Editor’s Note, Musings [School Magazine]
“Tell me a secret.”
-Sirius Black, All the Young Dudes.
I understood Musings long before I understood Mayo. Childhood has a way of handing one the symbols long before the explanations, as if meaning were something that arrives only in retrospect. Back then, I was still pretending to know words like ‘discombobulated’ with the exaggerated care of someone imitating an SC to impress anyone who would stop to listen.
It was my first prize-giving when we were handed the magazine and allowed to make up our own signatures to earn the thick copy. The 2019 edition of the Musings is still in my bedroom, slightly worn but always treated with a curious gentleness, like something deserved to be handled with clean hands. The name alone fascinated me. Musings. It was a word that seemed to belong in candlelight. A soft, dusky word, shaped like a breath on a windowpane. I remember the way I would trace the letters with my smallest finger, one by one, as though summoning a spell. A new book was added to the stack each year, but only after the old one had been thumbed through until the spine curled, its notes underlined, annotated, sometimes memorised. We took our time with it, passed it between dorms, lingering over SC quotes with the hushed reverence one might reserve for prophecies or horoscopes. There were arguments that were spirited, adolescent, vaguely philosophical over what counted as "quote-worthy," over which line would be remembered, or forgotten, or, in the best case, claimed. It became, somewhere along the way, our own strange little met gala and the first ambition I ever quietly harboured in school: to earn a place in its pages, even if it was just my name.
This will be the final volume added to the tower of Musings that bears “Vaanya Shekhar. S/2556.” inscribed in the top corner in permanent marker ink, the kind that always smudges slightly when you turn the page too fast.
Seven years of peeling apart the Editors’ Notes, of passing silent judgment on colour schemes, of circling names we hoped one day might be ours have led us here. Though now, we will already know the quotes and we will know the people behind them too well to giggle. Perhaps that's what makes this final one feel different. Not sad exactly, but eerily still, like the empty stage after a play has ended, as if the silence might say something louder than the applause. Or, to borrow from Louis Tomlinson, something simpler still: We made it.
In the same seven years, I have come to understand Mayo as intimately as I once tried to understand that first issue of Musings. I’ve cried here with helplessness that only a lost interhouse can bring and I have laughed, too, until my stomach ached and I felt dizzy from joy. I’ve chanted ‘V-I-C-T-O-R-Y’ with the violent thrill of belonging. I’ve slept under winter skies on sun-warmed grass and felt more at peace than I ever did in my own bed. I’ve sat before a blank screen and failed, more times than I’ll admit, to write about what Mayo has done for me. The truth is: I didn’t think it would do anything at all. And yet, here I am, grateful even for the terrible mayonnaise jokes I have learnt to bear gracefully.
And if you're reading this, let me offer one more secret: there is no gallery more exquisite than the one where people are still trying. I never did learn to ride horses, but I’m no longer afraid of them. I still don’t understand physics, but the science park feels like a fairytale. I’m not a dancer, but I mouth the lyrics every time. Not a comedian, but I’ve hoarded enough inside jokes to fill a notebook. I do not know everything — sometimes I wonder if I know anything at all — but Mayo has taught me the slow, excruciating, magnificent lesson: if I keep trying, I might learn to love the not-knowing too.
Mayo contains, in some impossible way, every version of myself I’ve ever been. The shy child with quiet eyes, buried in books too old for her age. The loud, laughing girl who would dance everywhere on campus except the stage. The uncertain debater, all trembling hands and clumsy conviction. The writer who wrote character sketches into her textbooks. The one who listened to Sir Pranab’s speech at Silver Jubilee Conclave in awe. The one whose writing he thought was ‘mature’ enough one time. Now, as I prepare to leave, I can only hope I am carrying with me not only the parts of myself this place has revealed, but also the parts of it I have known: the long, golden Sundays stretched thin with time; the months so full of events they split at the seams. I carry the freezing PG play practices where fingers went numb with both cold and fear, and the thunderous cheering that echoed off the stone during the third day of Prize Giving. I carry Mayo’s finelines: the ankle-deep floodwater and the merciless, blinding sun. The quiet of quarantine days. The wild euphoria of an unsupervised dance party. The Art department pillars (A special shoutout to the Harry Potter one!). The long library afternoons. The whispered gossip. The sharpened thrill of debate. The English classes. The birthday fudge and spice. The dizzying ascent from attending a farewell, to hosting one, to now waiting to be hosted. There are so many versions of Mayo in my head, so many stories, that I almost pity my college roommate because how can I explain it all? How can I explain a place that formed me with such quiet ferocity? I suppose I could try playing her ‘History’ by One Direction.
The truth of it all is that there would be no history without the people who made me who I am. Ma’am Neeti and Ma’am Bakshi for listening to all my ideasMa’am Smita for the countless hours that you spent with me showing me how magical John Keating truly was and then some more. Thank you O’Captain. My HM, Ma’am Rakhee and my matron, Ma’am Neeta, thank you for helping me through every high and low, you’ve got the moves and the style. Ma’am Gargi for reading every piece I wrote and being proud of even the ones I hated, thank you for believing in me even when I did not. My friends who made everything funny and my Mayo — Mayo. Chitrangda, Kuhu, Rukimi, Vaani, Devyanshi, Aarna, Bhumika, Charvi, Shriya and Diya, thank you. Please send all the reels you possibly can. Mehta, no words will ever justify my gratitude or love for all that you are as a person and as my person. Both my brothers across, for all their attempts to make me laugh. Finally, to my little sister, Anaa, I am nothing without you. You have made me the person I am and everytime you ask me how I survive, the answer is already in the reflection of my eyes.
As my eighty-two months in this school have become five, I have come to realise Ferris Bueller was right. Life does move pretty fast but life in Mayo moves faster and if you do not stop and look around once in a while, you might miss it.
So this is me, S/2556, signing off with my final goal in Mayo: to stop and look around frequently, because I will miss it.
Finally, to all the readers who are currently a part of the enigmatic, paradoxical and magical place with the google address of ‘Mayo Link Rd, nr. Mayo Lake, Nagra, Ajmer, Rajasthan 305007’, here’s another parting secret: we all become Orpheus’s one day with this address as our Eurydice because to describe ‘Mayo College Girls’ School’ is a mission that will stay impossible;
ORPHEUS: I miss you. No — that's not it.
[He thinks.]
Dear Eurydice….Love, Orpheus.
[He drops the letter as though into a mail slot.]
