Markings On The Wood

Madhu was in the class room. The desk had scratches and markings everywhere. He sat, slouching a bit and looked up. The wooden beams crisscrossing the large, ninth standard A section class room had markings, scratchings and writings. They were not Thirukurals. Lewd and rusty things said by fourteen year old boys over the years. How did they get up there ? Did they scratch on it before it got erected?

Vignesh came back from the playground. He looked and breathed tired. He smelled too.

“Move aside, da! I have to complete it before the mad man comes”, he said. “Did you finish?”

“Oh, I know. You would have finished already!”, he kept charging at Madhu without waiting for a reply.

He then jumped over Madhu’s back and landed on the bench. He put his hand under the table and unearthed folded foils of white sheets. His style. He didn’t like notebooks like the rest of them. He wrote in pieces of paper and clipped them, stapled them, sometimes even knitted them with twine threads. He was messy.

Madhu checked the blackboard. The blackness brought about by the cleaners in the morning was long gone. It was grey. The white chalks and multiple erasing in the morning class by the physics teacher Vanan. Chalks. Well, chalks were all over the place. Small, rounded missiles they became at the hands of the always-angry teachers.

Vanan, the large-teeth fellow, carried his cane always and wrote his equations with a screeching sound that swallowed all the silence of the class of hundred and five boys, all stunned by his whirling sound of whiplash.

He liked to pick up on Vignesh, his favourite. He would ask the trickiest of questions at the most unexpected times – when Vignesh dozed off for a mere millionth of a second.

“Sir! Sir! Sorry Sir!…”.

Whip. Whip.

“What is Newton’s second law of motion?”

“Sir! Sir! I don’t know, Sir! Please sir!”.

Whip. Whack.

“Just coming to school every day, well dressed, filling your stomach, and like a donkey, carrying bag full of books, but not opening them, ever”. Vanan’s caustic remarks were directed at the whole class. It was a prefix to the violent act that followed.

Taking in a long breath after uttering each phrase, swinging his cane up in the air, pausing a moment for pure theatre, swinging it down while breathing out and lurching towards the poor boy, he lashed at his buttocks at an angle tangent to the convex, tender flesh.

Vanan laughed like a yoga guru and a warrior, all in one.

“Sir………r!”

Vignesh was more moaning than pleading. The last sound of the afternoon physics class.

It was quiet ever since. The whole class wrote “F=ma” one thousand times as an imposition, in white sheets, notebooks and soiled scraps.

It was Newton’s law but Vanan’s regime.