Potato Chips

by Anshuman Mohan

  When F&L entered the classroom, she looked first at the monitors and then at us, as if she was expecting a complaint. Well, we had news for her! Sriniwasan went up to her, pleased as punch, and told her that Father Prefect had passed by and been impressed by the silence in the class. And he promised the class teacher a lollypop, I felt like crying out. Ecstatic, F&L moved into fourth gear, waving her arms about and talking about how she wanted us to make the assembly worth remembering by doing something unique.

  ‘A drama!’ someone called out. F&L immediately dismissed the suggestion because we wouldn’t have enough time to practise.

  ‘A prayer!’ This was accepted.

  ‘A song… with full orchestra!’ I shouted.

  She looked down at me from her podium. ‘Okay,’ she said, ‘as long as you can carry it off well.’

  I wanted to prove myself to F&L. I could play the drums—this would be a good way to showcase my talents and impress her. After all, my practice at home and at the Calcutta School of Music, my certificates from Trinity College, London, and my extremely capable teacher, Mr Darren Manuel, were nothing to laugh about. Utkarsh was on the keyboard, Vedant volunteered to be the guitarist and a class choir was organized.

  The next day, we all assembled in an empty classroom. We would be skipping our Hindi and History periods, with permission from the respective teachers. This caused us no end of joy. Legalized bunking was very rare and had to be taken advantage of thoroughly! We had all brought our instruments along. That, of course, had been a task in itself—a drum kit is not exactly what one would call portable. Finally, we set everything up and started the rehearsal. At the first go, we all succeeded in murdering the song.

  The orchestra sounded worse than an iron nail scraping across the blackboard and even the lead singer couldn’t make out his own words. The guitar was out of tune, the keyboard was playing too fast and the singers sounded like they had mild constipation. It all sounded a bit like the ruckus at a fish market. But the drums, I thought, sounded fine. Just fine. In order to stop the standard of Xaverian singing from going too far below zero, I took charge. I made them do the entire thing slower and then sped them up later. I simplified a few complex pieces of music and convinced the lead singer to not try to eat the microphone. After a few trial rounds, the song became almost bearable. By the next day, it was actually pleasant to the ear. We all marched up proudly to F&L, who was next door, and asked her to come over and listen to us. She complied eagerly.

  We gave her a perfect gig with a big finish.

  She applauded loudly. ‘That was a good show, boys. Well done!’ Then she signalled to me. ‘Aman, I don’t think we need the drums. The singers can’t be heard over all the noise.’

  Noise? What was she calling noise? Who was she to tell me that my drums were too noisy? And here I thought I had just finished the finest drum performance of my life!

  I was shattered. I had pulled the gig together. I had coordinated in the middle of this mess to put together something presentable. It was all my effort. And now she was telling me not to play.

  I made a decision. If F&L couldn’t judge music, let her rot in her ignorance. I would sabotage this gig for her.

  I went up to her and cajoled in my special, sickly-sweet voice. ‘Ma’am, it’s okay if I can’t play the drums for the final performance. But can I please, please, please join the choir? They are short of one person, anyway.’

  Needless to say, she fell for it. I joined the last row of croakers and started croaking the loudest and most outof-tune.

  Although it might look like I’d had my revenge, it wasn’t so. I actually felt very hurt and demoralized. I also felt slightly guilty for ruining the singers’ day because I was officially in the final choir and I really can’t sing to save my life. Ankit, Rohan, Sameer and a few of the croaking frogs tried to console me. Rohan also treated me to bhel outside school in the hope that it would cheer me up. It didn’t. Just-under-control-teary-eyes plus spicy bhel equals no end of embarrassment.

  This always happens to me. Nothing that I really care about ever goes my way.

  My mood remained surly all through. I walked to my dilapidated four-seater, summoned especially to collect the drums. I surprised my friends by not even waving at them when they whizzed past. Even Park Street meant nothing to me when I was feeling so dejected and defeated —it was just a collection of colours and sounds and smells fused together to form a meaningless jumble.

