I Kissed A Girl In My Class by Abhilash Gaur Page A

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.
    ***

20. Back To
School
    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,