Free Insects Are Just Like You and Me Except Some of Them Have Wings by Kuzhali Manickavel Page B

on answering all questions concerning The Waste Land in a made-up language that will only consist of the letters y and p. I want you to know that it’s not you, it’s me. I’m sure you were a nice man, even though you worked in a bank. If I had known you, I promise I would have loved you.
    Annie doesn’t call me for lunch and I forget about it completely until it is too late for lunch and too early for tea. I walk to Annie’s room and open the door without knocking. She is sitting at her table, stabbing a pen into her desk as she mutters softly to herself. On the wall beside her is a poster that says If you fail to plan, you plan to fail .
    “I think we missed lunch,” I say.
    “I had my lunch.”
    “Where was I?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “You didn’t call me. Why didn’t you call me?”
    “I did call you. I mean I didn’t know where you were.”
    The textbooks on Annie’s study table are stacked in two piles. Between them lie a pen, a pencil and a bundle of scrap paper for Annie to practice writing out her answers. On her bed is a thin book called Quotes for a Successful Life .
    “How’s the studying going?” I ask.
    She shakes her head, punctuating each shake with a stab to the table.
    “But you’ve studied, right? You studied today?”
    “Yes.”
    “You’ve been studying every day, haven’t you?”
    “Yes.”
    “So what’s the problem? I don’t understand.”
    She shrugs and continues to shake her head. Her stabbing has gouged a small hole in the table.
    “You won’t fail,” I say. “How can you study like this and fail? I mean imagine studying as much as you have and then failing anyway. Just imagine that.”
    Annie stops shaking her head. After a few seconds, she stops stabbing the table.
    •
     
    I decide to make Annie a motivational poster. It will be on glossy black paper with bright orange handwriting and a picture of a German castle on a rock. Since I don’t have a picture of a German castle on a rock, I make the poster using the back of an old receipt and a pencil.
    “Knock!” says Annie when I enter her room. “Knock, knock, knock!”
    “What?”
    “Why can’t you knock before you come in?”
    “Here,” I say thrusting the paper under her nose.
    “What is this?” she says.
    “It’s to make sure you don’t fail.”
    “Don’t say that!”
    “Stick it on your wall somewhere. Put it where you can see it.”
    “Jam That Bread of Lif,” she says.
    “What?”
    “That’s what you’ve written here, Jam That Bread of Lif. ”
    “Well, it will stop you from failing.”
    “Don’t say that! Why do you keep saying that?” says Annie as I leave.
    •
     
    After tea, Annie starts throwing up. She keeps throwing up and has to be taken to the hospital. The warden says she will have to be put on drips because she has thrown up absolutely everything. There is nothing left inside her.
    I have dinner alone and after that, I write a special Letter of Motivation and Explanation for Annie. I use white paper this time and a blue ballpoint pen. I bite the end of the pen and think. Then I walk to the window and think. I look at the moths slowly killing themselves against the porch light and I think. Then I sit down.
Dear Annie,
I hope that by the time you get this you will no longer be throwing up. My grandfather always said that throwing up was a good thing, along with diarrhea. It meant that the body was taking an active interest in clearing out things it didn’t need. Tomorrow morning is your first exam and considering that you are probably on drips right now, you might be thinking that you won’t be able to write your paper and you will fail and everyone will point fingers at you and you will kill yourself. This simply isn’t true. I remember when I was in 9th standard there was a girl whose name was Thenmozhi and during our quarterly exams she had a bad case of dysentery which actually made her cry a little before the paper started. But she still wrote her exam and she