  The next morning being Sunday, I slept late. This was highly unusual because normally I had tennis classes at six-thirty in the morning. I woke up to find my sister’s face inches from mine. She had been drawing something across my forehead. I freaked and let out a yell. A glance at the mirror told me that my forehead now had the word ‘Idyot’ scrawled across it in black marker. I gave my sister a good, hard kick and shouted at her for a bit. This, coming after the horrible day I’d had, left me in no mood to speak to anyone. I just wanted to be left alone.

  My mother greeted me with a warm hug when I appeared for breakfast. She had prepared my favourite breakfast treat—waffles, a specialty of hers.

  It was a typical Sunday morning in my house. The TV was blaring and Shah Rukh Khan was doing his ‘Dard-e Disco’ number on screen. Dad was hunched over a newspaper. My sister was being gross, licking the fake maple syrup off her plate.

  ‘Come, beta, eat,’ said Mum.

  ‘No, I’m not in the mood.’ I really wasn’t. I’d even had a nightmare about what had happened in school.

  I wanted to share my problem with Mum. I wanted to tell her that I was a misfit in my new school. Ask her what to do. Complain. Cry. Shout. But there really was no point in discussing it with her. She would only make it worse— ‘St Xavier’s is big. St Xavier’s is old. Old is gold. St Xavier’s is autonomous. St Xavier’s is prestigious. Admission is difficult. Everyone wants to be in Xavier’s. Blah blah blah…’ If St Xavier’s ever needed an advocate, I knew who they ought to call.

  But she spared me that torture—she had even worse in store! It was as if Ma Saraswati had descended into her body and started giving me philosophical gyan. ‘Child…’ she said, sounding like someone far away. ‘You have been planted. You are a tree. From a small sapling in a greenhouse, you have been planted into a vast garden… Phulo, khilo. You will bloom into a flowering tree. And your branches will spead. Ayushman bhavo.’

  I cursed the day when we had gone to apply for admission into the goddamned ‘prestigious institute’.

  Two

  Rewind and Play

  A few months earlier

  4.30 a.m. A loud alarm went off.

  My mother crept into my room and silenced the alarm hurriedly, careful not to disturb my father or my sister. Mum had been up all night.

  We were going to St Xavier’s Collegiate School to collect forms for admission into class seven. We had all been planning the change of school for a long while. However, my father had forgotten the dates for the distribution of the forms. My mother had remembered and told me the night before. It had to be kept secret from my father and sister because we wanted to surprise them by producing the forms magically.

  5.00 a.m. We left home, much to the astonishment of the security guards.

  We boarded a cab and set off. On the way, I asked Mum what the reporting time was, in case we were getting late.

  ‘Nine o’clock,’ she replied calmly.

  ‘What? Then why are we going there so early? I was having such a nice dream… We’ll get so bored there! I didn’t even bring my iPod.’

  ‘Oh, you’ll see when we get there…’

  5.30 a.m. We arrived at the front gate of St Xavier’s.

  I was amazed that they didn’t chuck us out because of the early hour. What amazed me even more was that we weren’t the first ones there. There were at least forty groups of people ahead of us in the line.

  ‘You don’t know it, but almost every Kolkatan dreams of studying in Xavier’s,’ Mum said. ‘They’ll probably distr
ibute around three hundred forms for just class seven, and then they’ll take only thirty-odd boys.’

  This unnerved me. I had no idea what the school was about. All I knew was that the place was a hundred and forty-eight years old. One hundred and forty-eight… my school was only ten years old! And the differences between the two schools were enormous. I had heard rumours about strict priests as principals, caning and severe punishments. Suddenly, all the excitement I’d been feeling about a new school fizzled out. I didn’t feel good about this at all.

  6.00 a.m. Nothing happened.

