The School Farewell, Or Apocalypse II (Part 1)

The School Farewell!

The excitement that precedes any event involving a gathering of friends started on the day we got our Invitation Cards, with Anwesha screaming, “WHAT! We have to wear school-dress to the Farewell!?” and self exclaiming, “A Farewell for us! Wow, we’re growing up!” with a strange sense of awe at how quickly I found myself at the threshold of one of the events that marked the distant growing-up world from the eyes of a twelve-year-old.

I didn’t have the faintest shadow of an idea about what a farewell was, but I tried my best to gather a more or less rough idea from the people around me. On purpose, I didn’t ask anyone in Class 11. Knowing exactly what to expect, I felt, would spoil the surprise.

Armed with the following information, I came to the following conclusion.
Information:-
Deyasini: How can anyone not attend the farewell? It must be something simply beautiful, a token of what we’re leaving behind.
Devpriyo: Of course I’m attending the farewell. You never know, I might even cry.
Rohan: I’ll come to the school farewell, but we’ve had our own farewell. I think I’ll remember that one more, won’t you?
My Music Aunty: In our farewell, we were given red roses at the door. Younger students performed variedly, and we were asked to perform too, if we liked. The Principal’s speech was wonderful, redolent of warmth, love and affection, and at the end of it, we all had tears in our eyes.
My Mum: In our school, things are done mostly the same way as that. We don’t give red roses, though, that’s a bit too much. There are performances, short speeches, good food and so on.

Conclusion:-
I gathered that a Farewell must be something filled with nostalgia, mushy songs, and boring speeches.


So imagine my surprise (too mild a word, I know) when the Farewell party started with a…..ok wait, I shouldn’t spoil the surprise by disclosing it so soon. One needs to build up the atmosphere huh? I don’t know how one goes about doing it, though. I guess, for an amateur like me, it would involve something in the line of boring my readers to death with small details of what happened before the farewell started, till they fall asleep. Ok, here’s the list of those little details that filled the 45 minutes that we spent waiting for the stuff.

1. I jumped up to the footpath where Kaustuv and Anwesha greeted me with an ear-to-ear grin and an enthusiastic, “YOU came on time! Woah-ha-how!” Laughing and waving cheerily while waiting for Deyasini was all we did those 30 minutes. I expended a good amount of energy waving jauntily at a couple of people only to discover that I didn’t know them at all. But they waved back twice as jauntily and so it didn’t matter.

2. The ground floor of Uttam Mancha was stuffy. To my horror, I discovered that we were going to be seated section-wise. Pratiti and I gave a short pre-farewell concert using our vocal chords to the best of their merits, complaining in a high-pitched melodious rhapsody about how the school authorities were involved in a conspiracy against EFL to keep them separated at all costs.

3. I said, “Hell!” in my special-effects-enriched banshee voice a good many times before realizing that I was screaming right into the ears of someone who had been unfortunate enough to place his ears two inches from my mouth. It was while bracing myself for a profuse apology that the body in question turned around to face me. Upon seeing who it was, my apology swallowed itself, and I turned away pointedly. The Law Of Interactions With Certain People states firmly that you never waste your breath apologizing to Debaruns.
He looked at me thrice and looked away again, before saying with what seemed like a monumental effort,"Er, have you completely forgotten?"
I don't have to explain exactly how warm I feel towards a person who needs this huge an effort even to talk to me.
"Forgotten what?" I asked coldly.
"Um, all of us, I mean.”
I didn’t snort, not because it’s unladylike, but because I don’t know how exactly one snorts. Coming from a person who had not even recognized me for the past few months, this was one golden snort-extracter.
“Remember who?” I said, to accentuate how well I had forgotten.
“Ok, fine don’t bother trying to remember who. How were your tests?”
“That’s the reason I don’t bother to remember certain people after the tests. If you want to boast about yours, you’re welcome. Don’t have to feign an interest in mine.”
“No, mine was really path…”
I turned away again, more pointedly than the first time. So much for an interview with a long-lost “friend”.

