I Kissed A Girl In My Class (9 page)

Manu then
remembered that one of his classmates, an untidy boy named Harman,
was a farmer’s son and always talked about his farmhouse and
combine-harvesters. “Hey, Harman,” Manu accosted him in the tiffin
break, “say, do you know anything about gardening and caring for
trees?” Harman nodded proudly. He was a disaster in class and in
the sports field. But of agriculture, he claimed, he knew
everything. “And do you know where I can get some urea?” Manu
prodded him again. “I can get you some,” Harman said, “we always
have a jeep-load lying in our garage”.

“Really!” Manu
said with mock-surprise, “that would be nice. I have never seen
these fertilizers we keep reading about. Can you get some tomorrow
morning?”

“Sure thing,” said
the other, eager to be in the good books of an all-rounder. And
true to his word, he slipped a packetful of white powder into
Manu’s hands as soon as he saw him in the morning. Manu had already
watered his sapling, but he did not want to wait till the next day
to try the fertilizer. He ran back to the ground, opened the packet
and after a moment’s hesitation, when he considered how much of the
powder to pour, he emptied the packet near the roots of the
sapling. And then, he emptied his water bottle over it.

Next day, the
plant had taken a turn for the worse. Where Manu had expected it to
shoot up like Jack’s beanstalk, it seemed even more shrivelled, and
the leaves had turned black as though they had been burnt. Manu
continued watering the sapling till the morning before the summer
vacation started. Although he knew it well, he never told anyone
that the Patron’s precious sapling had died a week ago. Killed by a
heavy dose of fertilizer.

***

Summer vacation
was the longest break of the year, nearly two months long, but it
wasn’t all playtime. Students were given a lot of holiday homework,
some of which was fairly easy, like solving some maths questions,
but some of it was killingly boring. There were essays to be
written in Hindi, and craft pieces to be made with thermocol and
paper. But when the vacation begins, no student bothers about
homework. They look at the wall calendar and count the precise
number of days remaining. “Oh, it’s 56 days, such a long time,”
they think with satisfaction and run outside to play or turn couch
potatoes.

Manu did not
bother to look at the holiday homework he had noted down untidily
in his blue school diary. May was for play, he told his parents,
and they could come back to discuss studies in June, preferably in
the second half. He was out playing mornings and evenings, and in
the hot hours of the afternoon he tinkered and browsed. He could
have made Ma happy by napping in the afternoon, but then he would
have been sorely unhappy himself. Besides, he told Ma, if he slept
in the afternoon, sleep came slowly to him at night.

There wasn’t much
to tinker around with at home, for back in 1989 houses were not
full of gadgets and toys the way they are now. They had an old pair
of Japanese electric scissors which they never used because buying
AA batteries seemed like a waste of money, so Manu secretly laid
hands on them, unscrewed the small white side panel when nobody was
looking and examined the machinery. Then he screwed the piece back
because the scissors were “imported” and believed to be in working
condition. With the old Hes alarm clock he was less considerate. He
had learnt to open its back panel long ago, but that summer he
pulled out every cog inside it and then could not put them
together. Nobody missed the clock because it was not used any more,
so Manu was able to keep the damage secret, but he continued
working on it in the hope that some day he would miraculously fix
it.

There was a broken
Bush transistor also, and an Agfa Isoly-II camera that worked but
was rarely used as the type of film it needed was expensive. Manu
would unscrew the camera’s leather cover and change the focus and
shutter speed settings with the little levers built into the lens
body, but he did not tinker with it further as any damage would be
unpardonable.

The afternoon
browsing had nothing to do with books, for Manu did all his reading
curled up in bed at night. The school library was closed and the
two books each they had been issued had lasted only a week, but
Manu got his supply from the ‘mobile van’ of the Central State
Library that visited his sector every Wednesday afternoon. When Ma
took her siesta, he quietly crept into the kitchen to pop sugar
into his mouth. Not once or twice but till all the clean spoons
landed in the kitchen sink. Sometimes, Ma heard him and creeping up
barefoot from behind whacked him on the back. She never slept
without washing the afternoon’s dishes, and hated to wake up and
find more of them waiting for her in the sink.

