Of boys and boys who became girls

In std 3 the teachers had this weird idea of a couple dance for our annual day. You can't call it Salsa, or Tango or anything for that matter. It was like one of those Bollywood numbers, the sort of dance where a girl holds a bloke's hand, and they jump together, sway, spin.... I hope you get the picture. Now, our school being a boys school, you can imagine how inappropriate a boy-boy couple would have looked dancing.

Relationship with Carmel school, the girls school with whom we shared a boundary wall was not friendly. Maybe the kindergarten-kids-of-Saint-Paul's-throw-stones-at-Carmel-injure-girl incident may have something to do with it. Maybe they were plain jealous of our new auditorium. There is also the offhand chance that it might have been triggered by the way we guys from Saint Paul's gape at them during parade, as if the girls materialized from thin air and we aren't quite sure what to do with that. I must mention here that students of std 6 gape with the widest open eyes followed by the 7, 8, 9 and 10.
The gist of all these babble here is that girls from Carmel could not be bribed into partnering us in the dance.

Ingenuity coupled with need led to an interesting solution. Dress up half the boys in frocks. At that tender age there are hardly any visible physical differences between the two sexes, I mean nothing that a touch of rougue and a bar of lipstick can't fix :P

There were some ready volunteers who probably thought they would get chocolates if they became "girls." Then there were some who were enticed into it by a few flattering words of the teachers. Then there were some like me who were just told to become a girl. I am still cloudy as to why I thought protest was not an option! Looking back at it now from so far away in time makes it an amusing incident but I remember how terrified I was initially.

Because of my height, I was the first in line, and the teachers who used to train us would say how cute I was and that embarrassed me to no end. Anyway, there I was leading the group wearing my sister's frock on the annual day. I don't remember who my partner was, but I recall that it was hugely popular among the crowds. The people loved the show happily clicking away the beautiful "girls" with lipstick, rouge, hairbands, colourful frocks, the works!

The makeup was so good that even I couldn't recognize one of my classmates for quite some time.