4. My excitement was increasing in leaps and bounds when we filed together. As is the rule when we stand within two inches of one another for more than two minutes, Roro and I started an Eardrum-Shattering Contest when I spotted a well-fed round fat tabby cat glaring virulently at me, its dangerously green eyes boring into mine. “Look who’s here”, Roro said in an undertone. “I spotted her first.” I shot at him, still in the quarrelling spree. “Ok, I give that to you.” He said with unexpected generosity. “Spotting tabby cats in the middle of what is supposed to be a happy gathering is not a task I take pride in.”
We made our way into the auditorium, mounting a dusty flight of stairs, to be led to the balcony. The BALCONY. My first disappointment.
“Wow” one of my friends said. “What a gorgeous view!”
“What the---” I exclaimed indignantly. “Is this the first time you’re inside an auditorium? We’re on the balcony, for heaven’s sake! Balconies don’t have gorgeous views.” Even I knew that, with my very meagre common sense. But then, I’d been in an auditorium scores of times, albeit on the other side of the curtain. “We have the worst view, dammit.”


If I’d known what was coming, I wouldn’t have regretted having the worst view. In fact, I was glad of it 15 minutes into the show. And now, after having put all of you to sleep in the process of “building up the atmosphere”, I think the time has come to plunge into a direct narrative of exactly what the alleged “Farewell” had in store for my unsuspecting perception.

“Insomnia” a microphone or something that spoke as loudly as a microphone, declared. Yeah, wake up!
“Huh?” was my reaction.
“Woah-ha-how”, a scream from Anwesha, who was sitting right beside me, gave my right eardrum quite a turn.
“Huh?” I said again. “What’s going on?”

At that moment, the Insomnia or whatever it was, burst into clamour. Thousands of elephants started to trumpet at once, forests after forests were uprooted, all the monsoon clouds started roaring simultaneously, and the Apocalypse began!
It was a while before I realized that it was nothing but the keyboard, guitar, and all those metallic thingies (whatever they are called) that were trying to create what was known to them as music, and that the hall had erupted into a tumultuous burst of cheers to assist them in the process.

I looked around helplessly. The laser rays were creating a marvelous design on the ceiling and to me, it looked to be the only place where you could glue your eyes. Everywhere else, the world was breaking into pieces, people whom I had believed to be sane all my life, were mocking my belief ruthlessly, the devil was working his will in the minds of all those I knew. There was not a single eye I could lock mine with for a look of silent sympathy. I gulped. My head was throbbing. I knew what one felt like when sinking into a mire.


The Farewell began.

A slightly different week

Life’s pretty eventless these days. I wish something dramatic would happen to me to break the monotony of this incredibly (or perhaps, quite credibly) eventless life of mine, with each day following and duplicating the last. I wish, one day, as I closed my eyes at night, I could surmise, or even dread, what would come the next day, instead of knowing every detail from beforehand the way you know the dialogues of movies that you’ve watched 144 times. Well, I guess we all spend our lives wishing for more drama, and wishing all the drama away when it comes. Personally, I wouldn’t ask for the romantic melodramatic kind of eventfulness; something as ordinary as Pratiti’s appendicitis will serve my purpose quite well. That reminds me, I really envy that girl. But as she herself said, one shouldn’t PNPC in a public domain, so I think I’ll keep my list headed “101 Reasons To Envy Pratiti Deb” to myself.

