Tomorrow is going to be the first day of 4th standard. Appa and Vaishi Akka have been sitting in the hall all evening, spread with their grown-up book covering materials and watching shows on Vijay TV. Vanya is fascinated by how skilled and organized they both are at it.
Appa wraps the brown paper on the notebooks first. They don’t use brown paper for the textbooks because that would cover their pretty outers. Akka then sticks the green St. Paul’s label on the books and writes the details. She writes in all capitals and her letters are so narrow and responsible-looking, they remind Vanya of Vidya ma’am’s nose. Let’s hope she doesn’t teach their class this year; her no-toilet-going rule had been quite inconvenient for Vanya last time as she struggled to keep her untimely urges at bay.
Akka and Appa then wrap the books with the see-through adda-sive paper. Vanya used to think that adda-sive was brown paper because adda is the thick brown dosa that Amma makes, but this time, she went to the store with Vaishi Akka and she said that it was the sticky see-through one. Vanya was shocked and made a note in her head to tell her friends.
Appa has a smart method of using a chapati roller for holding the sticky adda-sive in place when he removes the white paper backside. He is teaching Vaishi how to do it his way, but keeps telling her “Nee always thappu thappa panare!” Vaishi Akka is getting very annoyed and tells him to do it all himself then. They keep shouting back and forth, but Vanya secretly knows that Appa is right. All the books Akka covers has wrinkles on them like Hema Paati has on her arms.
Vanya doesn’t understand why they don’t let her help, at least with the labels. Is it because Vaishi Akka has a better handwriting? Vanya won first place in the handwriting competition last year; she had a good handwriting as well. Or is it because she was too young to join into their grown up conversations about something called Phyjics, which was Vaishi’s new favourite subject? She would look into her Oxford dictionary for the word and find out what this Phyjics was all about.
Amma never helps out with any of this. She is already busy with so many other things. Vanya is waiting for them to finish covering her English textbook so she can finish reading all the stories before anyone else. There is a story in there named Alice in Wonderland which she is excited about. In class, when teacher starts off the lesson, she will already know everything and answer when any questions are asked.
She has been studying at the same school for 3 years, but she still shivers of anticipation thinking about the first day of school. Who will her classmates be this year? And her teachers? Would there be any new students? She would be nice to the new students and hopefully make a bestfriend this year. She always had a lot of friends, but never a bestfriend like Smrithi and Ayesha had each other, or Carol and Aditya. She longed to have one special person to always sit with or share secrets and tiffin with all the time.
“Vanya, time aachu. Bag-uh pack panitu thoonga po”, Amma says. It is almost 10 o’clock. Packing her bag for the first day is always troublesome. She doesn’t have the timetable with her so she takes all the newly covered textbooks and 5 notebooks with her. No, 6. What if she doesn’t happen to have a notebook for one class and the teacher shouts at her? She will take 10 notebooks, she decides.
She neatly arranges all her books from biggest to smallest in her blue Echolac bag. Then she keeps her new Disney pencil box stocked with 4 sharpened pencils, one rubber, one sharpener and 2 scales, one big and one small. The big one won’t fit into the box so she keeps it in between her textbooks. Her bag will take some effort to close because of the 10 notebooks, but it is okay.
Tomorrow will be a good day. She will be dressed and ready by 7:30 for the school van. She and her friends will exchange stories from their holidays. They might sit in a new classroom with more windows. She might make a best friend tomorrow.
Hazy Jaunts 