The smell of School !

I guess school is going to start soon! That means every store has a "school" sale with things from notebooks, backpacks, shoes, down to the toilet items we found for "dorm" residents.

While the stores are busy selling anything and everything in the name of a "back to school" sale, what interested me was the smells as we walked through a section of the local Target store.

It was weird. I can easily understand one thought process jumping over to another, in my head. It is almost routine, as is obvious by the rambling in this space.

Have you, ever had a smell jump over and create a flashback smell in your head? It happened to me. I was in the notebook section and was taking a whiff of that smell which for some reason reminded me of those little erasers we used to have in 1st standard. The little orange or green ones, which have an outer shell that looks like a hippo or elephant or rhino, and you open the animal in the middle and inside is a nice cylindrical scented eraser! Remember those?

So there I am, in the middle of this aisle, with my nose held high, trying to savor that smell for a few more fleeting seconds, when all of a sudden, there is a smell jump! I suddenly smell fresh notebooks and brown paper, the ones we used to cover all our 192 page classwork and homework notebooks with, just two days before school started. That instantly brought a flood of memories.

Till I can remember, our school used to give out the books from the "school book store", three or four days before school started. This way we could cover all the texts, notebooks etc, with brown paper covers. These large sheets of brown paper would cover at least 4 of the 192 page std notebooks. Later in life they introduced the long "Assignment" notebook, which would make sure that we wasted enough of this paper.

My parents would theorize that the school must be in cahoots with the brown paper manufacturer association because they would mandate all kids wrap the notebooks! If we did not comply, we would get "blackmarks". Yes! you got that right. There was a chart in every classroom called the "Blackmark chart". 10 signatures from the teachers, and you get to go to the principals office!

In different sections, this chart would show different trends. In rooms where the kids were all dorks and extremely competitive, the chart would be near empty! In rooms where kids would pride themselves on getting in trouble, it would be a race to get to the maximum limit of 30, at which point you got to stand outside the principals office the whole day, get the occasional insult from the PT master and life would go on!

As usual, I digress! What were we talking about? Ah, yes, the smell of 30% fresh notebooks, 30% brownpaper, mixed with another 10% of glue (the green goopy maida flour glue!). Add to that the smells of new plastic lined school bags from the local "Amma Fancy store", new Bata canvas shoes, the unique smell of white shoe polish that we would apply in multiple coats, the smell of the new school belt, the smell of school uniforms, fresh from the "Artland" tailor shop, etc. etc., and you start wondering "Looks like it was not a bad childhood after all. So many great memories!".

Well, I even get a flashback smell, of the dreaded hair full of coconut oil, which my mom or aunts or grandma (in some cases all of them) would come and apply to support me on my first day of school, which would instantly turn me into mosquito man (kid you not, you could visibly see a mosquito halo around my head with all that oil) and make my friends joke, "enna da, ennai kadaiyave thalaiyile thookindu vare?" (What gives? It looks like you are carrying an entire oil store on your head!).

Just as those memories vanished into the background, saw that Jr. was smelling everything as well, just like dear old daddy!

Hopefully, we made her childhood experience of getting ready for school a memorable one. Who knows, a few decades from now, there might be a Jr. blogpost on school shopping and the smell of school supplies at Target!

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