ABSINRAW

This is maybe one of the earliest memories I have of being in the school. Hence, it is very fragmented, yet those fragments shine bright red in the summer sun.

I wish I could say which class I was in or what age I was of, but all I can do here is make an educated guess, as I clearly remember the place this memory draws from and of. Based on it, I would not have been more than 5 years old. This memory takes place in the student’s washroom area, so irrespective of what image I draw of that place for you, this story is anything but a hygienic one. Firstly, try not to think of your own school washrooms, because this one was built a bit different. And secondly, we won’t be entering them so you can keep that horror aside.

Our school building had only two floors then. Due to this, it ran in two shifts, where the students from Nursery to Class 2 attended the afternoon shift, and the rest were a part of the morning one. The washroom I am talking about was placed at the corner of the rows of KG1 and Class 1 on the ground floor. A passage just beside the stairs opened into a small open area that had the washrooms at another end. This open area was installed with the taps to wash hands and drink water. These taps and the washrooms were parallel to each other but were connected perpendicularly by an open shallow drain. This was where we were first introduced to the striking red flowers.

During a regular lunch time in the playground, we saw a huddle of kids playing very intently with something. Like a bunch of curious bees, we zoomed around without actually going to them, only to realise that some kind of competition was being conducted within the circle. We decided to move closer, to see two kids standing opposite to each other, hunched over to the center with their fists in between. After a few more struggling steps, we could see it was not their fists, but something held in their grips, like a matchstick, that they kept on pushing against each other. Before we could understand what it was, suddenly the circle went into an uproar and the different emotions of the two kids facing each other a few seconds before made it clear, that one had won and the other had lost. But we had no clue how.

The bees buzzed closer towards the one who seemed happy and asked, “What were you guys doing?” “Fighting!” Grinned the random boy 1, before showing a thin twig with a slightly bigger blob looking like a small head, on top of it. What the random boy 1 told us following it, was about the then latest craze, a battle game that involved two people going against each other with their chosen weapons – the thin twig with tiny head, that were pushed against each other to see whose head remains and whose pops off. The arsenal was to be found in the washroom area at the corner of the ground floor, and it was a free loot for all.

We ran all the way to the armory, to find a view that fills my eyes even today. All the ground between the two parallels was covered in red, crushed and pasted by countless shoes. Still the weapons were not visible, till one of the bees pointed out to a sole flower at the edge of the open shallow drain, still whole. We all could see numerous tiny head twigs peeking out of the red flower, which a few classes later were taught to us to be called “stamens”.

Let’s say, for hygienic purposes, that the bees didn’t pick that flower up to find that the flower was wet. They didn’t decide to wash it under the tap. And they didn’t distribute the weapons between themselves. But they all found their weapons from a different source altogether, still washed up though. Because after the group enthusiasm rose to feverish heights in the hopes to conduct a battleground of their own, the first fight taught them another important piece of information about their weapons. That wet twigs’ heads don’t pop off — the stems grow supple, bending instead of breaking, so always find dry arsenal. Which they continued doing, till the summer vacation came.

This memory always fascinated me because it’s hard to believe that you remember something that old. Also, because I never knew the name of the flower, or the tree. Maybe I just didn’t want to give it a name and always remember the way I had. This lasted until a few days ago, when I was at my terrace where I have shifted very recently, and found the same striking red flower right in front of me. Not just a single flower, but a towering tree staring back at me, bursting red. It felt like meeting a long-lost friend from the past whose name your never asked. Only this time, you did.