And Then One Day: A Memoir by Naseeruddin Shah Read Free Book Online

scores and the speeches in
Julius Caesar
had now reached the proportions of an ailment. Zaheer, the brains of the family, was deputed by Baba to coach me in maths, and he valiantly tried, sacrificing his own precious study hours trying to drill some mathematical sense into me. In vain, I’m afraid. My mind would not sit still long enough to assimilate the solution of one problem, and then it would be time to move on to the next! I’d pretend to understand, and I guess I didn’t do a convincing enough job, because Zaheer would sigh and move on. Sometimes he’d grind his teeth. I could hear them go ‘Grinnnd! Grriiind!! Grrriiiiinnnnnnnd!!!’
    I think I know what the ability to lie convincingly as a child is symptomatic of: children who were convincing liars become good actors, but to what I owe the complete inability to concentrate on anything that doesn’t interest me I have no idea. It is a tendency I’ve always had. If a conversation doesn’t interest me I can go so far away as to actually not hear what is being said. It has often been a boon too in later life while having to sit through the narration of a script one has given up on in the first five minutes. Anyway, academic rock-bottom was hit when in the final exams of Class 9 I fared abysmally and actually gave in my trigonometry paper empty, with an inscription that I hoped would amuse the examiner: ‘If you know the answers, why ask me? And if you don’t, how do you expect me to?’ The old stiff obviously had no sense of humour and awarded me a zero for my wit. I averaged about 30 per cent, not enough to get me through. But when we went home, I told the parents I’d done all right, and the vacations that year started to go past as usual, with complete amnesia on my part about the exams—until the results arrived.
    Baba went to work on his gleaming Hercules bicycle kept in tip-top condition always, not like the orderlies’ rickety cycles on which we all learnt to ride. We’d hear the bell when he returned and there’d be a race to grab and park the cycle, because whoever got to it got to ride it round the house once, otherwise we were forbidden to touch it except maybe to clean it. That day I got to it first. When I saw Baba, steam seemed to be coming out of his ears, but then he often looked like that. He handed me the cycle without a word and entered the house. Completely unaware of what was coming, I merrily rode the bike around to the back of the house to find Baba, face black with rage, standing there like the wrath of God. He flung at me a folded piece of very official-looking paper which got me bang in the chest and, just like in the movies, fell right into my hand. I didn’t need a second glance to recognize the report card; the words ‘has failed the examination’ jumped out and hit me between the eyes. I knew how I’d fared in the exams so it shouldn’t have been a shock but it was. I couldn’t hide my head in the sand any longer. However, instead of the remorse and regret that should have been flooding my heart, I began to have visions of all the movies that would be screened at Sem that year and that I’d now miss.
    Preparations to admit me into a school in Ajmer began, the only hitch being that all schools in Ajmer were almost at the end of their own academic terms, with barely three months to go before final exams. Even though term-end was close, Baba managed to prevail upon the Principal of a Jesuit school called St Anselm’s to admit me into Class 9 and to let me appear for the exams. In those days the term ‘capitation fee’ hadn’t been coined but doing favours for schools was appreciated, and Baba was not without influence in Ajmer. It was a brilliant plan, designed to see that I lost only a few months, and not a whole year. But I managed to foil it as well. Even with the additional three months of attention, tuitions and the very same curriculum I’d had the year before, I failed again. Though the teachers at St