Haywire- A collection of short stories

Deep in your eyes is the real you, in disguise

“Oh come on-Math isn’t that boring as you state!”
Sarita accuses.We are an annoying group of uniform clad girls and boys of class VII, section ‘D’.The uniform is a dull mixture of brown and orange, with
brown ties, brown socks and black shoes; complete with
weird short plaits hanging on either sides of our head in
an orderly fashion-suggesting our most basic responsibility in school at that age- protecting those plaits from sending them into a frizz attack due to picking
fights with humans around.

“It is what it is. Imaginary numbers?! Just when you think
it can’t get any more alien!!”
I start scribbling in my math notebook as soon as I finish
saying the above- because, let us face it-Mr. Gokhale is
not someone to be messed with. Even after 20 years of serving the same old dish of despondent tales of numbers, that guy still has nerve to come back every
single day at 10 am sharp to repeat the same snooze-
worthy schedule, all the while, with undying enthusiasm.
He specifically targets the last benchers-us- because he
thinks we want to avoid his lecture. But here- the reasons are twofold- primarily because of my tall stature and secondarily, because of his lecture-last bench has become my slumber.

“Hehehe”

I turn my head to the left to see Jai giggling yet again while scribbling something in his math notebook.

“He is the only source of entertainment back here.”
Sarita whispers and I let out a small giggle.

Jai is a short, stout fellow backbencher, who always sits
on the bench to my left. He wears thick, round, golden
framed glasses that magnify his eyes to look like that of
an old, wise owl. His presence is felt only during two
events- when he chuckles out of the blue in the middle of
a long lecture; the other time being during results-
because he is the unbeaten class topper. So all of us have
developed a love-hate relationship towards him- our parents ask us to worship him, while we just seek some
recreation from his short unanticipated chuckles.

The bell rings-ending the seemingly endless torture of
imagination in numbers.
I turn to Jai.

“Hey Jai! Can I borrow your history notes? I was absent on last Thursday and Mrs. Spider won’t be pleased to find some innovative answers to the same in our upcoming weekly test.”

Jai chuckles and fishes out his history notes to me.

“Thanks a lot! Will return it to you by tomorrow in
class?”

“Sure.”
__________________________________

Summer afternoon.
TV is desperately calling me to tune into something or
the other channel- for the sake of ending this seemingly endless torture of writing notes. Mom is trying to lure me into snooze zone by happily napping on the couch in front of the TV. A universal rule should be made- nobody should sleep when one person is wide awake, trying to work really hard- you know?

The whole universe is conspiring to put me into sleep, while I am stuck with this boredom of medieval times.History is actually interesting, until someone makes it a
point to disgust you with grammatically ill-formed
answers to questions at the end of each chapter. Mrs.
Spider weaves an intricate web of despair (hence the
name) using her vexatious sense of grammar to give an
end result of answers, which we have to correct again
while jotting them down.

I lean back into my chair groggily and put my pen down. I start flipping through pages of Jai’s notebook. The neat slant
in his cursive handwriting presents an upbeat picture of
his notebook- consistency, neatness and sincerity. At the
end of each chapter, there is a haphazard ‘A+’ scrawled
in the ruled margin by Mrs. Spider.My eyes wander to look at my grade on the last chapter-
‘B’.