School portraits / One autumn term of Sunday drop-offs and Friday collections
Sunday at Seven
A mother in Mid-Levels, a Year 6 boy at Harrow in Tuen Mun, and the weekly boarding timetable that ran from Sunday evening to Friday afternoon.
Nandini Rao agreed to weekly boarding on the understanding that it was weekly. Her son Dev was starting Year 6 at Harrow Hong Kong, boarding opened in Year 6, and the terms were printed plainly: in by seven on Sunday evening, out at half past four on Friday, home at weekends and holidays.
Weekly boarding, she had been told, was basically a long sleepover, and the person who told her this was her husband, who had never been on one. Arjun’s case was practical. They lived in Mid-Levels. The school was in Tuen Mun, out past Gold Coast in the western New Territories, and the school run would be a daily expedition for a ten-year-old who fell asleep in taxis. Nandini’s case was that she had a son and would like to see him. The compromise was the timetable, which was not a compromise, because the school had written it.
The first Sunday they left at five for a seven o’clock deadline, which in Hong Kong traffic terms is an insult to the traffic. Dev had a trunk, a duvet, a framed photograph of the dog, and a packet of biscuits he was told were for sharing and had privately decided were not. At the House, a cheerful housemaster called Mr Pemberton did a roll call, which Nandini found reassuring in the way that counting lifeboats is reassuring. Dev said goodbye with the brevity of a boy who has spotted a table-football table. Nandini drove home with the empty duvet bag on the back seat, folded, like a message.
Friday at half past four she was in the car park at ten past three. Dev came out in a shirt she did not recognise, smelling of someone else’s laundry powder, carrying a note about a House lunch and the firm opinion that the beds were better than at home. She had planned Friday night: his favourite dinner, a film, no questions. He ate the dinner and fell asleep during the film, which she counted as a victory and later, lying awake, as a draw.
By the third week Sunday had become the problem. Dev was packed by three. By four he was in the hall with the trunk. At half past four he asked whether they could leave early so he could get a particular bunk, which Nandini understood to mean a particular neighbour. She invented reasons to stay: tea, a phone call, the dog. Arjun watched her stretch a cup of tea across forty minutes and said nothing, which is the professional’s touch in a marriage.
The school’s own material said just under half of the Upper School boarded, and Dev reported this fact as though he had conducted the survey. He had a House. He had a roll call and a lunch and a Sunday-evening ritual she was not part of, and when she asked what the ritual was he said “just tuck” in the tone of a man protecting a source. On Fridays he was hers. On Sundays he was theirs by seven, and he had started looking at the clock at two.
In November, on a Sunday, she was reaching for the car keys at half past four when Dev, trunk already at the door, said, as a kindness, that she didn’t have to come. “Papa could take me. Or the driver.” She drove him anyway, in silence, and at the gate he waved from the step without turning fully round. Seven o’clock on a Sunday, she decided, was not when he arrived at school. It was when she found out whose he was.