My Water Bottle

Humans! We come with unique traits, something that sets us apart from the others of our kind. I was in FB chatting with some of my students. Like I always say, when your students who are all grown up still remembers you with a fondness, you feel you have never made a wrong decision about your profession. Well! That would be my side of rebuttal for being in love with my Teaching career.

So, let me go back, I was chatting with two students. Initially both started calling me 'mom'(whoa! did I feel old?lol) and we went into talking about sweet nothings and serious business of life when one of them said,"Madam, I really used to love your water bottles!"

Hey! It pulled some chord in my heart, something that was sleeping in some corners of my brain or heart or where ever but definitely was there. I don't remember much from my childhood and teenage years but since the time I was in NIE I remember having developed excessive thirst for water( thank God it was water and spirit of any kind). Being a day scholar I used to find it tiring to be carrying a bottle of water which would be an eyesore for all of my group friends. "Gachi mo, desert nalay yong yop zumbay?" My friend Sangay would always bark at me whenever she saw me taking a gulp of water from their room. But where ever I went, my water bottle came too.

Then I became a teacher and although my bottle didn't qualify for the role of a teacher, it did follow me to the staff room and to all the classes I went to. In the same school, we had a teacher who had some medical problems which required him to be taking sip of water every now and then. So there were two of us carrying water bottles with us. I heard from students that he was given the name, "water-man!" That is when I developed that fear. I definitely didn't want the name 'water-woman' or whatever related to my precious water bottle.

But since my student reminded me of it, I remembered these small silly incidences I had owing to my water bottle. It was way back in 2008, talk was going on about pay revision for the civil servants. Although all others pretended not to be as thirsty as I was, Whenever I approached they would extend their hands. It wasn;t just my collegues. I remember even my students would ask me water. Now that I think of it, it used to irk me sometimes (not really!). So, I was talking about pay revision. There was one male teacher who always extended his hands whenever I came in his view. So I told him (in jest),"Sir, This small bottle of water is not enough for all of us,when this pay is revised I'm planning to buy a syntex tank and carry water in it."

Well, that was supposed to be an verbal attack on him. But, to my dismay, he turned out be better in verbal wars than me. His answer was, " madam, since you are buying a tank you don't need this bottle, so after the pay revision, please give me this bottle." I could do nothing but hit him with that same bottle.
So many memories, so many people involved and I had discarded all those until this student reminded me. "Madam, when you left your water bottle in the class, we used to steal water and drink," and she laughs. She had her own set of people to remember, her own set of memories, all linked to my water bottle!

(If the readers think I'm talking about one water bottle that I owned from my training days to now, you are mistaken. I had a huge collection. It came in variety of colors and I would try really hard to carry a water bottle matching the color of my dress. Terrible obsessiveness? lol)