  I couldn’t believe how slowly time was passing. Each second seemed like a minute and each minute like an hour. As anticipated, there was no forward movement of the queue. It just kept getting longer and longer and longer. I started counting the number of people in line behind us to pass the time.

  I counted a hundred families behind me. It blew my mind. A hundred and fifty families had got up in the wee hours of the morning and were queuing up for four hours just to get themselves a stupid form! Surely this must make the news. How come some channel wasn’t covering it?

  6.30 a.m. The line was now two hundred families strong.

  I could hear a few concerned Bengali parents exchanging rumours about the admission process.

  ‘They will give out about four hundred forms,’ an obese man said confidently.

  ‘Yes. Then they will choose a hundred boys based on their reports from last year. Those boys will give a written test to determine the final forty.’

  Soon they were talking about how difficult the written test would be.

  I started to feel rather queasy.

  8.00 a.m. The line was even longer!

  I counted three hundred families in the line, with more joining in, thick and fast. The queue was spilling out of the main gate, blocking traffic and annoying pedestrians. I didn’t think the people at the end of the line were even likely to get forms. Things were going to get ugly.

  I was bored and tired. Mum and I were taking turns now, allowing one person to sit down while the other stood in line.

  ‘Hey! You too?’ a voice called out suddenly.

  I looked around. ‘Ankit!’ I exclaimed.

  Ankit was a friend of mine from school. Apparently, he had also been planning a change of school and was here to collect a form.

  I was not particularly happy to see him because I knew that my school-changing secret would soon be out. Then I realized that he was probably experiencing the same apprehensions. I smiled at the irony.

  I let Ankit cut ahead of me in the line to save him some trouble. He had just arrived and had no hope of bagging a form otherwise. Not everyone had foresight like Mum does! The two of us discussed the enormous crowd that had assembled. Everyone was standing quietly and without pushing and the line was neat enough to make our principal proud.

  ‘What are the criteria for selection?’ Ankit’s mother asked mine. Mum told her. We fell silent then, having run out of conversation. Suddenly, Ankit broke the silence, as exultant as if he had just cracked a huge code.

  ‘Students are like potatoes!’ he announced, much to our bewilderment. ‘These people who test us, will sort us out, grill us, sauté us, roast us, blanch us and fry us to various levels and degrees, making as many potato delicacies as they can.’ His eyes sparkled mischievously and he waved his hands about wildly. I could well imagine what Einstein’s assistants must have felt when he was struck by inspiration. ‘The finest of us will get made into potato chips,’ Ankit continued. ‘They will spice us up, cheese us, flavour us. And when we are good enough, they will package us in colourful packets and stack us up high on corporate shelves. To be sold to make more and more money!’

  ‘Yes,’ his mother added. ‘And then “society” will munch you up!’

  We all joined in her laughter.

  From then on, ‘potato chips’ became a running gag with Ankit and me.

  9.30 a.m. The line meandered forward and we all got the forms we had been clamouring for.

  I was forced to spend endless hours at the Kopycat Xerox Centre to make photocopies of my various documents and credentials. I smiled my cheesiest smiles at the high-end photo studio near my house. Dad got all the photocopies attested from the rudest of government employees and got income certificates made (though I have to say that I doubted their genuineness). Mum and I sat and dug out ancient certificates and report cards, restoring them in order to showcase my abilities. We all pored over the computer screen as I typed out the all-important covering letter which Dad dictated in official-type jargon. After a great deal of blood and sweat later, we had a smart, slightly overstuffed envelope.

  This parcel, which would soon decide my fate, was duly submitted to an old lady with an artificial smile pasted across her face, who sat outside the headmaster’s office at St Xavier’s. If I was found worthy, I would be one of the lucky eighty boys who would sit for the written test, which would quiz me on English, Maths and Hindi.

  I prayed fervently.

