Part 12 of 20 · 5 minHindi

The Hindi madam came in at nine-forty with the register under her arm and a bundle of question papers cut in half, and she did not sit down.

She was a small woman from Tirupati with her reading glasses on a black string and her sari pinned at the shoulder with a safety pin that had been there, as far as anybody in Six A could tell, for about four years. She had taught Hindi in that room since before the fan was put in, to boys who all agreed that Hindi was a punishment invented by Delhi, and she had long ago stopped expecting anyone to love it and had settled for making sure they learned it anyway.

Four minutes before she came in, the watch had said, from somewhere pleasantly far away:

There is going to be a test.

And Ramesh had sat up in the third row with his whole body going hot, and thought — with a happiness that he would remember for a long time afterwards with a kind of pity for himself — I knew. I knew before anybody.

He had four minutes.

He spent the first one being pleased. He spent the second one looking round at forty boys who did not know, which was the best feeling he had ever had in that room. He spent the third one waiting.

Somewhere in the fourth one it began to occur to him that he did not actually know what to do.

He had his Hindi book in his bag. He got it out and put it on his knees under the desk and opened it, and it opened at a page about a farmer and a horse, and the words sat there on the page in their round script and looked back at him.

Twenty-two words in the vocabulary list. He knew about six.

You cannot learn sixteen Hindi words in one hundred and forty seconds. You cannot learn four. There is nothing to be clever at. There is no trick, and no shortcut, and no way to think your way to a word you have never learned; it is either in your head from some evening in the past when you sat down and put it there, or it is not, and no amount of warning changes which.

The madam came in and said, “Books away. Half sheet.”

Ramesh put the book away.

So that was what it came to. He had been told first. Out of forty boys and one madam, he had been the first person in that room to know, by a clear four minutes, and now the half sheet came down the row and landed in front of him exactly the way it landed in front of everybody else, and being first had bought him precisely the same blank paper as being last.

He tried. Nobody should think he did not try. He got the paper and it was twenty words, English to Hindi, and he sat and looked at them and the first one was river, and he knew that one, and he wrote it, and it was the only one he was sure of on the entire page.

Then he did the thing that he would be most ashamed of, later, out of the whole three days.

He tried to spend the watch on it.

He held his wrist under the desk and thought at it, hard, the way you push a door that says pull. Tell me. Tell me number four. Tell me what Prasad is writing.

Nothing. Of course nothing. It had never once answered a question in three days, and it did not start in a Hindi test, and even if it had wanted to, what it had was four minutes of what was coming towards him, and what was coming towards him was a mark, and marks do not talk.

Beside him, Prasad had stopped writing.

It was about eleven minutes into the test. Prasad read his half sheet down once from the top with his lips moving, fixed one letter, and then screwed the cap back on his fountain pen with the small neat click that Ramesh had heard every day for two years without once listening to it. He turned his paper face down on the desk. He folded his hands on top of it and looked out of the window at the neem tree, not showing off, not looking round to see who had noticed. He had simply run out of things to do.

Ramesh looked at the back of that half sheet for a long time, and did not understand what he was looking at. It would be the next night before he did.

That is when he understood the first half of it, sitting in the third row with a half sheet in front of him and nineteen blanks.

It could tell him a test was coming. It could not tell him the paper. It gave him the event and never the contents. It had told him about the dog and not about the dog’s teeth; about the crying in the street and not who; about the bajji stall and not the burner leg. Every single time, it had handed him the outside of the thing and kept the inside.

He got two out of twenty. River, and one lucky guess.

He knew it before she said it, because she corrected them there and then, for the rest of the period, while the class copied the lesson off the board. She sat sideways at the table with the pile of half sheets on her knee and a red pen, and she did not once look up, and at every wrong answer she made a small dry sound through her nose, so that forty boys copying out a story about a farmer and a horse could follow their own marks going past by ear. Ramesh counted eighteen of the sounds on one paper, and knew whose it was.

And the watch, which had said one sentence about the whole business at nine thirty-six in the morning and nothing since, sat on his wrist bone being four minutes fast, and when he came out at the bell he had nine left and there were five hours of school still to go.