out the year and I had even surpassed the topper.

It was the reputation that anyone could've asked for but that wasn't it. I was performing amazingly in my extracurriculars also. I had chosen to do Theatre out of Music and Dance. The extracurricular periods were called MDT with respect to the three extracurriculars. The most amazing thing I loved about this school was that we had something called 'Talent Hunts' in which you could showcase your skills in MDT. I had registered for my first Talent Hunt and I had forgotten about it except the day when it was supposed to happen. As we moved to the stilt area which was basically an open ground floor which had a wooden stage at one end.

Luckily I was creative and was watching a lot of Charlie Chaplin episodes with my sister during the recent days. I had a black woolen cap with me and I was in my uniform which was trousers and half sleeves shirt with a red sweater which I was wearing. We also used to get newspapers of ToI and Hindustan Times student editions everyday. 

I combined all of them to form my outfit. I stuffed my cap with newspapers and wore it as a tall hat which Charlie Chaplin used. I set up my set for the act which was basically a table and some newspapers. I took the essence of mime and humour of Chaplin and performed one of his episodes with out any former practice. Fortunately everyone laughed and I won a certificate saying that I held and Outstanding position in the competition. I was surprised and happy that I had won but it was until 6th grade that I told everyone that I had won it just like that.

From that day onwards I had got so many offers for participating in competitions which our school never really won but it was fun to participate for the experience and I was happy doing it. I had won the talent hunt of 6th and 8th from then. It was in 7th that I made a mistake of switching my performance to singing 'Heathens' by Twenty One pilots and I lost. That day I realised that I should do what I'm good at and happy with because I had switched to singing just for a change and little did I know that the singers who were my competition were pretty good at doing what they did and inevitably I lost.

                                              ********************************** 

Hey readers, hope you liked it as this is just the first of a series!

yours, Author.