Heartaches And Heartbeats: Children Of Residential Schools

A captivating story of childhood in boarding schools under the shadow of the Himalayas. Those days just post India’s independence, the children in the hill station residential schools were the life of the town. They were the living breath, the heartaches and heartbeats, of the hill station. And during the three months vacations, the small town became a bleak, cold, and desolate one. An empty ghost town to some extent.The story begins during that period. It encompasses the life of a child – Shagor Ray, alienated from home and lodged in different boarding schools, for reasons beyond his ken. He believes he has been deserted by his parents. As a result, the separation impacts his formal education.Initially he finds motherly love and solace in a person he can trust. For two years at his first school, she guides him when he is just a four-year-old. Then as he goes to a new school, it is her phantasm that helps him to overcome fear and illness despite the corporal punishment being regularly dished out to him.Like all growing boys he is unable to comprehend the physical changes that he experiences and the only source of explanations are his friends or experimentation with himself. With his natural urge and in an enticing situation, he has his first encounter with the opposite sex. He has very little knowledge of what is taking over him and is scared.Yet he overcomes all odds, excels is sports, and departs a hero on completion of his schooling.

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