BESPECTACLED!

I peered hard at the blackboard. The words seemed familiar, yet I could not be sure whether the teacher had written the exact words which I thought she did. Miss Sapna’s sari was the same old one that we had grown used to seeing her draped in since Class I; yet, somehow the otherwise bold patterns seemed different today. Somewhat less bold. I tried looking over at my desk-partner’s copy, to get a glimpse of what he was scribbling.

Yesss!! I was right!

The small “whoop!” made Miss Sapna turn around abruptly. I froze in my seat.

“You! Stand up!” I complied meekly. “What was that about?”

“N-Nothing, Miss.” I could not see where she was looking, nor could I fathom her expression, but I was sure that her eyes were boring into mine as I searched for a way out of the soup that I now found myself in.

Bhaskar, the hero that he was, stood up in his place.

“He was peering into my copy, Miss. Because he cannot see what you are writing on the blackboard.”

From the distance between her and our desk, I could not judge whether she was looking at me or Bhaskar. Miss came a little closer to our desk. Now, I could clearly see disbelief writ large on her face.

“If that is so, you could have just asked me, isn’t it? I would have moved aside. I want to know what that ‘whoop!’ was about.” Bhaskar sniggered beside me.

“Miss, I…….” was all I could utter before she screamed at the top of her voice at both of us.

“I WILL NOT ALLOW INDISCIPLINE IN MY CLASS! OUT! BOTH OF YOU!”

Our profuse apologies and our attempts fell on deaf ears, and the two of us shuffled our feet out of the class of stunned students of Class VI, many of them silently giggling at our fate. Bhaskar winked at them.

Once outside, Bhaskar could not stop laughing at his yet another of his ploys to get out of the “boring” classroom, while I looked on at him dejectedly.

“Hey c’mon, Pranay. Even you have to admit; that was one brilliant strategy! Why are you so grumpy about missing out on one class? We’ll catch up, I promise. Now cheer up!” He punched me in the shoulder.

“It’s not that, yaar. I am worried about not recognizing words on the blackboard. I have to make my eyes into slits before I can actually start guessing what the teacher might have scribbled. Bhaskar, am I going blind?”

Bhaskar’s grin vanished instantaneously.

“It’s best that you go and see an eye doctor. You might have to start wearing specs.” And then, “Wow, man! Cool!”

Another ‘whoop!”, this time by Bhaskar.

­­The news of my poor eyesight caught my parents, especially Mom off-guards. “It’s all because you won’t listen when you are told not to watch TV! It’s all because you won’t listen when you are told not to read books in your bed!” she wailed. A good three days of feeding me paleng and fish-curry passed, before she admitted that her efforts were futile. (Apparently, paleng and fish were supposed to be “good for the eyes”.)

First of all, I did not like Bhaskar’s idea at all. I knew that he meant well, but there was nothing cool about wearing specs to school. But before all that, the trip to the ophthalmologist was worse than I had imagined. His attendant first gave me eye-drops that worsened my eyesight temporarily, also making me unable to see anything without light hurting my eyes; the ophthalmologist then proceeded with peering into my pupils with the help of a powerful torch; then he proceeded with making me read letters off an illuminated box, the letters reducing in size from top down. Then came the selection of the optimum power of the lenses. So I sat on the chair with the frame in place, looking like a dork, while the optician tried a combination of lenses, until we came to a satisfactory conclusion, that is, I started seeing the letters in the box clearly. The spectacles were to be delivered later that same day.

The new spectacles were not of the kind that anyone would call “cool”, Bhaskar’s words be damned. They were big, rotund and made me look like an owl, not a wise one, though. I did not even want to wear them in the first few days. The bridge of my nose hurt, but more than that, my eyes hurt the most as they tried to adjust to the new lenses. I would deliberately leave my specs at home, lest I would be laughed at by my schoolmates.

Bhaskar’s disappointment-ridden face and the frustration at my dwindling eyesight got the better of me, and I made the heinous mistake of wearing my new specs to school, one day. No sooner had I entered, that the whole class burst out in guffaws and name-calling. In anger and humiliation, I took off my glasses and stomped on it till all that remained were pieces of glass and twisted metal. I vowed never to wear specs again.

When I returned home, I lied through my teeth to Dad about how I had “misplaced” my specs while washing my face in the washroom at school, and I had hoped that that would be the end of it. The very next day itself, Dad got me an exact replica of my previous one, this time with a string. “You seem to misplace your things a lot. The string will make sure that your specs will remain around your neck even after you have removed them. No worries of forgetting where you leave them!” he said, patting my back for his apparent ingenious. This was the worst of my nightmares.

