I stuffed my head under the pillow so tight that I could
hardly breathe. With every far stretched attempt I would gather all the air again
and then stick my head deep into the pillow this time never to give up. Of
course I would check every fraction of a second if someone was heading my way
as I did not have a room for myself. All I could see was the fluorescent lamp
lit dimly and an emptiness that I could not comprehend.
At school, he told me,” Just dig ur head into a pillow and
hold your breath until you can’t puff air into your lungs and you would die.”
The idea seemed painless and effortless. And I sat under the large tree for lunch and
gobbled away thinking of the peaceful sleep I would sink into that evening.
Summer was distorted. It rained a bit now and then and the whole atmosphere was
dampened in gloominess. I hated the smell of moist algae. The frogs croaked
their lungs out as though this was their last day. The next hour was
mathematics but I was not frightened this time. I had to just wait until I got
home and snuggle under my pillow.
My math teacher asked us to solve a problem. One that wanted
children to twist their usually straight brains. All math problems were greater
problems in my life. They seemed to entangle me all over like a stubborn and
persistent creeper. It felt like being sucked out by a parasite. I was a front
bencher as I was one of the short statured girls in class. One of the most
distressing and dreadful places for a math hater was the first bench. The lazy
teachers would never step between rows and go behind to check on the girls who
would admire pictures of their boyfriends or scratch their nails to shape them.
I pretended I was solving it with all the involvement in the world. My teacher
came to me as though she smelt the most delicious perfume out of me. I knew I
was wrong and she knew too. I had to kneel down and solve. Kneeling down was
not tough. I always kneeled in math class. I kneeled but the problem remained
unsolved. I was then asked to go high atop everyone. Standing on the bench
always made the classroom look much smaller. It felt like I was not among the
two plaited girls who were scurrying into their notebooks for no purpose. I
felt nervous as my teacher came to me. She gave one look at my book and then at
me. The next minute the book was on the floor. I think I urinated cos the next
thing I remembered was the house keeping at school giving me a skirt in
exchange for my wet one. My decision was now firm. I would suffer no more
mockery.
At home I jumped and squeezed myself into the pillow in
vain. I went to the public library and pulled out encyclopaedias that told me
what I wanted to know. “ Can someone die
if they held their own breath under a pillow?”
It was like the whole world laughing at me. The whole
library was laughing at me. I knew I would stab the dumbass who instilled the
brilliant idea into me the next day.
Math was always a problem. It remained a mystery why we had
to know how many oranges were left in the basket if three of them shared more
than half the basket. My world was different. I could speak four languages. I
could sing and dance. I rode my bicycle the fastest. There was no story book
around that I did not read. I knew everything about the human body. Somehow all
this dint matter. Math made me feel I was insignificant and unfit to survive.
Math the devil….
The most happiest day in my life was when I passed out of
tenth grade. I said goodbye to math, burnt the textbooks and ate a whole a
chocolate cake to celebrate. That was life. I was surrounded by a string of
supreme power that would save me from any humiliation further.
Math had its own ways of haunting me. But it has never
bothered me like it did till I graduated from high school. I laugh at myself
when I look back at the days I wanted to pull down the saree of my math teacher
cos she threw a chalk at me for day dreaming in math class. I was really
calculating with my toes too cos my fingers were not enough. Little did she
know how involved I was to solve the problem. I could not pull down her saree
but I managed to sprinkle ink on it from my fountain pen. I loved it when I saw
the blotch grow bigger.
The geometry case was the biggest treasure I had. I had a
collection of leaves and flowers in it which I personally collected from the
school ground and I could not move them to a different place. I dismounted the
protractor and the sets squares from it and hid them somewhere. I don’t
remember where, until today. My teachers gave up on me and that was my biggest
victory. I was happy that they understood my hatred towards this specimen. They
thought I was hopeless but I was happy. It mattered the most…
