The Devil

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…