Life is stranger than a daily soap. Why? When God creates and recreates his masterpiece- humans-that is, ‘consistency’ is definitely an issue (who are we to blame him?). And that’s when geniuses, ‘bright ones’, ‘not-so-bright ones’ and duds are born, according to batch quality. I belong to the third category of the ‘not-so-bright’ specie, the common name being ‘average’. This, I think, is the most convincing reason I could give for the catastrophic moments in my days of education, especially when battling with a bitter truth that hounded my life every moment-mathematics.
Living with that truth was tough. Numbers never came to me. I was an outcast in the world of digits and sine-s and sigma-s…sigh! I had resigned to this fact as fate, but my mathematics teacher dint. Fate. Yet again.
And cruel too. Especially when it came in the form of corrected answer sheets, sitting smugly in my teacher’s humungous tote bag.
Scene 1:
Five minutes later.
One look at my answer sheet…
My eyes- suddenly bright
No, no…the brightness isn’t on seeing a decent score or a laudatory remark revering my problem-solving skills. It was the innumerable red cross-marks across my answer sheet that hit my eyes in full intensity and exploded in my heart like meteors, mercilessly. Alas!
The damages start cascading through my eyes and venting as sympathy evoking wails so distressing, the sour expression on my teacher’s face slowly turns into that of pity for a lesser mortal, even without her knowing it.
Scene 2:
Ten minutes later.
Defeated and ditched, I get up…Dragging a heart heavy in sorrow and sore with disappointment, my next conscious effort is to get a ‘reference’ from the one basking in the glory of a cent percent (ignoring the snooty look mixed with a liberal dose of false consideration, which I know is the fraud ‘est’ I’ve ever seen!); and checking meticulously- why and where on heaven’s sake did I go wrong? I analyze left, right, centre, top, bottom and even the margins to find that (how, as to how?) a single, believe me- a SINGLE mistaken exponent, one value of ‘y’ and an addition mark made all the difference! How unfair is that?!
After cursing everyone who made even the most insignificant contribution to this universal subject mathematics, and inspired by the unconditional encouragement from the ‘me-know-it-all’ whose genuine selflessness leave me with a “poor-illiterate-soul” feeling, I march to the teacher’s table, clutching the paper in my hand …
Scene 3:
Teachers table, in the queue. Let the ones before me get those ½’s and ¼’ths teacher missed out while counting. How deserving! Ha!
Scene 4:
Seven minutes later, face to face, mind to mind…
“Plead thee mercy” say my soulful eyes, tears welling up.
“Not again!!” says my teacher’s rebuking look
Oh no! That’s it!
Tears begin to flow steadily. Subdued sniffs convert to uncontrollable sobs…
Scene 4:
“Puhleez (beg, beg) maaammm…else I am dead meat!!” I sob.
Realistic visuals of my red-in-anger mom and crimson dad flashing through my head is not only blinding me in tears and terror, but also making me deaf, dumb and numb!
My teacher gives me her ‘classic’ disgruntled look which had so many meanings I would never want to decode till I die. I slowly keep the paper on her table, making my face look as innocent as a lamb.
Scene 5:
Our eyes begin to speak…
“Won’t you ever improve?”
“What do I do if mathematics and I never get together? It isn’t my mistake!”
Scene 6:
Gathering some courage and preparing myself for the worst, I ask her where I went wrong, in a heartbroken voice. Please, please, please…Seeing my misery, her usually cold-as-a-stone expression begins to melt (God bless her!).
She opens my heavily ‘blotched-in-red’ test paper to explain where I went wrong. Meanwhile, my eyes keep proving the fact that no man-made liquid-weapon can match the power of tears (supported by regular intervals of blowing the nose and letting out heart wrenching sobs every time she pointed out a mistake).
A misplaced exponent in the third step, a wrong value of ‘y’ in the eighth (missed a couple of decimals in between) and addition in the twelfth step that supposedly had to be a subtraction…
I give her a pained look in a way that makes her think she just committed the biggest misdemeanor known to mankind… “Is that it??!! You’re maligning me for these insignificant, overlookable mistakes??”
My expressions accuse her. My sobs are no longer confined to low frequency levels “Bawl baby bawl!!” I am heartbroken…
Scene 7:
My teacher cant just take anymore…she snatches my test paper from my hand and frantically searches as to where she can ‘grace’ me with some marks, so that she need not carry the burden in her heart that she wronged an innocent child.
“There!” she sighs as she rewrites the mark(s), finally…
“I swear I’ll never again…!” I reassure better performance next time, with the genuine gratitude exuding from my tear-filled eyes. She hands me back my test paper without a second look (or a second word!), when lady luck comes yet again in the form of a bell, calling off ‘murder’matics for the day…
Scene 8:
I walk back with my new gained confidence, not forgetting to give a snootiest-of-looks, (pungent enough give the world’s biggest snob an inferiority complex) to the ‘cent’ipede, who tries hard to conceal the hurt.
“So, where were we?” I ask my bench mate (gazing at me with her mouth a little open, gasping in disbelief), as I settle comfortably in my seat.
Scene 9:
With my sulking, tear-stained face suddenly smiling away to glory, curtains fall on my worst yet most frequent nightmare- a mathematics test…
Tailpiece: Years later, when I write this, the only calculation I do is to keep an unaccounted account of my salary.
Thank God, copywriters don’t have to be calculators!
