Act of Random (unintended) Cruelty
After studying in a private school till fifth standard, Aniket had just transferred to a Government run school. Schools in India are divided into two broad categories, the private schools where you pay heavy tuition fee plus other charges and government run schools which are almost free. The fee structure determines the kind of households from which students come to study there.
Sometimes middle class families, as they can’t afford the private school education of their kids all the way, tend to put the kids in private school for early years. Then they transfer them to the affordable government schools as the schools become dearer or the families have more kids to provide for.
This particular school had pretty good infrastructure on the outside, a big fancy building, a gigantic playground and it was even situated in a nice neighbourhood. The internal environment of the school was a different story altogether. It was what you would come to expect from a free-for-all government school.
Students ran rampant all over the place as soon as the teacher was not in class. While in his old school, classrooms without teachers were unheard of, here it was a very common sight.
Within the school, there were two set of students who were poles apart from each other. First set consisted of those who started their primary education in these schools. They were the natives. Second set was the ones recently transferred from private schools. They were the newcomers. They tend to do academically well but were less well versed in school culture and the street fights. Sixth standard was when the difference most pronounced and will taper down over the years as assimilation happened.
This came as a shocker to Little Aniket who hadn’t been in an atmosphere like this before. For lack of a better analogy this was like putting an animal which has been raised in the shielded well protected environment of a zoo in a wild jungle.
The difference in academic skills of those two type of kids was huge. It was a mystery to Aniket how the natives ever managed to pass exams. Come exam season the great secret was revealed to Aniket. This is the first time Aniket learnt of a novel concept called ‘Farra’. A ‘Farra’ or a ‘Chit’ is a tiny piece of paper, on which students scribble in the tiniest possible handwriting. These cheat sheets are then hidden in places where they cannot be discovered easily and retrieved in the exam hall when the invigilator is not looking.
So it was the miracle of chits through which the students who couldn’t be bothered to study year round long, managed to scale the barrier with passing grades, if nothing fancy. Some lenient invigilators would intentionally turn a blind eye in exam hall to let students pass.
Come exam season, while the ‘good’ kids would be worrying about what to study, the rest got busy making the chits, planning where to hide the chits and evaluating how many to hide in bathroom or on themselves.
Exams also typically happen in a classroom different from your own so that students are not able to pre-hide chits. Also, while during your regular classes you share a bench with one of your classmates, during exams you had to share the desk with a student from a different class. This was to prevent students from helping each other.
This exam season was no different. As per the seating plan, Aniket’s class was clubbed with students from class ninth. Pairing with a senior is always the preferred pairing. If you are lucky the senior might help you with a question or two i.e. if they themselves are the studying kind.
Aniket was seated with a lanky looking senior. In the very first exam of Social sciences, Aniket wasn’t sure about an answer. He tried his luck by asking the senior for help. Instead of saying ‘No I do not know the answer’, the senior decided to help the best he could. Even the kid knew how much far from correct the senior’s answer was. From that moment onwards it became clear to Aniket not to expect any help from the senior. To top it off, Aniket witnessed the infamous chits in the hand of the senior on the very first day.
Aniket’s exams were going rather well. Even though Aniket himself wasn’t a big rule breaker but he had never been a tell tale either. Even if there would have been a new comer in this school who had been a snitch, they would have witnessed enough street wars and violence in their first year at school to decide better. So the though of ever reporting the senior to the teacher obviously never crossed Aniket’s mind. Rather, his big worry was that a chit might be caught on their shared desk and then the teacher might not distinguish between who among the two students was planning on using it. So, exam after exam he witnessed in silence the senior using chits to try and get some answers out on answer sheets, while fearing for their mutual safety.
Today was the last exam of the year. Even though the exam was yet to start there was a sense of relief in anticipation of the end, in the exam hall in the morning. Today, Aniket also discovered where the senior had been hiding all these chits all these days. The place was no other than the shared desk itself. The desk was made of wooden planks and each surface wasn’t a full plank in itself but two planks nailed together. That left tiny slits between the two planks. The ingenious senior had been using the slit on the bottom side of the writing area as the perfect hiding place.
