The Bench Partner

DREAMY BOY - Part 6/9 – The Bench Partner

The bell rang, indicating that it was recess time. All the kids let out a sigh and pulled out their bags to remove their lunchboxes. Our lad got up and started running to the door, but was stopped on route by the reptile who held him by the arm. She exclaimed “Stop there you. Not so fast. Go and sit on your position, I have to take your attendance before I leave” The boy lifted his head and started saying “Ma’am, I….. toi……” and wet his half pants right in front of the class as his classmates, all of them let out a another and a bigger “Whoa”

As the lad stood there hanging his head in shame, his teacher pulled him by his left ear and mockingly reprimanded “kyon? aaj ghar se su-su kar ke nahin aya tha kya?” (Why didn’t you pee before leaving home today?), to which most of his classmates had a big laugh holding their belly and pointing their fingers towards him. Crying, he ran from the class first to the toilet, where he washed his trousers and then proceeded straight to the safe haven atop the water tank on the school building’s terrace.

The sun wasn’t shining well and the fifteen minutes long recess was not enough to dry his one foot long half pants. He missed the noon assembly and walked in two minutes late for the math class. As he entered in, the teacher questioned where he was loitering for so long, to which a so called bright kid from the first row stood up and informed her that “Today no ma’am Sue did su su here” pointing at the location, right where his teacher stood now. The teacher jumped screaming “Eeee” and the class had their second bout of laugh.

Except for the bad brazen boys from the back benches, kids in general had a field day making fun of the boy, walking around him giggling and staring at his crotch, as if it were a volcano waiting to burst and leak his pants. He now had no friends anymore. During the recess, he would just sit on his bench eating his lunch lazily without raising his head and just waiting for the bell to ring and for the recess to end. In the subsequent days, during recess, some of his classmates would bring their friends from the other classes and collectively gaze at him from outside the classroom, pointing at him, observing him from a distance as though he was a caged animal and one of the rare species.

The reptile, his Social Studies teacher, however ensured that the class had a fun time as she asked him every day if he wanted to visit the loo. And when he would say “No, ma’am”, she’d reply back “Then don’t do su-su here okay?” and the whole class would burst into a cacophonic laughter. The lad would just sit there, shutting his ears off. His bench partner, the girl, would at such times display her empathy by holding his hand and squeezing it lightly. He would just shrug it off. He didn’t want her sympathy.

He was now like an outlaw and he didn’t want to be friends with anyone, except for the last benchers, who empathised with him. He had won their friendship by gifting imported packets of Rothmans and 555 cigarettes, which he stole from his dad’s cupboard. All he wanted was to be was bad and bold like those senior boys who had bullied him a few days back.

Occasionally he would, along with his newfound friends, hole up at the toilet, draw caricatures, urinate into the wash basin and smoke cigarettes. There along with his bad buddies, he would contemplate ways and means to kill all the teachers and bomb the school building. The bad boys were now his only friends and needless to mention, under their company his grades started dropping.

The girl though kept watching from a distance, and tried to infrequently break ice by casually nudging him by her shoulders, borrowing his rubber and cajoling him saying “Oh ho… your handwriting is so good, so round and beautiful like chana dal” He wouldn’t bother to even respond back. During the class, as the teacher faced away writing on the black board, she would tap his knuckles playfully with her pencil and try to touch her knees to his. He would just angrily move away and in return give her a scornful look.

These events continued for over two weeks or so and one day, during their Physical Training Class, the girl confronted our lad in the playground, alone and away from his buddies. She looked straight at his face and asked him as to what his problem was and as to why he was behaving indifferent with her. He replied saying that he was as boy and he didn’t want to be friends with sissy girls.

She kept arguing and urged him to get out of this bad company that he had got into and to just get back to his normal self, to which he replied sternly “You go and be friends with girls, why are you after me? Just leave me alone and don’t follow me, you are only my bench partner. You are not my wife”. She cried and walked away.

Our lad stood there akimbo staring at her go away, with his legs spread apart as if a new set of balls. He had a big smile on his face and his spine and head erect. He had just made a girl cry, and within his heart he felt that now, he was indeed becoming a man, bold, strong and brute.

The next day his class teacher read out a letter issued by his bench partner’s dad. Through it, her dad mentioned that his daughter was having difficulties in reading the black board from her current position and requested to move her further to the front. Ma’am asked if any of those studious kids from the first two rows would want to shift places with her. No one volunteered, so she eventually visited that principal’s office and got permission to put a single desk in front of the row farthest away from the door.

From that day onwards they were officially separated.

As he had asked for, she had left him to himself. He now sat there on his bench alone, missing the smell of his bench partner’s mustard oiled hair and sweet sound of her anklets. There was no one who would smile at him and nudge him playfully. He was alone, even his bad buddies wouldn’t mind him, unless he fed them with imported cigarettes.

Sitting alone on the two-seater desk, this boy scribbled onto his notebook, plans envisioning new ways to confront and woo this girl’s friendship back. But although in his own eyes he had now grown up, he never really mustered the courage required to go up and talk to her. The girl would give him side glances and gaze at him from a distance, but never had she offered to break ice. 


The cold war continued through the academic year, at the end of which, the boy’s mother who observed his grades drop heavily, got him enrolled into another school, leaving their hearts broken forever.