The class continued to stare at me till the class teacher announced, ‘All right, class, so where were we?’
Ma’am resumed the lesson. The heads turned back to their respective books, and only intermittently did they get back to me. I sat with my schoolbag on my lap, so that it would cover my thighs. I didn’t want the period to end. I didn’t want the boys and girls to discuss me in the open and aloud when the teacher was gone.
But then, that period ended. The teacher left. And I became the talk of the school.
I didn’t go to school for the next two days.
That was the time that the tailor in Burla had taken to sew my new navy-blue full pants.
10
The Power of Chapter 10
More than half of the curriculum of Class IX had been covered. Winter had set in nicely. The red-coloured school sweaters were out of the trunks and on us, brightening the otherwise bland navy-blue-and-white colour combination of the school uniform. The ones that had been pulled out of the trunk very recently, and not yet put out in the sun, smelled of naphthalene balls.
To get out of bed early in the morning had become challenging. And this challenge had led to a significant drop in the school’s attendance. Every day there were a few students who would skip class—if not for the entire day, then definitely the first period. This kind of absence from the class required the student to submit a leave or a late-coming application. Interestingly, none of the leave applications would mention the real reason, i.e., the student was too lazy to wake up on chilly mornings!
While one leave application might have narrated a kindhearted story of saving a stray puppy from dying on the road, another might describe in detail how the chain of the bicycle had slipped out of the wheel. Most of us were smart enough to write applications with new and unique reasons for being late, but there was a bunch of students who defined the heights of laziness. They were too lazy to even change their ‘reasons for being late’ in their subsequent applications.
Gurpreet, who sat next to me in the left row and seldom took baths on winter mornings, would simply change the animal that she claimed to have saved! At first it was a puppy, then a kitten, followed by a goat. I thought given the rate at which she was using up different animals to rescue herself, she would have been left with nothing but elephants and horses by the end of winter.
When, for the fourth time, Nandu blamed the faulty chain of his bicycle for his coming late to school, the class teacher asked, ‘Why don’t you think of changing your bicycle, Nandu?’ and the class broke into a laugh. Nandu, too, shamelessly joined in the laughter, least bothered that his lie had been caught!
There also used to be a few cunning minds who believed that they must keep their reasons exclusive. This bunch of students invested almost half the night in thinking up one great excuse. That was precisely why, I think, half the time they used to wake up late! At school, these kids would keep their applications highly guarded, so that no one would find out and reuse their exclusive reasons.
So, the ritual of arriving late to school continued. And so did the ritual of submitting fake applications. Amid all this, there used to be some genuine cases as well. But then, it was pointless to try to prove that your application for leave was genuine.
Then, one day, our class made history. We recorded full attendance—for the very first time that winter.
This was not a random happening. There was a reason behind this historical achievement.
This was a Friday and the first subject of the day was Biology. Having survived the boring section about the plant kingdom, we had arrived at the chapters on the animal kingdom. And, on that day, we were about to start ‘Chapter 10—Reproduction’.
Ever since we had bought our books at the beginning of the term, the Bio book was the one whose pages had been flipped through the most. And it was this chapter that we had all flipped through the pages for. Time and again at home, in privacy, I would open this book and stop at this chapter on the page where a man and a woman stood, pictured naked. I didn’t believe my eyes when, for the first time, I came across this page. I wondered how something of that sort could exist in a schoolbook. It was my first experience of seeing lifelike sketches of a man and woman without clothes on—and it was quite shocking. In spite of the fact that it was my schoolbook, I was worried about what my parents would think of me if they got to know that this was what I was studying in my school. Therefore, I used to place that book right at the bottom of the stack of my schoolbooks in the shelf, making it as inaccessible as possible for them.
So, on that exciting morning, after the prayer, unlike the other days when the students would disperse to drink water or to go to the loo before the first period started, everyone headed straight for the classroom. And then we separated into two groups—boys and girls.
There was much excitement and whispering in the class, especially in the back benches, where a few of us had started making naughty jokes. The whispers were followed by raucous laughter from the boys’ side, while the girls looked silently on, either ignoring us or giving us dirty looks. They wanted to make us feel as if we were unnecessarily excited about certain things that were quite normal. But we knew that, deep inside, they were equally excited. What double standards!
The necessity of being able to talk about human private parts in public had given rise to code words. Creativity and imagination were at their peak when we replaced all the biological names of body parts on the naked man and woman in Chapter 10 with the names of fruits that had a close resemblance to each particular body part. Suddenly, that page looked like a fruit shop. In the end, we even gave names to the man and the woman. We called them ‘Chintu’ and ‘Babli’, after popular names in our town.
The madness continued. Some enterprising souls drew the figures from scratch on the last page of their notebooks, then tore off those pages and passed them on to others for review. I, too, was one of these people. When my paper landed in Sushil’s hands, he looked at the drawing and shouted appreciatively, ‘Oh, beta! Gazab banaaya hai be tu toh!’ [Hey, dude! Great job you have done!]
Right then my eyes fell on Bhavna, whose eyes were following me all this time. Now, I had a soft corner for Bhavna and had always treated her like my sister. She was looking at me with disgust and then she said out loud, ‘Tu bhi unki tarah ban gaya hai na, Ravinder?’ [You too have become like those people, haven’t you, Ravinder?]
