6th B, part 1

My autodriver had driven me late to school and I was pretty tense . I was sitting next to him in the front seat, in an auto full of kids from our school. Driver anna had no space for himself and almost drove with his body outside the auto. As soon as he stopped at the school gate to our watchman's relentless whistle blows, I got down from my auto hurriedly and ran towards my class '6th standard B'(batch stated to be the worst batch ever,for 8 consecutive years now. I don't quite know the parameters to assess the worst class of the year or the judges behind this prestigious award). I sprinted across the main building, quickly reached the corridor which had a giant aquarium and ran into 6th standard 'B'. The class leader , Aarthi had wiped the board clean , written 18-9-1998 at the side and had written "Try,try,try But dont cry " in pink chalk. There was a portion of the board dedicated to the 'juvenile,making no sense' proverb of the day .

"Dei, I am also joining da", I said to Amit.S , my north Indian classmate, native of Rajasthan and settled in Coimbatore for a decade.My school had an equal mix of North and South Indians, with north indians densely populated in the B section, because it was the hindi section. Amit was one of my close friends and partner in crime. Amit spoke funny tamil as expected of any north indian settled in Coimbatore, and was one of the few north indians who studied well(others were sure to land up at their father's business ,and made it a point to enjoy school life). "You came late. Match is almost starting now da", he said shuffling the WWF trump cards. He evenly distributed the cards between himself , deep brothers(3 people) and me. The deep brothers comprised of Sandeep,Pradeep and Kuldeep. Sandeep and Pradeep were twins( age of Sandeep - age of Pradeep=10 mintues), whereas Kuldeep was born two years later. However like the noble brothers of amar,akbar and antony, the three brothers failed at different points in time and finally converged at 6th B for a 'Yaadon ki Baarat' reunion. Deep brothers were the sons of the upper middle class cloth merchants and hardly required to study. And yes, fact- Kuldeep never wore an underwear, a thing confirmed time and again by us when his pencil fell down.

I had got Hulk-Hogan, Hitman and Giant Gonzales today with me. I was guaranteed to win.I sat in reverse on my desk with people entering the class in the background, while others were all talking. Class leader Aarthi got up and went to the front to mind the class. I put my finger on the lips to my gang indicating silence at play. The game was going well, I had the cards for highest height,fights fought and biceps . My win would have almost been certain if only my class teacher, Sharada miss,had not entered the class so soon. Sharada miss taught us Hindi. She had a scar on her face(6th 'A' rumour was that a cooker exploded near her face and she got a vertical scar on her left cheek. We sincerely believed that). She was one of the very strictest(in 6th standard lingo) miss of the school. "Is this a fish market or what?" , shouted Miss.Sharada. If she had an eye patch , her scar and eye patch combination would have made her look like a pirate.By the way, the fish market dialogue is the most banal Indian school cliche.

Sharada miss went to her desk and started taking the attendance one by one. Attendance was my favourite time of the day. My mind used to statistically list down the number of people who said "Present","Yes" with a combination of "miss" or "ma'am" crossed joined. I wished there were 800 students in class and attendance lasted one hour long. Attendance was done, Aarthi took the register and was involved in some flattery with Miss.Sharada. "Stupid dog", amit mumbled looking at aarthi and I nodded along in agreement. First period(ya, we used it innocently call classes periods) was Miss.Pandian's today. It was Biology class. Miss.Pandian was the almost 60 year old Miss who taught us Biology and whose class we would have most fun in. She wrote down a few of distinguish betweens, which got rubbed from the board quickly . I ended up copying from Amit,and Kuldeep to my left copied from me,and Pradeep inturn copied from Kuldeep. Sandeep stood up from the row behind me and copied from Amit and me mixed. So mistakes from Amit's note amplified level by level with every subsequent person, and Pradeep would end up failing,(Unit test 1,he drew something which looked like Devegowda for an Yeast molecule.)

