by G. Sampath
He thought this was a way of being tired. But he hadn’t even played that evening. He had come home, changed, snacked, chatted about school with his female parent, read Agatha Christie for a bit, and then, at six sharp, had put away his Agatha Christie for his biology class notes.
But bizarrely, he had found it impossible to sit at his desk. Could be a magnetic pole was embedded in his chair, of the kind that would repel the magnetic pole embedded in his backside. He got up, looked out of the window of his room, at the curtained windows of the semi-detached houses across the street, at a sad little Bajaj scooter with its tongue out and head cocked as it waited outside a neighbour’s gate, at pigeons chasing each other across and out of his frame of vision. He came back to his desk. He got up again, turned on the TV in the other room, turned it off. He went back to his desk. Got up again, walked to the telephone, dialled a number at random. It began ringing. A woman’s voice said hello. He put the receiver back, returned to his desk. Got up again, slipped on his sandals, went out. He walked to the park. A teenaged, servant-type girl pushing a baby in a perambulator, two teenaged, non-servant-type girls playing badminton with zero rallies, neither able to reach or return the other’s wayward serve, a group of under-ten kids arguing around a heavily bandaged cricket bat. He flung a stone at a tree, missed. He began walking home. On the way, he aimed a stone at a lamp post, missed again. His female parent had not locked the door. He let himself in, after three gulps of semi-cold water from the refrigerator, sat down at his desk again. He listened to his fingers drumming on the study table, his ring-finger, middle-finger, forefinger, in a rapid downward sequence on the hardness of wood, again and again and again, beating a simple rhythm that meant nothing to him, or maybe everything.
He got up, went to the refrigerator, and returned to his chair with Milk Bikis biscuits, determined to stay put, to stick to his timetable, which stipulated that he had to be doing biology for ninety minutes, followed by maths for ninety minutes, before winding down with English homework for fifteen minutes. But again, instead of the meanings of the black marks on the page he was supposedly reading, his mind kept filling up – of its own accord – with thoughts and images he knew not from where, thoughts and images he had not sanctioned, and did not know he had not sanctioned until they were already there, like guests landing up at a hotel closed for renovation and insisting on staying the night. One such intrusive image was that of the dark brown bud-like birthmark on the lower-left quadrant of the chin of the face of the plump girl who sat diagonally one row behind him to his left on the aisle-side of the girls’ side of the class. He had never thought of himself as the kind of boy who talked to girls and had never thought of them as anything but fierce, tough, and somewhat boring and monomaniacal fellow competitors for academic prestige. But now the face of this girl, who was not even the prettiest in the class, floated in his mind’s eye insistently, to the extent of making it difficult for him to intellectually register the letters and words he was reading-chanting-memorizing. According to his timetable, he was supposed to finish female gametophytes in forty-five minutes, but when forty-five minutes had passed, he had made no headway, which puzzled him all the more because he had nothing against female gametophytes, did not find them boring or difficult to understand, and was actually curious to know all that was humanly possible to know about them.
He finally decided, in confusion, that his mind, perhaps, was not in a ‘mood’ for biology and, abandoning his timetable, switched to chemistry one hour ahead of schedule. But it only got worse. He tried to focus his mind on the conversion process of Benzoyl Chloride to Benzaldehyde but the girl’s face kept disrupting the process (the attempted focusing of his mind, not the chemical conversion).
As the evening faded into night and dinner time came by and still no progress had occurred on either his biology or chemistry lessons, Roll No. 27 basically, as they say, lost it. Terrified that this might be the onset of a permanent condition, some as yet unknown form of learning disability or impairment, he broke down, and was found sobbing violently at his desk by his female parent, who reacted with even greater terror. It was an indication of how terrified Roll No. 27’s female parent was by her offspring’s sobs that she had assumed, to his complete bafflement, that Roll No. 27’s tears were tears of contrition because he had done something terrible and shameful, and even as she interrogated him through the refracting lens of her own terrified tears, unable to register her offspring’s murmured response that he had no clue what it might be that was bothering him and no words to articulate the vague pre-formed mush of thoughts that stampeded through his brain like a panicky horde fleeing a psychotic bull, her mind was already rehearsing the scene that she knew would be enacted were she to share this important development of potentially far-reaching significance with his male parent.
Roll No. 27, it goes without saying, begged his female parent not to discuss the incident (of his unexplained inability to concentrate/study accompanied by extreme restlessness and followed by unexplained tears) with the male parent, but the female parent, despite having reassured her offspring that she would desist from doing so, did exactly that after Roll No. 27 had fallen asleep, as she found it impossible to keep her peace when she was serving food to the male parent, who, she felt, did not deserve the proverbial bliss of ignorance regarding a matter that had made such a wide tear in the fabric of serenity she had patiently been trying to weave around her life and live inside of, and so she, more out of resentment at the male parent’s ignorance than anything else, poured out everything regarding the aforementioned incident to her offspring’s male parent, taking care to request him in the same breath not to say anything about it to their mutual offspring. But the male parent, having come home late (it was a quarter past 11) after a hard day of office politics and backbiting and taking shit from everyone, was already a seething repository of accumulated bile that only needed an appropriate trigger for forceful expulsion.
