DREAMY BOY - Part 5/9 – Before the break
The screen on the right displays proceedings within a sixth grade classroom.
The walls of the classroom are dull, and it appears like they have not been painted for ages. The room though, is well ventilated, with four large windows on the left and on the right two windows with doors on the ends. The window panes on the exterior face of the building are all damaged and cool breeze blows into the classroom indicating that this is winter time.
The highlight of the classroom is the door of the cupboard next to the black board. Its door dangles and sways rhythmically making the sound ‘kee kee’ aided by the wind agitated by the lone fan above the teacher’s desk.
The classroom has wooden benches arranged in a grid formed of four rows of and six benches per row. The benches are made of unfinished coarse wood and both the seating bench and writing desks are disjointed. The seating bench doesn’t have a backrest and so, except for the students sitting in the rear most benches none of them can lean back. They all sit straight with their spine erect, lest they should shake the writing desks on their rear.
A boy and a girl share each bench, except for the last row, which has only boys sitting, most of whom are repeaters as they look taller, stronger and brawnier than the kids on the other benches.
It is a Social Studies class, and the teacher, who looks like a bespectacled lean reptile wrapped in a sari teaches Geography.
The topic being taught was ‘Continents of the World’ and today she was teaching them about Antarctica. She informed them that, Antarctica is by far the coldest, driest, and windiest continent of all; that during winter the water there gets converted into ice and that is considered as a desert! As she shared with them the last piece of knowledge, almost all the students in the class let out a big “Whoa”. The latest revelation had just shattered their set belief that a desert was a place which had no water at all and that the only way one could find water in a desert was to drill a hole using a big drilling machine mounted on a truck. Well, that is what their parents had taught them, and that is what they believed because that is what they had seen around them, in this remote town on the west of India.
The students started murmuring, expressing their disbelief, and discussing amongst themselves. Some wanted to know how fishes could survive and swim in the frozen ice and someone else wanted to know if penguins actually peed liquid or strings of ice. However, the discussion within the class just served as a welcome break for the teacher, who went out to the corridor and started chatting with the teacher from the next class, basking and soaking up some warm sunshine.
As the teachers stood there in the corridor busily engrossed and discussing their sari patterns; and their students in both the classes talked and discussed in suppressed tones, a ten year old boy on the fourth bench of the second row from the entrance breathed heavily with his torso moving back and forth, his legs shaking, as his hands clasped on to his knees.
Next to him and on his left sat a cute dusky gujju girl who wore a nose ring and anklets that made a sweet sound as she walked. Her oily hairs were braided on the sides and on the ends tied up with bright and shiny red ribbons. She, turned her head and stared at him agape, as if she just witnessed someone being possessed by a spirit or something. The boy continued to shake his head, biting his lower lip, with his eyes closed, swaying his torso back and forth and shaking his legs vigorously. He slowly opened his eyes, turned to the girl and asked “How much more time for recess?” to which she replied in her husky voice “I don’t know, maybe two-three minutes” and enquired “Why? What happened?”
He didn’t respond back. She asked him again “What happened? Want to go to the toilet?”
“Yes” he replied in a hush tone.
“Then, get up. Go and ask permission from ma’am” she said, to which he replied “No, it is okay, I shall wait. Just two minutes” and turned away.
She then started pestering him “Go, get up….. go… go”, but he didn’t. He was scared to. It was only two days since that fateful day, when he was brutally bullied in the toilet block by some senior boys, whom he had inadvertently caught smoking and drawing explicit caricatures over the urinals. He had since decided that come what may, he’d never visit the toilet alone during the period hours, lest the event would repeat. He was just waiting for the recess bell to ring so that he could rush to the toilet and get relieved.
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