Free Like It Happened Yesterday by Ravinder Singh Page B

was too lazy to wake up on chilly mornings!
    While one leave application might have narrated a kindhearted story of saving a stray puppy from dying on the road, another might describe in detail how the chain of the bicycle had slipped out of the wheel. Most of us were smart enough to write applications with new and unique reasons for being late, but there was a bunch of students who defined the heights of laziness. They were too lazy to even change their ‘reasons for being late’ in their subsequent applications.
    Gurpreet, who sat next to me in the left row and seldom took baths on winter mornings, would simply change the animal that she claimed to have saved! At first it was a puppy, then a kitten, followed by a goat. I thought given the rate at which she was using up different animals to rescue herself, she would have been left with nothing but elephants and horses by the end of winter.
    When, for the fourth time, Nandu blamed the faulty chain of his bicycle for his coming late to school, the class teacher asked, ‘Why don’t you think of changing your bicycle, Nandu?’ and the class broke into a laugh. Nandu, too, shamelessly joined in the laughter, least bothered that his lie had been caught!
    There also used to be a few cunning minds who believed that they must keep their reasons exclusive. This bunch of students invested almost half the night in thinking up one greatexcuse. That was precisely why, I think, half the time they used to wake up late! At school, these kids would keep their applications highly guarded, so that no one would find out and reuse their exclusive reasons.
    So, the ritual of arriving late to school continued. And so did the ritual of submitting fake applications. Amid all this, there used to be some genuine cases as well. But then, it was pointless to try to prove that your application for leave was genuine.
    Then, one day, our class made history. We recorded full attendance—for the very first time that winter.
    This was not a random happening. There was a reason behind this historical achievement.
    This was a Friday and the first subject of the day was Biology. Having survived the boring section about the plant kingdom, we had arrived at the chapters on the animal kingdom. And, on that day, we were about to start ‘Chapter 10—Reproduction’.
    Ever since we had bought our books at the beginning of the term, the Bio book was the one whose pages had been flipped through the most. And it was
this
chapter that we had all flipped through the pages for. Time and again at home, in privacy, I would open this book and stop at this chapter on the page where a man and a woman stood, pictured naked. I didn’t believe my eyes when, for the first time, I came across this page. I wondered how something of that sort could exist in a schoolbook. It was my first experienceof seeing lifelike sketches of a man and woman without clothes on—and it was quite shocking. In spite of the fact that it was my schoolbook, I was worried about what my parents would think of me if they got to know that this was what I was studying in my school. Therefore, I used to place that book right at the bottom of the stack of my schoolbooks in the shelf, making it as inaccessible as possible for them.
    So, on that exciting morning, after the prayer, unlike the other days when the students would disperse to drink water or to go to the loo before the first period started, everyone headed straight for the classroom. And then we separated into two groups—boys and girls.
    There was much excitement and whispering in the class, especially in the back benches, where a few of us had started making naughty jokes. The whispers were followed by raucous laughter from the boys’ side, while the girls looked silently on, either ignoring us or giving us dirty looks. They wanted to make us feel as if we were unnecessarily excited about certain things that were quite normal. But we knew that, deep inside, they were equally excited. What