Vasu Gupte (Chitnis) remembers her time at Cathedral.

I don’t know if anyone else realized all the changes that I faced:

• Unlearning the American accent. Amy kept teasing me about it!  Every day in the lunch line, there was Amy behind me, teasing me.  Thanks Amy!
• Writing with a fountain pen! When I left school in the US, we had just graduated from pencil to ball point pen.  I don’t know how many nibs I broke, but I went through a lot of them!
• Learning to spell! Till this day, I am still baffled with the extra “u” in colour, flavour, etc. 
• Learning the metric system!
• Learning to write!  I remember many times being rapped on the hand with a ruler for writing “like an American.”  The American method/script is very curvey, and I had to learn to write the British way with straighter lines.
• Learning Hindi and Marathi!  Even though Marathi was my mother-tongue, I had stopped speaking after moving to the US when I was 5 years old.  I had to not only learn the languages but also the alphabet and script.  Learning to speak Marathi was easy, everyone at home required me to speak with them in Marathi.  I forget our 6th Std. Marathi teacher’s name, but he tutored me at home for at least a year.
• Learning to play throwball!  Who came up with that game?
• Learning to eat!  I used to go to Bombay Gymkhana for lunch, and had to follow proper protocol for utensil use.  I used to dread Mondays, when we would have Indian food/rice and daal, because I had to use a spoon to eat my rice.  Other days, I had to use a fork and knife, and I had to hold them in “opposite” hands.  I was perfectly capable of eating anything with just a fork held in my right hand, even rice. 

Those are some of the things I had to re-learn when I started at Cathedral. 

I do want to say that regardless of the teasing that Amy showered on me, she is and always will be a great friend. 

I can’t say enough about how welcome all of you made me feel, you helped make that “foreigner” feeling disappear quickly.  Ila, Nasreen, Rekha, Amy added me to their inner circle and made me feel very much at home.  I treasure our friendship. 

Out of that group, Ila and I have always been close, she has been and continues to be one of my best friends.  By the way, it was because of me that Ila was thrown out of class by Mr. Krishnan:  I was chatting away (keeping my head pointed straight ahead), and must have said something that made Ila turn her head towards me, when she was caught “listening!”