A Whole World Inside A Tiny Bubble
How living with no personal space as a teenager shaped my adult life.
“If Harry Potter can do it, so can you.”
That’s what I told myself when I first stepped into Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalaya (JNV), Golaghat — the boarding school that was to be my home for four years.
I was fourteen years old, about to live away from my family for the first time.
Harry Potter and his magical world of Hogwarts was my only vicarious experience of life in a boarding school, and I took solace in my favorite fictional character’s experiences.
But unlike Harry’s Hogwarts, which had a huge castle with magical staircases and friendly ghosts, my JNV had a single-storied academic building with interiors so sparkly clean, it reminded me of a hospital.
While Harry had already befriended Ron Weasley on his first day to school, I was entering an ecosystem where the students had co-existed and bonded over three years. I was the new girl, ill-equipped to survive in this world and unaware of its rules.
As my mother led me down the alley to my hostel, I felt a strange heaviness in my heart. This was the verge of a new life, but was I ready for it?
