Amma, you can’t think of changing my engineering college every year now,” said my son when my husband and I took him to his hostel outside Chennai.
Though we laughed, we could not ignore the resignation in his voice.
When the boy was just three, my husband was transferred with a promotion to one of the northern parts. We accepted the offer as those were our prime years of progress in life.
After an extensive survey of trustworthy friends, we put him in a school which offered Hindi as the second language and Tamil as the third. It was music to my ears as I already knew Hindi, and Tamil was our mother tongue. Without much deliberation, we admitted him in the new school.
When he finished Class 1, an unexpected transfer to a Marathi-speaking region left us shocked. We were greatly worried about the task of finding a school again. This time, he had to study Marathi as the second language and Hindi as the third. One can imagine how depressed parents can become with a set of new conditions posed by schools and the task of finding a Marathi teacher.
The uncertainties in my husband’s transfers forced us to return to Chennai. We were getting worried about finding a good school. Before our son had turned eight, we had moved him three times. I had never seen him happy, as he had made few friends and was always thrown into a new environment.
Much to our luck, we found a CBSE school and this time he was lucky enough to find a best friend. They became inseparable. My joy, however, was short-lived. It was the era when parents dreamt of getting their ward admitted to IIT or to a medical college, but the school did not have the facilities to open the magic doors for such aspirants.
With no option left, I took the extreme step of changing him to another renowned school in Chennai, where parents stand in queue for hours for application form, never mind the bleak possibility of getting an admission.
My son got admission into Class 6 and completed his Class 12 from there. As if it were the karma of every Indian parent, he then entered one of the most popular engineering colleges outside Chennai. And this one luckily had hostel accommodation. As soon as we entered his hostel room and were introduced to his new room mate, I found that he was the same old inseparable classmate that he had befriended in school.
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