I couldn’t say anything in reply. I stammered, and then I stopped myself. There was no explanation. But the feeling of guilt lasted only for a minute. I looked around—everyone other than me was busy celebrating the spirit of reading ‘Reproduction’.
Then suddenly someone behind me announced, ‘Nandu has got hold of the convent school’s biology book. It has close-up visuals of the reproductive organs, something that is missing in our book!’
And I lost it. This was too much excitement to miss! I looked at the boys and then back at Bhavna. Half a minute back, I was wondering how to redeem myself in Bhavna’s eyes. But having heard what the backbenchers had announced, my mind was immediately made up! I escaped Bhavna’s glare, and, without bothering to respond to her question, ran back to the backbenchers. I tried to push my way in to treat my eyes to the close-up view. The book was snatched around from one hand to another. I’m not sure if anybody else managed to see the images very clearly, but I didn’t.
Suddenly, all the commotion was interrupted. The loud laughter, the dirty jokes, the chatter—all died down in a second. Bio Ma’am had arrived. She took her time in coming though, listening to the chaos from outside the classroom, but choosing to keep quiet.
When the voices died down, she walked to her chair with grace, just as she always used to do. She was one of the most good-looking teachers in the school. She must have been somewhere in her mid-twenties. All of us knew that she wasn’t yet married. She looked gorgeous in her maroon chudidaar–suit, paired with matching bangles and sandals. She took her chair and then opened the attendance register
.
That day, every roll number she called was followed by either a ‘Yes, Ma’am’ or ‘Present, Ma’am’. As she approached the last roll number, she had a sly smile on her face. Guess she had seen this phenomenon of cent per cent attendance in the previous years as well.
That was the power of Chapter 10!
As soon as she was through with the roll call, Bio Ma’am picked up the chalk. There was pin-drop silence. The boys were almost holding their breaths. Her sandals made a tick-tock sound as she walked to write on the blackboard that had been freshly scrubbed clean by the monitor of the class.
R–E–P–R–O–D–U–C–T–I–O–N
… she wrote in her stylish handwriting. Every letter of that word, along with the scratchy sound of the chalk on the blackboard, raised ripples of excitement within us. For the girls in our class, it seemed to be yet another chapter and they prepared themselves to take notes. For us boys, it was nothing less than the morning show of an adult movie—that too right after the morning prayers. We looked at each other and exchanged naughty smiles. The girls didn’t dare to look anywhere and kept their eyes focused on the blackboard.
Bio Ma’am progressed with the lesson. Five minutes passed …
… then ten, twenty. And then thirty.
THIRTY MINUTES!!!
And nothing exciting happened. Absolutely nothing!
Disheartening as it was, our fantasies never saw the light of day. We wanted the teacher to talk about the vital body parts, but she was wandering somewhere inside the body, in between cells and zygotes. She had gone off on a different tangent altogether. We wanted to talk about the breathtaking visible process and actions of reproduction. She, for some reason, was just not coming out of explaining the boring invisible process of what happens inside. We wanted to skim the surface of the subject matter, but she was busy diving deep into it!
‘When the X chromosome of the father meets the X chromosome of the mother, a girl is born,’ she explained. Then she added, ‘But when the Y chromosome of the father meets the X chromosome of the mother, a boy is born.’
She repeated that multiple times, and finally asked, ‘And what does this show?’
She looked at the class from the left to the right, expecting some braveheart to answer that one. An uncomfortable silence descended upon the boys’ half of the classroom, which felt cheated and was about to break down into tears.
‘That you don’t have anything interesting to teach,’ Sushil whispered in frustration.
The boys around him giggled and brought him to everyone else’s attention.
Sushil Aggarwal, a hard-core backbencher, was the most notorious guy in the class. There was no doubt about this tag, as it was the unanimous belief of our class, and Sushil too had accepted this fact. Girls hated him for his notorious behaviour; boys loved him for his guts and the fun he used to bring to the class. And, fortunately or unfortunately, he sat next to me.
‘What’s going on there?’ Bio Ma’am raised the duster, pointing at us.
No one at the back responded. The most we did was to stop smiling.
The next moment, Archana, who was the topper of the class, grabbed Ma’am’s attention by raising her hand to answer the question.
‘Yes, Archana?’ Ma’am asked her to speak.
‘That means whether the baby is a boy or a girl has nothing do with the mother. It all depends on the father’s chromosome.’ She finished, and stood there waiting for Ma’am to praise her intelligence.
Which happened the very next moment. ‘Very good, Archana! But uneducated people, especially in villages, blame the mother for the gender of their child. Now sit down.’
We found nothing interesting in this discovery.
‘Hell, man! X and Y—here also? Bio ki class hai ki algebra ki?’ Sushil cried out aloud, unable to hold back his frustration.
‘Seriously, Sushil … Do something, man!’ we encouraged him, trying to get some fun out of his madness.
So he raised his hand, interrupting the lecture. He said he had a question to ask—a rare act from him. We all waited.