  My overenthusiastic mother did not bother to wait for the results of the lottery—I could not imagine what else to call the process of deciding students’ fates on the basis of a few sheets of paper—and put me to work. I had to study for the upcoming test—in Mum’s mind, there was no doubt that I would be selected. So I studied, studied and then studied some more. By the end of the month, I had crammed so much that I felt like I could sit for the CAT three times over!

  However, this would all be in vain if the crucial call did not come. Time crawled along. Worry raced through my head. Things went on as usual, tinged with feverish anticipation. I tried in vain to balance home and school. While we discussed the Xavier’s plan constantly at home, I had to keep it quiet in school on special orders from my parents. And it became very, very difficult to not blurt it out in front of the wrong people. I felt like a potato which was being roasted at 10,000 degree Celsius.

  The day of reckoning finally arrived. I stayed at home while my parents went to the school to find out the outcome. When they came back, they brought ice-cream and good news. My name was on the list! Ankit’s was, as well, and I was overjoyed. But this also meant that Mum’s nagging went into overdrive.

  I started bunking school to stay home and study. The Xavier’s study matter was completely different from that of my old school. All I did all day, every day, was study and eat, eat and study. And what was I allowed to eat? Carrots, spinach and lettuce, thrown together in various gross permutations and combinations, to ‘improve my thinking and concentration power’. To add to my misery, Mum discovered something called ‘superbrain yoga’. It was like some kind of bizarre punishment, where I had to hold my left ear with my right hand and vice versa, and do utthak-baithak twenty-one times while facing the sun. It was crazy.

  On the day of the examination, loaded with good wishes from everyone, I set off with my parents. I finally saw the inside of the school I had heard so much about. The vast green field, the enormous white buildings, the sculpture of the founding father… I stared in awe.

  I bid goodbye to my parents and was led to an oversized classroom, complete with a podium with the teacher’s desk on it. We were seated in some obscure order which placed me in the front row. Soon, Ankit walked in and sat down at the back of the room. I set down my new clipboard, took out my new pen, opened my new geometry box and took a sip from my new water bottle. These were all gifts from well-wishing family members and friends. As Father Prefect introduced himself and encouraged us to strive to do our best, I felt quite confident. I had studied well and according to the syllabus at Xavier’s.

  We had three hours to complete three papers—Maths, English and Hindi. The papers were distributed. The tension in the room grew.

  I went for the English paper first. The essay topic was ‘An autobiography of a dustbin’. A dustbin? Was that the best they could do? My long, gruesome revisions and ‘model essays’ had been a waste of time—I felt like all my hundreds of practice essays had been cru
shed and thrown into that very dustbin! Even my ‘superbrain’ seemed cluttered—I had to scour out half the things from it and dump them into the shitty dustbin. Somehow, I managed to scribble some crap about a dustbin in St Xavier’s and made up some philosophical stuff about what it meant to be a dustbin. The Hindi paper went well. For the Maths paper, I really benefited from knowing the Xavier’s syllabus. Many of the boys writing the test seemed not to know several important formulae and theorems.

  A wrinkled old lady with a slight moustache collected our papers at the end of the designated three hours. I retraced my steps to the main field and met my parents. They were glad to know that the test had gone so well.

  The month-long waiting period after the exam was easily the longest month of my life. My mother diagnosed me with boredom and asked me to go get a life. But I had a better term for it—Waiting Sickness.

  It was, in some ways, even more challenging than the actual time of preparation. All day, I would get bored doing absolutely nothing worthwhile. I would just sit there, staring into space… It was downright scary. All of a sudden, the world felt abnormal. The seconds passed in slow-mo and the minutes seemed like hours. And I started doing things that I’d never done before. I started sleepwalking— one night, I woke up suddenly and found myself standing at the basin and washing my hands, having emptied an entire container of liquid soap. My sister complained that she couldn’t sleep because my mutterings woke her every night. After going to the doctor about this, I was given some medication to reduce anxiety. But I think the bitter tonic had some milaawat in it—I started snoring extra-loudly from then on.