Miss.Pandian made the entire class repeat the distinguish answers after her. "chlamydomonas is a unicelular organism." and "Spyrogyra is a multicellular organism". Sandeep hatched a clever plot. All the boys would whisper the first line and the second line we would all scream like hell. Everybody were a part of this except Sundar kannan , the first ranker. Sundar was the geek of the class. He was the only person in our class who had a Computer and had excellent computer skillsets like MS Excel,powerpoint,Pacman,wolf and Dave.Anyway,It was time for fun. We are all whispering the line "chlamydomonas is a unicelular organism". Some guys even made hissing noises for added effects. All the girls were smiling at that. Now it was time for screaming. We shouted to the top of our voices" Spyyyyyyyrogyyyyyra is a agaabaagaaaraagaaa organism". Pradeep and Kuldeep wohooed at the end adding to the fun, while Sandeep gave a finger in the mouth whistle(He was the only person who could do that in 6th and 7th fully included). Miss.Pandian went crazy and could not figure out who did what. "Stop shouting", she screamed. Sandeep cleverly said,"Miss, you are only shouting now no miss" to which the entire class laughed. "Shut up", Miss.Pandian said . "I am never going to come to the class", she said with a look of contempt at the boys and walked out. "Sorry miss", said aarthi running behind her and trying to do some damage control. "See, Aarthi will now fall downing on Miss's feet ", said Amit in one of the worst framed sentences in English ever.


"We are all gone. Maybe they will suspend us. Already they suspect our class for the bathroom bomb blast last diwali. " ,said Sundar genuinely concerned. "What a baby", I said and patted Kuldeep giving him an indication to laugh at my comment. Kuldeep responded like a faithful dog anticipating a piece of rusk and laughed . Pradeep joined in hooting, and Sandeep too later laughed along, only knowing the fact that we were laughing at Sundar.Sundar shut himself up and turned to the front. Aarthi came back and we did not know what happened at the staff room. We had two periods of history after Biology. Our history miss Gita was very strict and used to hit us on our palms with the wooden scale held vertically if we created any trouble(Sundar used to contribute the wooden scale which had Sundar.S written on it, scratched in an ugly fashion with an old blade from his father's shaving kit).We were all very quiet during the two history periods and I even yawned inside my mouth without opening it, so as not to get a "Stand up on the bench" order, which she issued as freely as home loan pamphlets.

It was around lunch time now. The bell rang and everybody took out their carrybags. Amit and I were the uber cool guys who kept small tiffen boxes in our bags itself and brought no water bottles. Amit brought 2 chappaties for himself, with some potato fry. I always wondered how that would be enough for a normal human being, considering that I could eat ten chappaties (even at that age). Deep brothers brought a triple deck tiffen box with many rotis and a deck dedicated to dal. I brought lemon rice and Sundar would eat his curd rice with pickle all alone in the front. Other gangs used to eat amongst themselves. And the girls, we did'nt care about the girls.

Amit and I had our lunch and went to our school pantry. It was time for having our favourite 1 rupee pepsi. I took out three 25 paise coins from my pocket and realized I was short of 25 paise. Amit took out his purse(He was the only guy who had a purse) and handed out 5 rupees to the shopkeeper. Amit's parents were very rich and kind, they gave him 50 rupees of pocket money every month. I gave 75 paise for my pepsi to amit and promised the remaining 25 paise the next day . Amit said "Chalta hai , Boss" and winked. We quickly headed back to the class after sucking in the grape flavoured pepsi. Free time in lunch was utilized playing pen fight on our desks. We had a tag team match today and so we hurried back to class.

Pradeep and Sandeep were busy drawing something on the board when we walked into the class. They drew a caricature on board and wrote the words below which said something called "MADHER****" with a double underline below it, which turned out to be the reason for our suspension in a few hours.


(To be continued...)

P.S: Again, thanks for the support. Corporate monkey ideas lingering in my head. Will continue with that too soon. As always, do comment.