‘Yes, Sushil?’ Ma’am gave him the permission to ask his question.
Sushil stood up, adjusted the belt of his trousers and tucked in his shirt. He tried to conceal his smile but could not; so he smiled on shamelessly. This gave the class an idea of the kind of question he was about to ask.
‘Ma’am, how and when does father ka X meet mother ka X?’
A master stroke that was!
Sushil’s courage in asking this was deeply admired by all of us. On the boys’ side of the classroom, laughter erupted like a volcano. We tried hard to keep it down but that too felt like a challenge. The backbenchers celebrated this ultimate joke by tapping hard on the table.
In the girls’ camp, whispers of ‘Oh shit!’ and ‘Oh God!’ were followed by embarrassed smiles. They were probably sympathizing with the teacher.
The only person who managed to hold her smile was Bio Ma’am. However, in order to bring the much-needed silence to class, she had to shout out: ‘Silence!’
That only managed to silence half the class. She tapped the duster three times on the desk, until, gradually, the entire class came to a still. She had managed to handle the erupting chaos quite well. With that she regained some confidence, and went to answer Sushil’s question.
Bio Ma’am looked right into his eyes. ‘When the male sperm comes in contact with the female egg, that’s when either X or Y from the male meets the X of female. Is that clear?’ she asked sternly.
At that unexpected reply, Sushil couldn’t even decide whether he should nod his head up and down or shake it left and right. So our hero landed up doing both. It was hilarious!
But as soon as Ma’am turned towards the blackboard, everyone turned towards Sushil. There was a smile on every face. We raised our hands to give him a thumbs-up sign. This was our admiration for him.
However, Sushil wasn’t moved by our appreciation for him. He was still thinking over the interesting question he had asked and the boring answer that the teacher had countered it with.
He looked at us, rubbed his palm against his forehead in disappointment and said, ‘Yeh kya bakwaas kare jaa rahi hai?’
Someone else in the back whispered, ‘Why didn’t she simply say when a man and a woman have sex?’
‘Aur nahi toh kya?’ Sushil said.
All we wanted to listen to were those few titillating words, but it was only the non-sexy stuff that we were hearing. Not that we had never heard them ever, but the pleasure of hearing it from our own teacher’s mouth was incomparable to anything else. Till half an hour earlier, we had imagined that she would explain how to have sex to us; that she would talk about the reproductive organs—the ones she possessed and the ones we possessed. In a nutshell, we wanted to experience spoken porn, and hell!—she was treading nowhere close to it.
‘… and that’s how the baby is conceived inside a female.’ She ended her lecture with that sensational line.
‘Wow, the female got pregnant and there wasn’t any mention of S–E–X. What was she producing—test-tube babies?’ I whispered to Sushil in deep frustration.
People behind me overheard me and laughed.
Ten more minutes were left for the bell to ring. This was usually the time for the question-and-answer session. Counting in the sensitivity of the topic and the presence of students like Sushil, Bio Ma’am decided it would be wise not to ask the class any question. So she let the entire class review the chapter on their own.
Some of us looked at Sushil, pushing him to utilize the remaining time and ask one more question. He refused.
A few chits and pieces of chalk were hurled at him. He managed to save himself from a few, but not all. He looked back, grinned and said, ‘Bhak saala, main nahi puchhunga.’
‘Last try, Sushil! Make her say something dirty,’ someone in the crowd asked.
‘Yes! Yes! You can do it!’ everyone else cheered him on too, keeping their vo
ices low. We treated him like he was our rock star.
All that flattery worked. Sushil agreed to give it a final try.
‘Ma’am, one doubt!’ Sushil said and raised his hand.
The boys looked at Sushil with great expectation. The girls wanted to run out of the class or hide themselves somewhere inside their bags. They looked really embarrassed. Bio Ma’am looked at her watch. She must have desperately wanted the bell to ring right then. But God was on our side.
‘Yes?’ She cleared her throat half-heartedly and agreed to listen to the question.
‘Ma’am, I am not clear on how the male sperm lands up in the female’s body,’ he asked her with an innocent look, as if he seriously didn’t know anything about it.
The entire class made a muffled ‘Hooo!’ sound in unison.
Now that was a checkmate. There was no way for Bio Ma’am to escape. She had to utter that word—‘sex’—which we had been wanting her to say since the beginning of the class.
The excitement in the class had at once reached the extreme. By now, the girls had come to terms with the fact that they didn’t have a choice but to adjust to the animal instincts of the boys. But Sushil’s direct question was still difficult to digest for them. A few of the backbenchers first thought about clapping on Sushil’s bravery, but changed their mind so that they could focus on what Ma’am was about to say.
Bio Ma’am looked uncomfortable and irritated with the question. She felt offended, but had no choice. She stood up angrily and asked the rest of the class, ‘Anyone else has any other question?’
There was a silence. No one dared to ask anything.
‘All right, then, I will answer Sushil’s question,’ she said, crossing her arms against her chest and walking into the aisle between the girls’ row and the boys’ row.
Sushil’s eyes were twinkling and focused on her.
Bio Ma’am spoke, ‘That happens when the male reproductive organ enters into the female reproductive organ.’