A coming of age.
We had arrived. Bright-eyed, cocky girls who believed they owned the world, or wide-eyed nervous ones who were rolling around in their mouths, a first taste of freedom, or, bored jaded ones who believed that they were just too good for what they had just signed up for.
Sophia took us all in. The future generation of Sophiaites. For now too raw to know that they had just stepped on to a campus, that in their hearts they would never leave.
You’re in a funny place when you’re 15-16 and just out of school. You’re full of ideals and grandiose ideas of your own power. You know you don’t need men but you’re dying to be asked out. You look down your nose at the girl in too much makeup but you wonder which shade of lipstick that is. You’re a determined feminist but you don’t know what that means. You believe that you’re a fully grown forest of complexity, emotion and strength. But actually you’re a freshly ploughed field. Earth turned over and just ready to be seeded.
That was me at least. Pre Sylvia Plath, but post Ayn Rand. Pre internet, but post MTV. I stepped on to the Sophia campus, bridling with newly-found power and freedom that I was still too scared to actually try out for size. This beautiful, exciting place was, to me at least, a representation of real life. Finally, a slice of The World Out There. My own portion of it. Ready to be tried out and polished off in whole if I liked it.
The canteen extension was a busy bus station of try-outs for clubs, the marble stairs were a picture- frame of college clichés-girls lost in books, filing each other’s nails, involved in passionate shouting matches about politics, literature, canteen food, boys. There were huge contrasts around me. Girls who you already knew would one day change the world, girls who came here because they were marking time, girls who were bad seed, girls who formed a sisterhood and believed that every decision they took on behalf of Women Everywhere, and girls who thought Tolkein was something you could buy off a cart, served with chillies.
And all these Girls, wherever they came from, however they thought, were treated equal and same. At the massive front gate where the security would salam or grimace depending on what morning he was having or at the wicket gate via Ramniks which you would approach after saluting Ramnik Uncle who sometimes gave you credit on a phone call and a “Green-Walla” perk, everyone Checked In. Everyone got to believe that they were born with a purpose, and just because Sophia College didn’t have a marks cut off, didn’t mean that we got to cut off our brains.
It was tough to try and hide out in Anna’s anda pao, bunking the first lecture and hoping that a lecturer wouldn’t run past, having come in late, and, seeing you eating breakfast and drinking tea, as she flew towards college, drag you all the way up to Room 27, still chewing. It was just as hard to sink in to the green walls, hoping to be ordinary. We were here, at Sophia’s, because we were Women. It simply wouldn’t do to be anything less.
Soon two years passed in a haze of Kaleidoscope, Ripples, samosa pao and my bunch of friends who had begun to mean more to me than anything else in the world. It was time to move on to “Senior College” and I had the choice to leave for a different (read co-ed) college, or stay on and keep fielding comments like “Lezzie”, “Nun” and “Man-Hater”. Or, the word men use when they really want to get nasty. When they want to tell you, in the most hateful way they know how, that they find you ugly, repulsive, and (heaven forbid) masculine-FEMINIST.
I stayed.
Not because I loved where I was, but because I was still too scarred from 15 years in a school that produced cookie cutouts of high-scoring, designer-label- wearing, perfect accent-owning adolescents whose school-groups would continue to be their only social group as long as they lived.
And for another three years, we learned to co-exist in classrooms where whispered discussions included tampons and terror attacks, nail varnish and narcissism, marriage and mass communications. For those three years I was taught by teachers who told me I mustn’t “sit like a cabbage”, that I didn’t deserve to do theatre if I didn’t have attendance, that reading and literature were two different things.
I hated these chains with a vengeance. This was not school. I was an adult not a baby. I was a Creative Type, born to wear black and kill myself with a viscous mix of cough syrup and roadside alcohol after writing a novel that would make the world miserable.
I was not to be shackled in to classrooms, soothed to sleep by talk of poetry and dead kings. But every time I slipped between the cracks, I was fished out by a nun demanding that I attend more morning lectures. Or a teacher who insisted that I pay attention in class. Or a Head of Department who refused to let me participate in co-curricular activities unless I made it past an F grade. Such nasty, wing-clipping women! Such killers of 18 year-old Greatness. Such thwarters of Real, Tortured Passion!
And after an extra year of degree college, which I managed to earn myself after diving in to a dark hole, repeating the most challenging year-SYBA, suddenly it was time to go, and I was crying my eyes out in the shed as our teachers sang “May God hold you in the palm of his hand” because really, all I wanted to do was to be held in their palms. These women who had sought me out time and again. Admonished me time and again. Not because I wasn’t good enough. But because I was too good to disappear in to mundaneness. Because I deserved more, much more than to be a man’s plaything or a pretty chime in the tinkle of social conversation.
I spent six years at Sophia College. A place that took me as a girl, watched me grow in to a woman, and sent me out that wonderful, substantial, worthy thing. A Feminist.
Itisha Peerbhoy is a Brand and Business Storyteller and the Author of Half Love Half Arranged, published by Penguin. She is currently writing her next book, and wishing she could relive her college years. She was at Sophia College from 1995, to 2001 and was taught by the great Sister Ananda, Miss Colaco, Mrs. Canteenwala and Miss Vakil.
