Table Memories: MoSL Part II

Remember those longish polished brown tables inside our library I talked wrote about in the previous post, Memories of my School Library (MoSL).They shone like mirrors, you see. And many a time we played catch your reflection when this period stretched to infinity. There were 3 rows of those tables and benches to seat nearly 60 students shoulder to shoulder at a time in the library. Since no class had library periods during the same hour we never shared the space or dared to have our small talks inside those four walls.

Nevertheless, on the occasion of an essay & a story-writing competition the library accommodated those many numbers. Even during those extempore competitions we were kept behind its closed doors to remain clueless about the topic spoken about so vehemently over the microphone in the adjacent auditorium until 5 minutes before our turn. Martha Ma’m was a lenient soul at those trying & tensed times. She permitted us to discuss, and we made some noise munching on her Marie biscuits and thinking out loud all the possible points on every possible topic.

These tables were where we did our home work whenever there was a Library period that day in the morning hours. I still remember, I was in Class V then, a friend was dictating notes (of course, we were at the opposite end, far away from the Librarian’s chair), and how she pronounced muslim for muslin (a kind of cloth) to be caught by our social science teacher the next period for a spelling error in all our note-books.