All Saints is a poem about the school I attended back in the late 40s in Hyderabad. It was a Catholic Mission school with a great tradition of learning and sports. I had first joined the adjoining Rosary Convent as a 5 year old. There was a church tower and a statue of the Virgin Mary in a niche of the convent’s wall in the peaceful shadow of a great Neem tree. Here many of the servants who brought the children to school would lie down and while away the afternoon until it was time to return. At the end of my first year at the Rosary Convent I was transferred to All Saints where I spent the next 10 years of my schooling. Many of my school mates became very successful professionals later on. We all went our different ways and have since lost touch with each other. The love for my school and the memories associated with it still persist in my heart and mind. It was a time of great upheaval and change, as anyone who is conversant with the history of the sub-continent will know. While at school we saw the old Hyderabad disappear giving way slowly to a new age. This poem of mine laments the passing of a way of life.

Click the link below to read the poem (2 pages)

All Saints