Quiet Corners of the Ashrama That Every Alumnus Should See

Every old school hides its deepest memories not in classrooms but in strange, often overlooked corners. The bench where a friend once carved initials, the patch of grass where a stray cricket ball always seemed to vanish, the stairwell that smelled of ink and damp wood - these places stay with former students long after report cards have yellowed and uniforms have been packed away. Alumni associations exist partly to keep these recollections alive, gathering them like pressed flowers between the pages of shared history.

Baranagore Ramakrishna Mission Ashrama High School has always carried this kind of quiet geography. Generations of students have moved through its corridors and courtyards, leaving behind traces that the buildings themselves seem to remember. For those who left Baranagore decades ago, especially the many who later settled abroad in cities such as Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, or Brisbane, returning to the school means more than greeting old teachers. It means walking back into the folds of a place that has not entirely let them go. Some of the school's most evocative pockets remain almost unknown to anyone who did not happen to stumble across them as a child.

This article gathers five such tucked-away locations - the kind a student would only find by wandering off the main path or by following a curious senior. Each one carries a small story, and each one deserves to be on the itinerary when old students come home for a gathering. The committee has opened the final window for registering for the upcoming BRKM Grand Reunion 2025, making this an especially good moment to revisit the spots that shaped so many schooldays.

The Banyan Grove Beyond the Eastern Wall

Most maps of the Ashrama show only the main buildings, the parade ground, and the front gate. Few acknowledge the stretch of land just beyond the eastern boundary wall, where a row of mature banyan trees has stood longer than any of the present structures. From a distance, the grove looks untidy - aerial roots trailing, a thin scatter of leaves, a few broken benches that students dragged out here in earlier decades. Up close, it is a different world.

The banyans were, in the 1960s and 70s, an unofficial adda. Seniors took their juniors there during the long lunch break, away from the supervising eyes of the monitors who walked the central courtyard. Politics of the student union were debated under the widest canopy. First crushes were confessed there. A few old-timers even remember a homemade rope swing that the groundskeeper pretended not to notice. For alumni now living in suburbs from Parramatta to Caulfield, the grove has the same quality as a forgotten park back home - the kind of place one describes when asked what Australia is missing.

What makes the grove remarkable is how little it has changed. The same roots grip the same earth. The same broken bench still leans at the same angle. Even the small shrine tucked between two of the larger trunks - dedicated, locals say, to a wandering monk who once rested beneath them - remains undisturbed. Alumni who return after thirty or forty years often find that they can still place their hands on the exact spot where they carved their initials into the soft bark.

The Forgotten Print Room Behind the Headmaster's Office

The main office of any school tends to be busy and exposed. The print room behind it, however, is another matter. Tucked behind a heavy wooden door that most students were strictly forbidden to enter, the print room housed a hand-operated press and, later, a small flatbed offset machine. It produced exam papers, school magazines, festival programmes, and the endless stream of notices that kept a Bengali school running.

Few pupils ever crossed its threshold. The few who did - usually the editorial board of the annual magazine or a trusted monitor running an errand - remember it vividly. The smell of fresh ink, the soft hiss of the press, the stacks of half-printed pages, the narrow windows that let in just enough light to read proofs by. The print room taught a particular kind of patience. A misplaced comma meant re-setting an entire line of Bengali type. A jammed roller meant starting over.

For alumni who went on to work in publishing, journalism, or design - a surprising number of whom now sit in offices from Surry Hills to South Bank - the print room is the cornerstone of their professional memory. It is also the place where they first realised that words could be arranged, rearranged, and made beautiful. When the committee organising the reunion asked former students what spot they would most like to revisit, the print room appeared on more than one list, even though most of those writing had not seen it since their teenage years.

The Drain Beyond the Cricket Pavilion

Cricket at Baranagore Ramakrishna Mission was played on a ground that was never quite level. The pitch itself was maintained with great care; the outfield was another matter. A wide, sluggish drain ran along the eastern edge of the playing area, and any ball that found its way in was effectively lost. Older students recall entire afternoons disappearing into attempts to retrieve cricket balls from the muddy channel.

The drain had its own mythology. A few boys claimed to have caught a koi carp in its waters. A monitor once wrote up a prefect for allegedly fishing there during free period. During the annual sports day, the drain served as a useful hiding place for the cooler full of nimbu pani that the captain had smuggled out of the kitchen. For alumni who now follow the Boxing Day Test at the Melbourne Cricket Ground or stream the Ashes from loungerooms in Adelaide, the Baranagore drain stands in for an entire childhood of improvised cricket.

The pavilion itself, a low whitewashed structure with a tin roof, deserves a mention. Inside, bats hung from hooks along the wall, pads were stacked in corners, and a battered scorebook lived in a drawer that nobody was supposed to open. The pavilion's veranda, where spectators sat on wooden benches, offered a view of the entire field - and, beyond it, a slice of the river that students liked to claim they could see on clear mornings. Alumni often mention the pavilion veranda as the spot where they first understood what it meant to belong to a place.

The Upper Gallery of the Old Prayer Hall

The prayer hall sits at the heart of the Ashrama, and most visitors only ever see the main floor. Few realise that a narrow spiral staircase at the back of the building climbs to a small upper gallery, semicircular in shape, that runs along the rear wall. From this gallery, the hall below looks very different. The carved wooden pillars appear smaller, the stained glass above the main entrance throws coloured light across the marble floor, and the sound of collective chant rises as if from a great distance.

The gallery was not built for students. It was originally intended for visiting swamis who wished to observe the prayers without sitting among the congregation. Over time, it became the favourite refuge of boys who had been sent out of class for misbehaviour and were told to "go sit quietly upstairs". Many of them, surprisingly, remember those punishments fondly. The gallery was a place for reading, for staring at the river through the high windows, for letting the mind wander in a way the busy schoolyard never allowed.

For alumni who now practise meditation in suburban Melbourne yoga studios or attend multi-faith gatherings in inner Sydney, the gallery holds a particular kind of significance. It was, in a way, their first ashram within the ashrama. Returning to it on a visit can be disorienting - the building has been renovated, the staircase reinforced, the windows replaced - but the acoustics, that curious echo of chant rising from below, remain unchanged.

The Cycle Shed and the Lane Beyond It

The cycle shed stood near the southern gate, a long open structure with a corrugated roof and iron posts. Hundreds of bicycles passed through it every morning and evening, and the air always smelled faintly of chain oil, wet saris drying in nearby classrooms, and the chai that the nearby tea stall poured into small clay cups. Most students simply locked their cycles and walked off. Few ever looked at the lane that ran behind the shed.

That lane was where the school grounds met the edge of the neighbourhood. It led past small gardens, past a brick kiln that has long since been demolished, and finally down to a low stone wall overlooking the Hooghly. Boys who were late to morning assembly sometimes slipped through the lane to enter by the back gate, hoping the monitors would not notice. Boys with no intention of attending morning assembly at all used the same path in the opposite direction.

For alumni now accustomed to Melbourne's bike-friendly laneways, Brisbane's riverside cycling paths, or Perth's coastal shared walkways, the Baranagore lane offers an unexpected kinship. Cycling was, after all, the principal way most students reached the Ashrama, and the lane was the final stretch of that daily journey. Returning to it, even briefly, brings back the rhythm of the bicycle wheels, the small wave to the chai-wallah, and the slow climb toward the school's front steps.