Aniket would have never guessed that this was the hiding place, his mind not inclined to these tricks and rather busy on studying for his own exams. The reason he ‘did’, was because today the senior decided to cleanup all the old chits from past exams. Before the exam could begin and the invigilator shows up, the senior finished his cleanup. Then he went to throw these away and fill his water bottle at the nearby water cooler. Aniket also felt relieved that the desk was clean for today’s exam and he need not fear being caught for the crime of others.
Nevertheless he decided to run his fingers through the slit where the senior use to hide the chits. As the desk had seen its share of seasons over the years, there was plenty of space in the slit to hide stuff. To his surprise, Aniket discovered that the senior hadn’t found all the old chits which he wanted to throw. It seemed there were still a few left which, ‘may be his thicker fingers missed’. Not to let this interfere with his sense of relief, Aniket quickly took out these leftover chits without attracting attention of others. There were only a few mins left for exam to start so he quickly rushed out and threw them in the nearest garbage can and promptly returned to his seat.
Soon the invigilator entered the examination hall, and thus began the last exam of the year. While Aniket’s exams were going rather well, the senior wasn’t doing too bad on his own expectations either, thanks to the magic of chits. About an hour into the exam is the time when invigilator’s become a little lethargic, they look for taking a break themselves or just stop the rounds and become static in their own chairs. This is the time when you bring out the chits, ask your friends for help or apply any other innovative methods to score a little better on the exam. Towards the end of the exam time, the invigilators might become vigilant again.
Aniket observed that the senior today appeared a little rattled around this time into the exam. He was ferociously searching for something below the desk, running his fingers all across. Then looking at the floor here and there to see if the things he was looking for might have fallen down somewhere. However they were not to be found. And then it dawned upon ignorant Mr Aniket. The chits he thought were old and he threw out, were indeed the fresh ones for today’s exam. Judging by the expression on the senior’s face Aniket could guess that the senior was surely going to fail today’s exam now.
Through his act of random unintended cruelty Aniket had probably caused a big damage to the senior’s life. Even if the senior doesn’t have to repeat a year, he might have to appear for a supplementary exam during the summer break.
Aniket’s biggest fear was now how much longer before the senior discovers the culprit. If one applied simple deduction, fingers will point towards Aniket, as he had clearly seen the hiding place in the morning. The saving grace was that he had no purpose behind throwing the chits, neither had any body seen him throwing them. At least that is what he wished for. However Aniket knew he might not last under duress and might confess in a punch or two.
Even though lanky, the senior was much bigger in size compared to Aniket. Being the studious type from a private school background, Aniket wouldn’t have stood a chance against most boys in his own class, let alone against a senior more than three years older.
So the fight or flight response kicked in. Flight was the obvious and intelligent choice. Aniket decided to finish and submit his exam early, even leaving a few marks on the table. So that the senior doesn’t get a chance to interrogate him that day. Given this was the last exam there would be long vacations post this. Hopefully the senior wouldn’t keep the grudge even if he figures out that Aniket was the culprit. The good part was that even though they were exchanging pens and other stationary during the course of exams, they never exchanged names. The course of time will weaken his suspicion. Or may be he will fail and leave the school. Aniket also decided not to wait for the school bus to go home which would have started once the exam was done for all students. He instead took a private auto home. This was a time before social media and mobile phones. So the senior even though he might have his suspicions wouldn’t have been able to figure out Aniket’s name or reach out to him to confront him before the school reopens.
It’s been years now. To this day,Aniket doesn’t know what happened to that senior. Did he pass his exam, did he guess it was Aniket or thought it was someone else? Did he really fail and leave school? Aniket never ran into him in school again the next year. The thought remained with him for a few weeks after the school reopened, and then he forgot about it completely. That is until today when he sat down to write this story.
