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I spent twelve years in prison.
Juvenile prison, if you will.
My parents sent me there. (Unwittingly, I hope.)
That prison was high school.
A boarding school in the hills of North India. Some seven hundred of us between the ages of six and sixteen were locked in there for nine months every year. Our own personal incubator – minus the warmth or protection.
So there we were all of us, trying to live the best way we could. With no connection with the outside world. No outings, no phone calls. Just us and our prison wardens – the teachers and seniors. The former were on patrol duty during the day, and the former took over at night. Punished for talking, for walking, and even eating outside of prescribed times, we survived from one day to the next. Visiting hours were 1000 to 1200 hours every other Sunday, but visitors were really few and far between.
The weird thing was that we seemed happy. Most of us did, anyway. Initially everyone was miserable. Gradually, however, we got used to it. And the tears turned inwards. You didn’t cry or you got picked on. If you did too well (in sports or whatever and gawd forbid if you were sporting short hair), then you got picked as some senior’s bitch. And that was no fun at all. I know. I’ve been there.
We each did our best to live out our sentence. Some two, some twelve years long. (Yes, I was one of the old-timers. One of the few who served the longest term.) The new chicks had a really hard time getting used to the place. Some ran. Or tried to, anyway. Some managed to get quite far. But all of them were caught. And punished. Boycotted, first from whatever company they had within the school, and then from the school itself. I don’t know if being thrown out for running away was really a punishment at all. It accomplished the end, anyway. I don’t know. I’ve never understood administrative strategies. If one may dare call them that at all!
Methinks, the worst thing you can do to a bunch of teenagers is lock them up. Well, the thing is, my people don’t understand that. They don’t believe in individuality or sexuality. So no one really gave a shit about a few hundred girls in some obscure town.
The world was too busy with its own problems to bother with the imprisoned.
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Posted by eccentricity on 2008-06-19 16:43:29 | Rating: | Views: 40
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