if I were to guess what you know about us, I would say maybe great academic results, awesome extracurricular pursuits and maybe a little bit of involvement in controversies.

But since there is so much more to Viqarunnisa, this article is going to be a walkthrough for you and maybe a little trip down memory lane for the Viqis as well.

So, let’s start with the lady with whom the journey of Viqarunnisa Noon School and College actually started. In Class Two or Three, we had to memorise a paragraph on the history of Viqarunnisa. At that time, all I cared about was gulping down the information and getting the score in the exam. So, for a really long time, all I could remember was her name: Viqarunnisa Noon, wife of Feroz Khan Noon.

Growing up, especially in college, we had to enter the campus every day watching her stare at us with still eyes. So, I got a little interested in her history.

Born in Austria in 1920 as Victoria, she was raised and educated in England, where she met Feroz Khan Noon in London. She followed him to the subcontinent, married him in Bombay in 1945, and converted to Islam.

After Partition, when Feroz Khan Noon was appointed the first Pakistani Governor of East Pakistan, Lady Noon began her extensive social work in Dhaka, which included founding Viqarunnisa.

In Viqarunnisa, Viqis start their journey from the junior section. The junior math and the towering tree. Only we know how much love this place holds. A decade ago, when I entered the school, the first thing I laid my eyes on was this tree. If you stand beneath it, you would almost feel like it is standing there with its arms open, trying to protect the precious laughter beneath it. We did boring assemblies here in this very place, surrounding the tree. We shared tiffins, bunked classes and played Borof Paani here. Most of us had our most magical phase of life surrounding the tree.

Just a little bit ahead of that is the place where you can stand with a mind full of adult life problems and a minute later you would be smiling ear to ear, the playground. This is more of a junior territory and no, being a senior does not bring benefits here. But if you are sweet enough and have the ability to hypnotise the juniors with that sweetness, you might get to sit on the dolna for a minute or two. But hey! No more than that.

After the playground brings you back to life, an annoyingly delicious smell of food will hit your nostrils, move through your entire respiratory system and reach the weird part of your tummy and do an even weirder somersault. The canteen. Pardon me, but being a Viqi from the time when we used to get Luchi Aloor Dom for 20 taka, I cannot talk about anything else. And the biggest news, it is back after years. No matter if you are a Viqi or not, you should go and have that Luchi Aloor Dom, trust me. If there is any part of Viqarunnisa that makes me feel something physically instead of hitting me emotionally with nostalgia, it is this. It does that somersault thing in my tummy even at the time of writing this, at 3 am, in my bed, without the smell.

A little further ahead, you may find a group of girls doing PT or playing handball. While I was a student, I hated the weird rules of this school. Doing two ponytails, oiling the hair every day, keeping the nails short, wearing black shoes on normal days and PT shoes on PT days, and if you ended up wearing the wrong pair on the wrong day, there was Beena Apa. Yes, this author belongs to the Beena Apa timeline.

But after spending twelve years hating those rules, now I find myself wanting to oil my hair every few days and I realised that actually calms me down in stress. I now dress according to the occasion, place and goal of an event, just like Beena Apa taught us to wear black shoes on normal days and PT shoes on days we were supposed to do PT. I have lost count of how many rumals I lost across those twelve years, but nowadays, I find myself keeping a rumal in my bag. The same nails I was dying to grow for some occasion feel heavy and uneasy whenever I grow them even a little now. All these habits that were injected into us in the form of discipline are somehow still helping us lead a better life. As said earlier, I hated the strict discipline of Viqarunnisa the most, yet these were the things that shaped me the most. Ask any Viqi. They would say the same.

Now that I mentioned Beena Apa, that brings me to our teachers. On my first day in Viqarunnisa, I called a teacher “miss.” She corrected me, saying, “We do not say miss here. We say Apa.” It was super weird because only the elders say Apa to sisters and she was not my sister. Fast forward thirteen years, these Apas became something more than sisters. This writer cannot really find a word for that something. But just to make sure you do not call her vocabulary weak, she was lucky enough to get classes from Mohsin Sir, Rifat Apa, Badrul Sir, Chand Apa, Munmun Apa and many more of these legendary teachers. Pardon her.

Did I mention we have an actual Lover’s Point? Let’s not go into why this place is named that, but I was privileged enough to have a class right beside it. If you are a Viqi reading this, the next time it rains, make sure you take your friend, find your way to Lover’s Point and scream some Bangla song at the top of your voice in the rain. And while you are doing that and keeping one eye out for whether Sumi Apa is coming or not, make sure to capture that memory in your heart. Because apu, you are going to replay it in your head a thousand times over.

Rain in Viqarunnisa is a whole different thing. But then again, everything in Viqarunnisa is a whole different thing. The assemblies with perfectly straight lines, badminton shuttlecocks flying all over senior maath, the batch of Class 12 students who are about to graduate jamming to Bangla songs at every free corner they can find while the teachers do not say a word because they are leaving soon, Rifat Apa coming after Viqis with some huge stick while they get drenched in the rain, the kaathgolaps, Sumi Apa standing outside teachers’ room with a handful of monograms, and the kaaks who somehow always get the hint and show up just before tiffin time.

And, and… there is a different kind of beauty in Viqarunnisa that can only be seen when it is in its solitude. The most beautiful kind of smoke rising from whatever the mamas are always burning. The most beautiful kind of bird chirping sound that you usually never stop to listen to. And more than anything, a hauntingly beautiful silence.

I could go on forever. And I think that is exactly the point. When I started writing this article, I thought I could cover everything, give you a walkthrough of a place that is so much more than what makes it to the news. But while writing it, I figured out that I can never cover everything about this place in a thousand-something words. I guess you can never really know everything about Viqarunnisa unless you are a Viqi yourself. But I know one thing for certain, that every Viqi, given the choice, would pick Viqarunnisa all over again.