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

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”.
    ***

21. Quiz
Time
    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