Fortunately, however, the female parent prevailed upon the male parent not to wake their progeny for the purpose of having a discussion concerning the latter’s academic crisis. But the male parent raged on, the general import of his raging being as follows: what does it mean he’s unable to concentrate? Two slaps and concentration will automatically resume normal service. Here I am, breaking my back to send this rascal to school, and he is having trouble doing his studies? Tell the idiot I would be happy to save on his school fee if he cannot concentrate. Tell the idiot he can graze cattle if he cannot concentrate. Tell him he can become an assistant ice-cream vendor if he cannot concentrate. Concentration, my ball of mud! (And so on in that vein.)
The male parent, whose lifetime secret ambition was to become the global CMD of a global conglomerate, left for work every morning at a quarter to seven, though only after waking up at half past six, getting ready in about fifteen minutes, his breakfast packed for work by his progeny’s female parent, did not, in the following months, ever broach the subject of the failing concentration of his progeny with his progeny and the issue seemed to fade away as Roll No. 27 subsequently found a stop-gap (and ultimately, as it turned out, not at all satisfactory) solution for it: he found that he could concentrate reasonably well and his mind gave him no trouble if he sat down to study when it was already too late.
Roll No. 27’s concentration disintegrated like a biscuit dipped in hot tea if, on a regular weekday – like that Tuesday October evening – he tried to sit down at or about the self-appointed and traditional study time of 6 p.m. But on the morning of the day of an important exam, if he woke up at 4 a.m. and began to study – with no hope of (or time for) studying/mugging all the lessons covered by the exam, no hope of (or time for) acquiring a doubt-free understanding of all the requisite theoretical concepts, and no hope at all of clearing the exam with a score he wouldn’t die of shame of – he found that not only did he absorb knowledge and data like sawdust absorbing moisture, he even began to find the topics he hated, such as trigonometry, instantly interestin
g. So sound was his concentration for those few hours, the next thing he knew, it was already 8 a.m. and his female parent was harrying him to hurry if he didn’t want to miss the school bus.
But what was even more strange, every time he did this – i.e., avoid his studies until it was suicidally late to be commencing them – he was surprised by how well he did in the exams, as his test scores invariably trumped his forebodings of gloom and exceeded the most optimistic of his pessimistic expectations. And yet for all his success – he did manage to remain consistently in the top five of his class right through classes 9 and 10 – Roll No. 27 was never again at peace with himself as a student ever since the incident of his first ‘concentration crisis’ when he had sobbed for twenty-five minutes (give or take a few seconds). Though he may have appeared, to the casual observer, as an academically upwardly mobile student with a future ‘bright’ in every sense of the word ‘bright’, inside his head he was in continuous turmoil of the kind that was likened, by the dead first-born in a diary entry, to ‘being locked inside the negative space of a black hole along with all the light in the universe and all the thoughts in the universe with no chance of getting out of the negative space of the black hole’ and this unremitting inner turmoil wore him down and gave his default facial expression a suggestion of despondency, which did not go unnoticed by his classmates. His teachers, if they noticed, did not let on, or could not be bothered. His sibling, who despised him for cravenly seeking their male parent’s approval by trying to emulate the academic overachievements of their dead first-born, gave him a berth as wide as the Mediterranean, preferring to spray his attention on cricket and crime thrillers.
7
A cylindrical metallic wire is stretched to increase its length by 5 per cent. Calculate the percentage change in its resistance. (2 marks)
Roll No. 27’s anxiety over his concentration crisis was also rendered more toxic by the injuries to his self-confidence and self-esteem wrought by the very real possibility that he might never again figure in the same league as the elite academic athletes such as JH and CA, whose hallowed company and academic intimacy he had briefly enjoyed when he had scored successive centums in mathematics and physics in the early months of Class 9 and topped the quarterlies. His crisis, in other words, had produced the following contradiction: while Roll No. 27 believed that he belonged to the exclusive club to which JH and CA belonged, and probably enjoyed similar scholastic and cranial potential, his new-found inability prevented him from performing at the level they did, which meant that he ceased to enjoy their respect, and was evicted from their exclusive club of scholastic overachievers – an eviction he resented as an affront to his dignity and to his identity as their equal in intelligence, and he would not rest until he was back in that same elite club again and universally recognized as an achiever on a par with JH and CA. But he could do that only if he studied as they did: when it was too early to slog, not when it was too late. But that, he could no longer do, and this social dimension of his inability began to trouble him even more than the inability itself.
And as if to add another special layer of agony to his pre-existing multi-layered agony, his female parent began to stigmatize his inability to study as ‘laziness’ and ‘last-minute preparation’ and issued him a warning to the effect that if he did not mend his study patterns, she would inform his male parent about his ‘laziness’ and ‘last-minute preparation’, both of which signified to her (she had no doubt they would signify similarly to his male parent as well) Roll No. 27’s lack of respect for his parents’ hard-earned money invested in his schooling, as well as being a comment on his (lack of) character as revealed by his refusing to be more serious about his studies, for unlike the parents of other, richer students, his male parent did not yet have the financial resources to pay donation or capitation fee to get him the education he might need in a world of ever-rising college cut-offs that had no place for academic also-rans, and in this world that had no place for academic also-rans, even 99 per cent was no guarantee of a secure future, for many colleges had cut-offs of 99.99 per cent, and that (99.99 per cent) had to be his target if he was serious about his future, and he could not come anywhere close to meeting that target if he spent all his time reading storybooks or out-of-syllabus books and did exam study only last minute.
