The noise on the first floor

I first walked into the school, early on a Monday morning. The school building looked like any other BMC school in Mumbai, save for the innumerable pigeons that greeted me with an infectious flutter at the gate. This school building houses BMC schools in four different mediums of instruction: Marathi, Telugu, Gujarati and English. The first floor houses the English medium initiative undertaken by an NGO that educates community children from the surrounding chawls and bastis.

It was still early when I reached and children were only trickling in to their classrooms. As I walked down the corridor, I was met with warm smiles from women busily going about with brooms, books or stationery in their hands. Slowly, I heard music flowing out of different classrooms. The same women were now in the classrooms, cheerfully welcoming each child as he or she walked in, all set for a new day at school. I was stunned for a few moments as I remembered my own days in school. We were herded into classrooms and quickly silenced as soon as the bell rang. Then we waited for the teacher to make her entry so we could welcome her with our “good morning teacher” in a rising crescendo.

Almost a decade later, here I was faced with the possibility of an entirely new equation between teacher and pupil.

The first floor at this school is never for a moment enveloped by the piercing silence typical to most ‘good’ schools in the country. It is always bursting with curious voices of enquiry. Today, almost eight months later, as I work with the children on the first floor, I rarely miss the silence that my school was enveloped in, always.