The only reason this week has been slightly different from the preceding ones is because I had to sit for those stupid Pathfinder Mock Tests everyday, which was the first Mock Test Series I ever sat for in my life. It began on the 15th with Maths for us. “Us” here refers to the EFLians (Or does EFLite sound better?) viz. Deyasini, Rohitashwa, Rohan, Raunak, and last and definitely the least, myself. On the first day, I prepared, practiced, looked at the theorems, went though the objectives, sent a good many SMSs to various people enquiring about what the papers were like, indulged in a good deal of hypertension, and, in short, did everything you’d expect a normal mediocrity to do before a normal Maths test. However, in spite of the fact that I found only two marks unknown, I flunked the test as badly as you can. Result: Ebbing of enthusiasm.
On the second day, I prepared a little less enthusiastically, I indulged in only tension without the previous prefix, and sat for the test moderately prepared. Not at all surprisingly, I flunked this one too. But since I’ve been flunking Life Science nearly all my life, it didn’t make me stop caring completely about Mock Tests. It simply diluted my enthusiasm a bit more.
Third day. Physics test. Or rather, Physical Science test. And it was because I forgot the difference between Physics and Physical Science that I had to suffer on this day. After completing the whole paper minus the Chemistry part in 2 hours quite happily and confidently, I was shocked to see that I was staring at a page of Hebrew before me. I gulped once or twice, blinked stupidly a few times, and then imagined I was sitting for a History test and switched to the “Invent Wildly” mode. With some brilliant guesswork, I managed to answer around four marks correctly. Then, realizing that I had completely covered up the shine of the Physics part by the slush of the Chemistry part, I burst into tears (metaphorically) and broke my heart into three meticulous pieces. The first piece said, “To hell with exams!”, the second said, “Who the heck cares about Mock Tests anyway?”, and the third declared, “I give up! No more studying for these wretched tests”. Thus, my tests ended.
Wait, that doesn’t mean it ended for Pathfinder as well. We still had History and Geography to go, but I couldn’t care less. I spent the major part of the next morning bombarding a friend of mine with SMSs (knowing him to be too polite to tell me to shut up), and the rest of the day glancing through a few objectives and important long answers. That was all the preparation with which I sat for the test, and surprisingly enough, I didn’t flunk it! I mean, considering that the lowest I ever got in History is 48 out of 100, flunking for me corresponds to getting less than 50.
Till that day, I had thought of the tests every night and every morning. I knew that the reason I went to Chetla was to sit for tests. On the day of the Geography tests, however, I had reached such a degree of emotional saturation that Geography was the last thing on my mind all day. My net came back, I chatted happily with a couple of friends who were sitting for the same tests in the same batch with me, lost my geography book and didn’t bother to search for it, and when I boarded the auto to Chetla, I knew I was going because—
1. I enjoyed travelling alone.
2. I loved meeting my friends there.
3. I wanted to sit beside Deyasini because it was probably the last time before July that I would be doing it, or maybe the last time in my life (if either of us failed to make it to SPHS in +2).

Someone was really, really shocked when I told him this, but it was true. I didn’t care two pence about what happened in the goddamned exam. Heck, I didn’t care a quarter of a pence! I didn’t know anything about the type of vegetation seen in Rajasthan and quite happily filled a page writing all about xerophytes’ adaptation that I had read in Bio, vaguely hoping that a science-ignorant teacher would take “phylloclade” and “sunken stomata” for learned Geographical terms. It amazes me to know that someone actually loves Mock Tests, but well, he’s an android after all, however vehemently he denies it.



I don’t know why I wrote all about this in my blog. It’s not that I’m really proud of my achievements and want to make a nice musical comedy of what is supposed to be a serious business. I guess it’s because I wanted to take my frustration out on everyone else. Or maybe because I wanted to update my blog but couldn’t wait to finish the long ones I’ve started. Well, whatever, don’t bother to tell me that my attitude towards exams is abnormal. And don’t bother to preach either. Have a happy Christmas!

Oh wait!! I totally forgot about Christmas! Yay!
“Christmas time is drawing near,
Santa Claus will soon be here,
With his presents and his toys,
For the little, girls and boys!
For dear old Santa we’ll give three cheers,
He’ll soon be coming with his swift reindeer,
And he’ll come so quick, with a ‘click-click-click’
In the e-a-r-l-y Christmas m-o-r-ning!”

Feels lovely to remember Nursery rhymes! Cheers! And adios for now! :-D