Manu spent a lot
of time out of doors that summer. He would go out to run and do
chin-ups at a football goalpost early morning. Then he would play
tennis with Sharad at one of the broken courts in a corner of the
campus. Evenings, they again played or cycled around, and on some
days Manu visited a classmate outside the campus. For a few days,
he also visited his parents’ villages, and spent a lot of time
tending to cattle, driving tractors with older cousins, bathing at
tube well spouts, swatting mosquitoes and fanning himself to sleep
with hand fans because the villages hardly got any electricity.

He had brought
along a small but thick hardbound book about the 18th-century
Russian polymath Mikhail Lomonosov and he read it over a week lying
on a string cot under the gnarled and noisy peepul tree beside
which there was a hand pump and space for cattle to rest on hot
afternoons. In Lomonosov’s scientific experiments and successes,
Manu saw his own future glory. He liked it more than Hardy Boys and
Alistair MacLeans. That book wasn’t a library-issue. He had bought
it at the start of the holidays from Punjab Book Centre, a
fascinating grotto in Sector 22 that was full of Soviet works
printed on the finest paper and sold at really cheap rates by
publishing houses called Raduga and Progress. While he savoured the
book, the Soviet Union, CCCP, the spring from which those
delightful books came, was unravelling. But Manu had no inkling of
it.

Manu had forgotten
school and schoolbooks. He had lost track of time completely. When
he checked the calendar again, only 15 of the 56 holidays remained.
He remembered his holiday homework. But there arose an unexpected
problem: after the passage of more than a month, he could not read
his own shabby handwriting. He panicked. He didn’t have a phone at
home, and those of his friends he could visit were still out of
town. He wracked his brain, and strained his eyes to make sense of
the ant-scrawl in his diary. Finally, he decided to do something
anyway. It was better to plead in class that he had misunderstood
some instructions rather than tell teachers that he had not been
able to decipher his own scribble. He prayed fervently that at
least some of the work he was doing would be acceptable.

***

The morning
when school reopened was always a difficult one for students. Not
only because they had become soft and lazy and found it difficult
to get out of bed early in the morning, but also because there were
those clumsy craft pieces to be carried along. It’s never easy
carrying a thermocol board on a cycle. If you don’t carry it held
sideways, with its edge facing into the wind, even a mild gust can
bend and break it into two or more pieces, and often the models
reached school with rivers and houses separated, planets pushed out
of their orbits, and lighthouses with their tops blown off. But the
students were used to such accidents and carried Fevicol along to
carry out salvage jobs in the classroom.

But more important
than the craft operations was meeting old friends, and there was so
much to talk about that even the teachers didn’t bother to come and
‘sush’ them. Two months in class 7 is a long time indeed. Some of
the boys and girls had changed remarkably. Aman seemed to have
grown a couple of inches. He was the tallest boy anyway and now
stood almost 5 feet and 10 inches in his shoes. Manu himself had
changed somewhat. His voice had broken and the down on his upper
lip had turned distinctly black. The girls had changed, too, and
when the boys were alone, they remarked on those changes and
tittered.

Manu’s first
thought was to check whether he had done the right homework. He was
relieved to see that indeed he wasn’t far off the mark in most
subjects. With that fear out of the way, he got busy exchanging
notes with friends, and from both sides flowed fantastic stories
about which it can be said that they certainly had a kernel of
truth, but no more.

Radhika Ma’am also
seemed prettier than before. She looked different and had a very
chic short-cropped hairstyle. Instead of a suit, she wore jeans and
a white shirt to class that day, stimulating a lot of talk (all
behind her back) in the staffroom and stunned silence in the class,
for a few moments. Then, it was business as usual. There would be
no maths that day, she promised—only talk about what each one of
them had done in those two months. This wasn’t anything new. All
class teachers have always avoided teaching and indulged students
in this way after vacations, and those who insist on teaching are
decidedly unpopular.

