Anirudh entered the lift with a palpitating heart. His mother was not going to be happy with his 68 % in English. He envied his friends. None of them had an English teacher for a mother. They didn’t have mothers, who wanted them to be the chips off the old blocks. Her vehement attempts at improving his English was third degree torture to him. While all his friends watched TV or played cricket he would be battling with Past Perfect Tenses and Passive constructions of sentences. ‘How did it matter if the Subject got importance or if the Object did?’he wondered. As long as people understood you!
He remembered grimly how she had once made him write ‘ ‘You’ is the subject of an imperative sentence, 200 times! For weeks he used to dream of a skeleton chanting ‘Shut the door…. You shut the door, close the window…you close the window, remove you shoes ….you remove your shoes and whatnot!!!!’
‘ Why couldn’t I have had a doctor or even a secretary for a mother? Or at least a Science teacher….. Science teachers never bothered about language… They just wanted facts. Why an English teacher?’
Even his own language teachers were on the defensive with him. He felt that his teachers corrected his paper twice or thrice fearing that his mother would appear at the Open House challenging their corrections. They took no chances. Maybe that was why they were so strict with his papers. He felt that his teacher overlooked silly mistakes in his friends’ papers, but never in his.
As the lift ascended to the 13th floor, he felt tremendous tension. He looked at the paper again. Sentence construction had never been his forte. And when you are frantically trying to finish a lengthy paper within measly 11/2 hours, how can you waste time thinking about a stupid word? So in his hurry he had written a sentence using the word ‘Appendage’- Last summer holidays my father got his appendage removed through surgery. It was only after the exam when his friend had told him about the meaning of the word had he realized his blunder. When his teacher had read his sentence out loud in the class, he had felt like a prize idiot. Of course he now knew his father had got his appendix removed… but he had been under pressure in the exam hall.
If only I could keep this from her! He thought with panic. Next few days were off for Diwali. And he could not bear being confined to his room, writing sentence after sentence to improve his sentence construction skills, while his friends had fun with crackers and outings… God! Help me, he prayed as he entered his house.
“Anirudh! Be careful!” his mother’s voice came from the bathroom. “ Don’t trip over the rolled carpet in your room. And did you get your papers?”
Anirudh mumbled something. ‘God show me the way!’ he prayed like never before. God was kind. Quickly, Anirudh rolled up his English paper into a tight cylinder and pushed it inside the rolled carpet. “Phew!” He said, relieved of all his tension. “You stay there till Diwali is over!”
‘No, Ma ,’ he shouted. ‘Only after Diwali holidays.’ He saluted Lord Krishna’s smiling picture and started removing his uniform.
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