Townwalks
3 min readJul 26, 2020
Every second Saturday when the bell signaled the end of another day at school , children did not immediately line up outside the the dining hall as was routine. Instead they excitedly rushed to the locker room and hastily donned on the formal white shirt and school blazer that was reserved for special occasions like these. The haste however was for children. Boys from the senior school went about this with their usual calm demeanor. They were seniors , no joke. The warden ushered everyone out of the locker room using tricks that some boys were now immune to. Switching off the lights , the daily countdown. This, was the townwalk day.
For three hours every fortnight, students were left free to go to town and roam around. Only the last formality of the principal's address remained after you had changed into formals and lined up class-wise in long straight queues in the quadrangle. While we got impatient with every wasted minute, the school principal would walk down and remind the boys of certain key rules. Bhutia market out of bounds. Use good language. Be back in time. And then we were good to go. One queue at a time. The seniors went first. Juniors envied them for that. A member of the staff always accompanied the junior boys. They were not allowed to take the Tallital short cut. 6:30 you had to be back.
To save time, children ran to town to save time. The seniors walked. As a tiny eight year old who looked more juvenile than other kids that age , dressed in formals and carrying an umbrella as shelter from the inclement and erratic Nainital weather, I would run down the 2 kilometer downhill road to do what I could with the two weeks of saved pocket money. The goal of running was to beat other boys to the phone booth and get a call through to home as quickly as I could. Those sixty rupees of saved money were kept in the inner pocket of the blazzer. Safe. With it a note, that had everything I had to mention or inquire over the phone. Long distance calling rates were still a thing back then, so I spent a lot of my money on the phone booth. Most of it actually. Some PCO owners were kind and would let your parents call back. I would spend fifty minutes on the phone. Talk to everyone: Mummy, Papa, Dadu and Amma. If there was time left I would call up Mama because he was specially close to me. I would talk about letters, the weather, my activities in school. Sometimes I cried on the phone, missing home. With the remainder of my money I would buy sweets and start my walk back to school.
As a senior I walked down the Tallital road. Took the rikshaw service at the mall road. With my augmented pocket money(now Rs 100/week), I went and ate at a local restaurant first. Then called home to talk for fifteen minutes. Call up Mama. The ritual still remained. I was no longer home sick. Spending your townwalk talking on the phone was wasteful. You could go to the cyber-cafe. Or walk the Mall road. Eat at Moti mahal. Get packed buntikkis for dinner. Eat pastries from Sakley's. I would buy the Times of India crest edition, the latest edition of the Science Reader or Down to Earth. That was ration for a perfect Sunday. When you got back to school, you only had to spend half an hour in the study hall before you went for dinner. And depending on the warden's mood, you were allowed to make noise. For dinner, most students got something packed from town. Others ate Maggi. The townwalks were special for so many reasons. Getting to hear the familiar voices from the family after two weeks, getting to eat some ice-cream and some restaurant food. And just being for those two hours, liberated.
