I Kissed A Girl In My Class by Abhilash Gaur

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