Little by little,
the teaching resumed, and from the second day lessons were taught
in right earnest. The holiday homework was checked and many angry
notes were sent home for parents to sign and acknowledge. Manu came
out of the homework fire unscathed. He didn’t get any stars, and
one of his drawings made Manjeet Ma’am, the art teacher, wince, but
he was spared the diary notes. Each time he stood before the desk
waiting for the teacher to finish assessing his work, he held his
breath, and when his notebook was returned he breathed a deep
“Thank you, ma’am”.

***

July was at an
end, and Manu was already thinking about his birthday all the time.
He would turn 12 years old in three weeks, Papa had promised him a
bicycle at the start of the session, and it was time to remind him
of the promise. It was the rainy season and the skies poured
heavily that year. Some afternoons, the sky became so dark that
even with all the lights on in the classroom it felt like late
evening. The children had a word for such dark mornings: “andheri”
and when the sky turned black during a class, everybody looked out
of the windows as soon as the teacher turned her back upon them.
Sometimes the rain fell in a torrent of water accompanied by strong
wind, and then all over the school building sounds of steel windows
crashing and doors banging rang like explosions on a
battlefront.

Manu and Samar
again got a summons to the principal’s room. Manu’s sapling failure
had been forgotten, since nobody but he and Harman knew about the
fertilizer misadventure. The school staff thought the tree had died
of some pest attack and the sapling was quietly supplanted by a new
one with plenty of pesticide to make sure it survived any
infestation. Anyway, during the summer break the responsibility of
looking after the saplings had reverted to the mali.

There were only
four other students in the room this time, and Manu guessed they
had not been called about the sapling. There was Neha, of course,
besides Anisha, Sana and Sachin, all of them from 7-B. The school
was readying its junior team for the city round of Bournvita Quiz,
a prestigious inter-school quiz whose finals were held at the
national level. To make sure the best students represented the
school, the six of them would be divided into two teams and
face-off in front of their classmates on a Saturday afternoon.

Manu liked quizzes
ever since he won a first prize in class 5. The prize was a little
brass urn that could be called a trophy, and for years it graced a
shelf in his drawing room. As always, Manu prayed to be put in the
same team as Neha, and this time his wish was granted. He, Neha and
Sana made up one team while Samar, Rohit and Anisha were in the
other.

The quiz was even
better than the science project and taking care of saplings, Manu
thought, because it required a lot of discussion. Now he could talk
to Neha all he liked, and no teacher would stop them from preparing
for the quiz, because it was a matter of the school’s pride.
Finally, whichever team won would have to represent the school at
the city level, and then, if it won again, at the north India
level, and then the national level … But all that was a long way
off. For now, they had to prepare for an afternoon contest in
school.

Just three days
remained for the quiz, and the students had no clue how to prepare
for it. So far, they had participated in subject-specific
quizzes—science quiz, English quiz, and the like—in which the
questions were framed from their own textbooks. But this one was
going to be different. Anything at all might be asked, from the
name of Italy’s prime minister to the first governor general of
India, the height of the world’s third-highest peak and
circumference of earth.

The six held a
consultation outside the principal’s office about preparing for the
quiz. They needed to memorize a lot of names and numbers, and they
needed time to do it. This was long before the Internet age, a time
when books were expensive and children had only a few storybooks at
home. They needed to use the library, and that could only be done
during school hours. Problem was, their subject teachers wouldn’t
excuse them for three days, unless the principal ordered them
to.

A soft knock at
the door and a “come in” later, the six stood before the principal
again, hesitating to speak. Manu spoke finally. “Ma’am, we need to
use the library to make notes and brush up our general
knowledge.”