It was a long-awaited milestone in her life: graduation. Finally being able to put aside all the books she had kept by her side for years. Finally attaining the goal she had been working for all this time. Finally achieving some standing as a grownup in society, as opposed to a lowly college student.
It was a long-awaited milestone in her life: graduation. Finally being able to put aside all the books she had kept by her side for years. Finally attaining the goal she had been working for all this time. Finally achieving some standing as a grownup in society, as opposed to a lowly college student. prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />
The day she received the news she had passed her final exams was spent in denial. She had barely managed to scrape through the papers and the practical assessments. She could hardly believe it.
There was some time between passing and the graduation ceremony but, when the big day came, she felt a strange sense of emancipation mixed with fear. She had waited for the day when she would be able to walk away from college campus and never look back, yet on this day she gazed fondly at her old haunts, recalling the sunlit days spent attending classes and doing assignments. Freedom that she could choose never to sit in a classroom environment again. Fear that she would have to enter the corporate world and abandon a life of familiarity and routine.
Her class did all the typical graduation day gimmicks, ending with tossing their caps into the air for the characteristic caps-in-the-air photograph. Afterwards, she made her way to where her parents stood, smiling from ear to ear. They embraced. She could feel a bittersweet aftertaste of graduation day linger on in her consciousness even after they left campus and went out for a family dinner.
Somewhere between the Ramen noodles and instant coffee of her college days and the whole-wheat pasta and prime roast bean coffee of graduation day family dinner, she had lost the innocence of her girlhood and gained the insight that made her a woman. She would miss her old self. She would miss the daily company of college friends. She certainly wouldn’t miss her teachers, except for a few. College campus, beautiful, but no longer surviving on substandard college canteen food: priceless. Graduation, seen as the enviable hallmark of young adult life by those who have yet to reach it, appears as yet another stepping stone after having achieved it.
If she thought exam-season rote-learning sessions had plunged her into the darkness of despair, the void that was entry-level job application was waiting to correct her opinion. She would have to conclude that the pain of the present overshadows any hurt or difficulty that has already been overcome, except the threat of future pain, which compounded the pain of the present. It had been easy to sit back and let her father pay for everything, desi style, as she progressed through her academic years. Now, the price labels on her favourite things made her put some of them back on the shelf of the departmental store.
The thrill of being able to define herself fully for the first time in her life, combined with the limiting labels plastered across the way any path she took, made her reconsider her perspective on practical life. As a child, “when I grow up” holds infinite possibility. Actually reaching that age reveals a whole new landscape.
Whatever life brought her way, she was sure she would be able to survive and even thrive. How did she know this? After four years of giving undergraduate vivas and actually passing them, her nerves knew how to handle high-stress situations. Lab work at college and kitchen work at home had developed her dexterity to the point where she felt confident using her hands to do anything herself, though she had yet to conquer the mental challenge posed by such a mundane everyday hurdle as a clogged toilet. They spent all her young life training her to juggle numbers, retain and reproduce words, and speak in public, yet street smarts were something she had to pick up herself.
Whether it was a fairy meadow, a minefield or something between the two that she would encounter beyond graduation, only time and experience would tell.