"Gawd!! I'm so dead, man! I can't remember crap of what I learnt!!" moaned Sania, as she pored over her photocopy of my Hindi notes. "I think I have dyslexia..." I trailed off, as I watched the letters on my paper jumping around, dancing to "The Way I Are". "Yeah, right!" she scoffed, "Rhea, you've probably finished studying the portions twice and doing your third revision now." "Hey!" I said indignantly, "I can't remember anything either!" Sania gave me a very skeptical look and I decided that it would be wise to shut my mouth before I got verbally abused.
Manisha was sitting next to us, watching the drama unfold with a saintly smile on her face. She was probably the only girl in class who was extremely feminine and well-behaved. Even the smallest, slightest sarcastic remark could scandalise her and she would cover her mouth with her hand, a shocked look on her face. Everytime she spotted one of us, she'd greet us with a cheery and polite "Good morning!".
I turned to Manisha and asked her, "Tell me, you saw the way she corrected our papers the last time. And to top it off, I haven't studied much. And another undeniable fact - this is HINDI!! Fate loves watching me suffer when it comes to this. It's not possible for me to do well!" Manisha pondered over the matter for a while before she replied, "No, Rhea, I'm quite sure you'll do well. You always say this before a test. You'll probably do better than the rest of us." I stared back in shock at the sincere face with the same smile I had noticed a few moments ago. Rolling my eyes, I said, "Brilliant! The whole world is against me! NO ONE believes me!"
"Rhe-a, stop being so... melodramatic." said Sania. I glared menacingly at her. The first long test had always been a source of discomfort for everyone. You never knew whether your new teacher was the kind who loved seeing people have panic attacks on receiving the question paper or their corrected answer paper for that matter. On the bright side, it is a lot less dangerous than having a stroke during the first semester exams.
As we grimly filed into our classroom, the widely spread chairs giving it an ominous look, I chose the seat that seemed the furthest away from Sania's. During the first ever long test that we took in Hindi, we had copied from each other and our old teacher had found us out. She made us sit in two different corners for that test and all the others that followed them. Even though this teacher was new, she seemed rather intimidating and I thought it would be best to sit as far away from Sania as I could, in case the temptation to peek into her paper rose again.
An extremely boring 1 and a half hours later, filled with strenuous writing tasks and a lot of guesswork on my part, we emerged from the classroom with relieved looks on our faces. Janet, my classmate, looked at the expression on my face and said, "What, madam? Did brilliantly, huh?" "Well, I'll pass quite decently if that's what you mean..." I said, smiling sheepishly. Janet burst into a fit of exaggerated coughs and I gave her my best raised eyebrow look. It did not work.
All of us wandered around college aimlessly for a while till we finally settled down at the benches near our block where all our classmates were sitting. I was surprised to see everyone with a book in their hand, either reading it religiously or looking to the skies as they repeated some extremely complicated definition. Truth be told, this was a very rare event but since no one took the H.O.D. lightly, it was something to be expected.
Maths had never been my forte so I walked out of the room with the most dismal expression on my face. Refusing to talk to anyone, I walked rapidly to the canteen and ordered a Sprite, looking like someone who had lost all hope in the world. I downed it in less than 20 seconds. Sanjana kept a close check on me as a dazed look kept coming and going on my face. She told me that worse things could happen and that I could probably have lost an arm or a leg. "She probably will when the H.O.D. is through with her!" said a quirky Aditi. I sighed - they have a knack for doing this.