Though he hated her for threatening him over it, Roll No. 27 was, of course, intelligent enough to realize that his female parent was correct in her assessment. But, unfortunately, that realization did nothing to remedy his inability to study, which remained, and therefore so did his last-minute approach, which had anyway become his default mode of study. And while he cleared the class 10 Boards comfortably with this method, and even secured a percentage high enough to get him the stream of his (male parent’s) choice, and high enough for his male parent to be able to transfer him to The Most Prestigious School – a school that admitted only the academic crème de la crème of the country – this success only ended up obscuring the fact that his approach of study was a short-cut to scholastic perdition, and it was this perdition that befell Roll No. 27 in class 11, as his mind refused to have anything at all do with anything at all in the broken oval of illumination conjured by his study lamp in the pre-dawn darkness, preferring instead to embark on unscheduled flights of adventure that Roll No. 27 would surely have enjoyed if he hadn’t been too invested in getting it to follow his schedule.
One such flight, for instance, involved the persistence in his mind’s eye of the expression on his desk mate Roll No. 33’s face as he did his Salman Khan act which involved rapidly stabbing the wooden desk with the sharp end of a steel knife or compass needle through the gaps between the splayed fingers of his left hand, the stabbings going back and forth back and forth with rising velocity just like the angry, lovelorn, pre-muscular Salman did in that film, the blade a blur of glinting metal as it flew from the gap between thumb and forefinger to the gap between forefinger and middle-finger and middle-finger and ring-finger and then back via four stabs to the gap between thumb and forefinger while at the same time gradually reducing the stabbing space between fingers till the knife was forced to draw blood and puncture and scrape pieces of finger skin or even go right into the flesh or ram into the bone in its rapidfire up-down pistoning like the needle of a sewing machine and the point of it (pun intended) so far as Roll No. 33 could tell was to not just get the rhythm right and the speed right so you don’t stab yourself by mistake but the other way round, as in the point was to keep getting better at it and as you get better to keep stabbing faster and faster with the fingers getting closer and closer till it becomes impossible not to stab them and that’s the mega-point precisely as you then revel in the blood and the pain, and keep going for even more blood and pain if you felt like it, till all the other pain that was like the background hum of being – the psychic pain – is thoroughly vanquished by this simple hard little cute little physical pain with physical stuff like blood and this compassionate little kind-hearted pain was a pain that was generous enough to absorb your entire being inside and hug it to its heart, even if for only a few seconds, and liberate the self from the pain of the self by allowing it the fleeting dignity and fragile freedom of itself choosing its own pain from the suffering menu.
8
A group of men collectively have 9 steel, 7 plastic, and 4 cotton balls. If two balls were to be chosen at random, find the probability that they are both balls of steel. (3 marks).
One day toward the end of the academic year when he was in class 10, after the morning assembly, during which JH had been publicly commended by the principal for winning yet another first prize in yet another inter-school competition and making the school proud, Roll No. 27 had walked up to JH with the intention of congratulating him. JH was, as celebrities tend to do, holding forth to a group of sycophants and admirers, and when Roll No. 27 thought he had found a conversational opening, he started to address some congratulatory words to JH. But JH raised his hand in Roll No. 27’s direction,
to silence him, and resumed his soliloquy. Roll No. 27, who had reflexively fallen silent at JH’s raised hand, felt compelled to wait for a chance to say what he had come to say before going his way. But JH continued to speak, not bothering to make eye contact or look in Roll No. 27’s direction even once even though Roll No. 27 stood almost directly across from him. Roll No 27 waited a full minute, trapped in his pauciloquy, listening to JH go on and on about a quiz competition where he had pointed out an embarrassing error on the part of the quizmaster and the quizmaster had hated him for it but had had no option but to acquiesce when one of the teachers in the audience came out with evidence to prove that JH had indeed been right, and how in the next round, which was the buzzer round, though the quizmaster tried his best to get back at him by ignoring him, he could not do so because the other contestants whom he wilfully favoured anyway did not have the correct answers and the quizmaster was forced to come to him when the question got repeatedly passed and he had ended up winning that round too, and eventually the competition as well, and by a handsome margin too, and the quizmaster had had to suffer the mortification of having to present the trophy to the very individual who had showed up the gaping holes in his quizmastery and whose guts he hated for having done so. Roll No. 27, who was getting late for his class, finally muttered ‘congratulations’ into the little aural hole at the centre of the circle formed by JH and his admirers and sycophants and slunk away, and as he did do, he could not help but notice that JH did not even seem to notice his departure and continued speaking without so much as a nod or a half-wave in his direction.