The name-callings in class continued unhindered. I ignored the “Oi Chashmeesh!” and “Abe Ainak Singh!” the best I could. The popularity I had enjoyed started dwindling the same way my eyesight had dwindled. The girls in my class, who used to be friendly to me earlier, now would not talk to me. The guys would not talk to me without making at least one reference about my “owl-eyes”. Bhaskar did his best not to hurt me, but I would definitely get hurt when I could see him smiling when he thought I was not looking, when the others cracked jokes about me behind my back. I knew that, the specs I hated so much had to become a part of my personality, and I had to adapt to them the way a defeated warrior accepts his fate.

I hoped that, over time, the nightmare would recede.

A year passed. I had started liking wearing glasses when no-one was around. I liked the way I saw things through them, the way everything around looks fresh after a brief spell of rain. I had forgotten that the eyes could see in high-definition. Though still wary of being teased, I wore them only when I needed them the most, namely while copying notes from the blackboard.

My popularity in class remained as low as ever. Until one fateful day.

Srishti, the Monitor (or Man-eater as she was often referred to without her knowledge) sat alone at the far side of the classroom. She was the quintessential teachers’ pet. Everyone either loved her, or hated her for being loved too much. Always to shoot her hand up on being asked questions in class, she had been coming first since the past five years in a row. A pleasant new development in Class VII was that she was on her way to become a beautiful damsel. Many a popular guy in the class had been smitten by her and the aura surrounding her, and had tried to woo her in their own awkward ways. Knowing that I would never know the luxury of winning a girl over, I used to watch dejectedly from afar as guys would take their turns to send roses her way on Valentine’s, and on receiving her cold shoulder, the same guys would try their luck again on Friendship Day.

I thought I heard a buzz-like sound, and instinctively turned my head towards the sound. It seemed to be coming from where the Man-eater was sitting. She was attentively scribbling down notes from the blackboard.

Strange. Why would Srishti make buzzing noises in the middle of class?

I turned my own attention to my notebook.

Bzzzzzz….

There it was again. My eyes squinted to find the source of that noise. No one seemed to notice anything amiss. Everyone was busy taking down notes. Bhaskar half-turned his head towards me and raised his eyebrow at me. I shook my head no at him, and he went back to his scribbling.

Bzzzzzzzzzzzz……….

This time I saw it. It was sitting on Srishti’s short sleeve; a bumble-bee, as black and dangerous as any I had ever seen before in my life. It was wiggling its tail, crawling its way to her naked arm. As I watched it with petrified eyes, I could distinctly see its dark, pointed throbbing sting at the end of its tail. My bespectacled eyes grew wide with horror as I fathomed how much pain that tiny devil could inflict.

Before the bee could finish its deadly mission, I jumped on my desk, armed with my plastic ruler and ran at top speed towards where Srishti was sitting at the other side of the classroom, a good twenty metres away. I gave my all to my legs, willing them to fly over rows of desks and open-mouthed students.

I ran, hopping over everything that came between me and the bumble-bee, while Srishti suddenly took notice of the commotion behind her. Time had turned painfully slow for me. Try hard as I did, it was taking me an eternity to reach the deadly beast in order to stop its deadly design.

I suddenly buckled as my foot tripped over somebody’s schoolbag. As I fell, my hopes dashed, all I could think about was how to prevent the inevitable from happening. I did want the bumblebee to reach its goal.

Just milliseconds before my body hit the floor, I managed to cry out, “Srishtiiiiiiiiiiiii…!!!! Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!!”

And then, CRASH!

I skipped school a whole week owing to broken spectacles, a broken tooth and a bloody nose.

Srishti is a good friend of mine now. She isn’t the same girl that used to sit alone in class, bearing the brunt of her “popular” status. She now hangs around with me and Bhaskar. Bhaskar keeps thanking me incessantly for getting her into our gang. I think he has a secret crush on her. But then, I don’t mind, as long as I know that had I not been spectacled, I would not have earned the respect of the most sought-after girl in class, and also that of my other batchmates. They do not tease me anymore. Rather, my specs have raised me to a cult-status. My almost-heroic antic was the talk of the class for days afterwards.

Oh, and the bumblebee? After I had fallen, Srishti had knocked it out using her fingers, as in carom, picked it up by one of its wings, and threw it out of the same window that it had flown in through.

__END__