Past - Nigeria 1981 - 1987 [Written 22 November 2007]

Port Harcourt, Nigeria (a West African nation) was the exact place where our family spent some 7 and a half odd years (I was all but 5 years when we moved over there). Our uncle - my father’s elder brother – a Doctor and settled there for the past 2-3 years, was who had invited my father to come over to Nigeria and have a job as a teacher (in Alama Secondary School, which was some 80 Kms from where we lived – my father and later on my mother who also joined as a Mathematics teacher in the same school, would drive in our – and my favourite Beetle – orange coloured and pretty old but still going strong!!!), more on the be-hest of my mother, who felt that making ends meet in Rampur was getting extremely difficult by the meager agricultural income – that too shared between my father and my ‘chacha’ – his younger brother and family.

And so, I did my schooling in Nigeria from 1st till 6th class. My brother had moved over to a different school after his 5th class in my school (Army Children’s School – GRA, Port Harcourt, Nigeria). My next school, which was pretty far from our house – involved a lot of travel for me – in fact I used to be picked and dropped half way (at Savana Bank) from where onwards I would take a ‘mini-van’ type of bus quite popular there as the form of public transport (they had a unusual way to collect money for the ticket – no ticket was issued – but one had to pay 20 Kobo [100 Kobo = 1 Naira – the currency in Nigeria] after a fixed number of stops, irrespective of wheather you had to get down or not, then again 20 Kobo after some stops and so on till you got down – innovative? maybe? But at least they were able to avoid people travelling for free for short distances!!!) to my school.

Best part that I remember, at least of my later schooling days in Nigeria, was that, we had a lot of ‘non-regular’ (at least from Indian context) subjects – like typing, shorthand, and carpentry workshop. These (as I now realize) have inculcated a ‘jugaar’ (jack of all trades) type of nature in me – which helps in me doing many weird and petty small home jobs even today!!!

The other side of the coin was that, in my last year at school there, we were made to cut grass using long blades with a rubber strip wound on to the bottom as a handle) in a long swirling motion to get the long – and sometimes the ‘elephant grass’ variety of grass cut.

Another part that I remember and cherish even now, were the trips our family would make to India, almost every year. In between were times when we would travel via different places on the way. I still have faint memories of our trips to London and Paris during one – which was to be the ‘final’ one back to India. I remember myself yearning to get a overcoat in a ‘Mother’s Care’ store in Paris and showed dissent to my mother by laying down on the store’s floor – till my mother yielded and got me the ‘slightly smaller size’ coat – one that wore proudly for the rest of the 3-4 days trip.