I Kissed A Girl In My Class by Abhilash Gaur Page B

time to play. You
can play from afternoon till late evening. It’s also a good time to
study. The feet don’t chill, the fingers don’t freeze, and the
palms don’t sweat either. Riding to school in the cool mornings
with no bag and only a writing pad and pencil box pressed under the
clip of the cycle carrier felt like going on a picnic.
    But Manu also
liked the final exams because he knew his subjects well. When other
students burnt the midnight oil, he merely browsed his books to
make sure he remembered what was in them. The only subject he
crammed was social studies because there really was not any other
way of remembering all the history dates. Since he did not practise
maths like Samar, he invariably made some silly mistakes and lost a
few marks, but he still managed to finish in the top five every
year, and his folks were more than pleased with his results.
    To him, each final
exam was a milestone crossed on the way to the next class. Six,
five, four, three, two, one. The subjects were maths, science,
social science, English, Hindi and Sanskrit. On returning home
after each exam he tossed that subject’s books into the loft, and
looked with satisfaction on his depleting shelf. But only after
consulting those books to see whether he had made some outrageous
mistake that day.
    The last exam day
was a time for celebration. Boys stayed on in school till late to
play, the girls mostly headed for each other’s houses to chat or
stay over. They would not meet for two weeks till the next session
started. Then came Holi, a riotous time, and after that the summer
picked up. On the last Saturday of the month, all the students
trooped into their classrooms with parents in tow to find out how
they had done in the exams, and which section they had been
assigned to in the next class.
    Manu stood fourth
that year, which earned him a pat on the back and the promise of a
new bicycle. A racing cycle. He was being moved to section A in
class 7. “Am I the only one?” he asked Uma Ma’am, his class
teacher, but she said some of his friends were going too. The
sections had been mixed. Because he was among her best students,
she let him have a look at the list of students going to section A.
It was an alphabetical list, and Manu quickly jumped to ‘N’. No,
Neha was staying in section B. That’s all he wanted to know, and
was very sad. It was the first time they wouldn’t be studying
together. It had taken him years to befriend her, and now she would
just drift away. It was so unfair, even cruel, but what could he
say or do?
    The joy of
starting a new class was missing when the students walked into
their sections on the first day. The reassignment of sections meant
that half the class did not know the other half. There was a
visible division in the centre, with students from 6-A occupying
the leftmost row and those from 6-B the rightmost. Instead of a new
class’ loud babel there was just an indistinct hubbub.
    The students
wondered who their new class teacher would be. They all knew Roy
Ma’am who taught maths and had been class teacher the previous
year, and when they saw her walking towards the classroom they
quickly settled down in their benches. But ma’am left in a moment
after taking her notebooks from a locked cupboard. The suspense
continued for half an hour and then, a new teacher, an unfamiliar
face, walked in. She was very young, very pretty, very hep with
bouffant curls and high heels, and her dupatta draped in the style
of the latest Hindi movies (English movies weren’t so hot
then).
    Many boys fell in
love with her at first sight. Even those who didn’t out of loyalty
to their secret crushes, like Manu, took a keen interest in her.
The girls studied her style approvingly, and made mental notes. By
afternoon, she was the talk of the senior wing. The bigger boys
found excuses to walk past 7-A and peep inside, causing much
heartburn among her own possessive students.
    She was a maths
teacher, her name was