“Where is your answer paper?”.
I stared at her. I thought it unfair that she was asking me this when she could clearly see what happened to it. She had me standing in front of the whole class, watching me trying to make up my mind. I didn’t have a lot of time to decide what I was going to say.
We were starting school that year in a new building. It was the same school but we were all a little different from how we were before the summer holidays. Some of us had grown taller. Some of us started coming to school on our own bicycles. Some of us were coming back to school after vacationing in far off foreign countries, while others had baked in the Chennai sun all through the summer. I myself had brand new uniforms ironed to a crisp.
We had heard that middle school teachers were far stricter than the ones in primary school. The maths teacher especially was legendary in the school for how terrifying she was. Students were not told which teachers were assigned to which class. So at every new subject period, the class waited in eager anticipation of who would show up. Would we get the strict teachers or would we get the nice ones?
45 eleven-year-olds sat in breathless anticipation when it was time for the first maths class. If you stuck your tongue out, you could probably taste the anxiety. We braced for the arrival of this teacher assuming our class had the worst luck. And we were right. Everyone in class took a quick sharp breath in unison as the teacher walked in. One student froze in the middle of drinking water and held it in her mouth until the teacher gave her a look.
The first rule was to never rest our chin in our hands. That was the quickest way to encourage sleep in a maths class, she said. “Keep your head and spine straight in my class or be sent out. And no talking amongst yourselves, if you want to talk, you talk to me”. On the third or fourth class I had the uncontrollable urge to rest my head in one particularly dry algebra lesson. As an alternative I chose to make little circles with my hand and I put them on my eyes like I was holding binoculars. The teacher stopped her lesson, stared at me and asked me if she was showing a drama here that I’m trying to see. The whole class turned around to look at me. If I were made of chocolate I might have melted to a sticky puddle right then. In a panicked haste I put my hands down. Any hint of drowsiness for the rest of that lesson was driven straight out.
She didn’t ask to learn all our names like some teachers do on their first day, she asked us to tell her if we had older siblings that she may have taught. She looked me up and down as I volunteered my sibling’s name who was the three grades above mine. I could see that she expected less from me thanks to said sibling’s supreme aloofness to school work. Those who had gone on foreign vacations to visit their dad got a nod of approval from her. A good precedent had apparently been set in that case which was expected to be followed.
The quarterly exam came and went. The girl who usually topped the class barely scraped by with a pass mark. There was a general uproar (a silent one), at how bad everyone’s marks were. I did as badly as most others. Foreign-resident-dad had indeed done extremely well. Perhaps her sibling’s wizardry oozed into her. The teacher passed out the answer papers in the atmosphere of heightened tension, even more than what usually prevails in her class. One by one the students’ names were called out and it was either a walk of shame or a grudging acknowledgement of a mediocre result. Everyone was handed down a judgment.
Usual-class-topper had by this time burst into tears after she realized not everyone had suffered a downfall like hers. The average performance of the likes of me was no source of comfort for her. Quite unconsciously I began tearing the edges off of my answer paper. I was not sure what made me do it, perhaps it was my way of not resting my hands on my chin. My friend next to me elbowed me and mimed at me to stop. I ignored her and proceeded to tear up my paper into small bits.
I was quite peacefully occupied in my inexplicable shredding when I began to sense a silence. No one was talking anyway but there wasn’t even the usual shuffling of shoes from restless legs. I had to guess that the distribution of papers was done.Pieces of my paper had begun to fall on the floor. I got elbowed which made me look up. Everyone was staring at me including the teacher. Somehow I did not feel myself turn into chocolate. I stared back at her. She looked straight at me.
“Stand up”.
I stood.
“Where is your answer paper?”A moment or two passed and then I heard these words coming out of my mouth.
”M’am the squirrels from the tree.. They took it”.
Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash
