Testing Times

It was a lovely March morning and the air was fragrant with the sweet summer scents.  There seemed to be nothing odd or unusual about this world or the other.  The lark was on the wing, the snail was on the thorn, and you know the rest. I was feeling sunny, and the sun himself, being Indian, was a bit high in the heavens at nine-thirty in the morning, spreading his genial warmth and boosting my own sunniness.   Mocking within at the fear and anxiety writ large on the faces of those around me, I danced my way into the examination hall.  But, when my eyes rested on my seat, I turned green, started violently, and leaped about six inches in the direction of the ceiling.

If there is one thing I do not like in this world, it is the improper arrangement of seats in an examination hall.  I had expected – and was confident, after a precious fifteen minutes spent in what seemed to me a meticulous calculation – my seat to be at the rear end.  But I was out in my calculation, arithmetic never being one of my strong points, and my losing battle with the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune left me to stare with a blazing eye at my seat at the centre of the examination hall.  That clumsy piece of wood in the middle that was holding my gaze crushed my proud spirit and injected a black frost into my sunny mood.

It is pretty generally recognized in the circles in which he moves that P Rao is not a man who lightly throws in the towel.  A seat at the centre of an examination hall might upset his mind for a moment, but history has it that he is capable of getting himself out of a sea of troubles.  Twiddling my fingers for a while and letting ‘I would’ wait upon ‘I dare not’ in a moment of weakness, I wondered if it was wise to take the examination from a place which was likely to be the centre of attention.  The situation, it was plain to me, was sticky; it could not have been, to be precise, more glutinous.  But, I reminded myself, sticky situations were not uncommon in my life; besides, the tact and intelligence I always possessed would help me out this time, too.  Determined thus to take the examination from the epicentre of the examination battle, I occupied that seat of desolation and surveyed the situation as Satan would have done in hell or Gulliver in Houyhnhnmland.

There were fifty assorted chaps in the hall which could accommodate eighty.  My eyes rested on my immediate neighbours.  The one on the right was a thin, whiskered fellow with a melancholy face which was made gloomier by his thick, enormous, horn-rimmed glasses which perched on what seemed a curlew’s curved bill sticking out above his mouth.  To infuse a bit of the party spirit into this pensive bird, I greeted him with an enthusiastic ‘Hello!’.  The response was a rough noise which sounded more like the snort of a bulldog when provoked by a poodle than like a human greeting.  ‘Not a bonhomous bird’, I mused.  ‘Well, it takes all sorts to make the world’, I consoled myself and turned my eyes in the direction of the n. on the left.  He looked like a dying duck in a thunderstorm, and his staring before him with unseeing eyes suggested that he might have gone off his onion a bit.  ‘Doleful shades!’ I grumbled like Milton’s Satan and turned my eyes away from that bleak and melancholy landscape.

Soon, the invigilators arrived.  One, two… I winced and felt a pang in my heart as I beheld a third invigilator stalking into the examination hall.  The sight harrowed up my soul, froze my young blood, and made my eyes, like stars, start from their spheres.  Why three?  Why should there be three invigilators?  I flew into an impotent rage.  ‘A seat in the middle of the examination hall, Hamlet-like neighbours who are a hard audience, three invigilators, one of whom looking rather like a butcher, and what next?’ I wanted to shout. 

I paused for breath and tried to calm myself.  The situation, I counselled myself, was definitely murky, and the three hours that lay before me promised to be sticky three hours, no good to man or beast.  But I am a pretty astute chap, the type that thinks in moments of crisis.  And so in the next few seconds one saw a pensive P Rao sitting in the middle of the examination hall with a brow that was sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.  With the furrows disappearing from the brow one by one, I discovered that I had two courses open to me: (1) that I could stay on in the room and take the examination; and (2) that I could go out, not taking the examination.  I must now choose between the two.  My predicament, in other words, was similar to Hamlet’s: To be or not to be.  However, I differ from the Prince of Denmark in one respect: I don’t procrastinate.  My policy is somewhat on the lines of the Thane of Cawdor’s: If it were done when it is done, then it were well it were done quickly.  Besides, to whet my rather blunted purpose, ancestral voices began to admonish me at this time.  Wasn’t it shameful, they asked me in a chorus, that I, a chip of the old block of Colonel Vegunta Rama Veera Venkata Ganapathy Subrahmanyeswara Rao, should behave like the cat in the adage?  Switching figures of speech – and domestic animals – they advised me to take the bull by the horns.  I realized that what was at stake was honour and decided that, to uphold it, I should stay on and confront the situation.  More casualties, I reminded myself, are suffered by running away from a battle than running towards it.  I decided to stay the course, keeping the upper lip as stiff as could be managed.

With this resolve, I sat upright with my chin up and with my drooping spirits revived.  I glanced at the question paper that one of the three musketeers had given me.  I heaved a sigh of relief.  The question paper was the only silver lining in that gloomy deep.  I had got the answers to all those infernal questions: they were as safe as houses in my pocket. 

I was about to put a hand in my pocket when prudence reminded me that those great Generals my old ancestor, Col VRVVGS Rao of the 4th Infantry Brigade, used to talk about did a bit of reconnaissance before commencing an attack.  I cast a furtive reconnoitering look behind and found an invigilator making slinking movements like a slithery serpent.  Compelled by the enemy’s proximity, I decided to suspend hostilities.  Those great Generals I was talking about go in for this manoeuvre a bit.  “Strategic retreat” is the technical term.  I eyed the enemy, nevertheless, with ill-concealed animosity.  He was a burly heavyweight with a beaked nose and grizzled moustache which was sticking out like the bristles of an overused toothbrush from a dark, nicotine-stained upper lip.  He must have felt suspicious, for he took a clumsy step forward and stole up right behind me, breathing down the back of my neck.  What a low, mean, creeping, crawling, slinking, despicable worm!

It was a disturbing set-up, a situation which the French would describe as impasse.  With a burly heavyweight of an invigilator breathing stertorously like a steam engine down the back of your neck, you can’t write an examination, can you?  A lesser man would have called it a day in despair.  P Rao, being a man of strong fibre, stayed put, scratching the head and chewing the upper lip.  Patience, I reminded myself, was always rewarded.

The reward came after half-an-hour.  Soon after the principal had finished his rounds and sauntered into his room with a simper of satisfaction, the heavy-weight deserted his post and carried his bulk to the other prowlers.  There was a short hush-hush, and the scene was familiar enough.  Two of the invigilators would now sneak out, confident that the principal wouldn’t show up again; only one would be in the room for the next two-and-a-half hours.  I was relieved to find that the beefy snake-in-the-grass was one of the deserters and that an innocent-looking bald-pate was to stay behind.  After fixing me with a gaze of cold hardness that would have frozen an Eskimo, the bolting hutch of beastliness ponderously stepped out of the room, like a buffalo pulling its foot out of a swamp.  After the place was wholly free from the pre-eminent scourge, I put a bold hand in my pocket.  The bald-pate sat in a chair with a vacant look at the ceiling.

There is a tide in the affairs of men which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.  The next two-and-a-half hours marked that period in my life.  I know of no other personage in history or literature who had displayed a tact and resourcefulness matching mine during the two-and-a-half-hour period.  It bore out to the world the extent to which a mortal could rise, given an excruciatingly painful and traumatic situation as I had been placed in at the time.  I employed every means at my command and strained every nerve to emerge glorious from that extremely dangerous situation.  Even my father, that valorous twice-decorated Colonel of the 4th Infantry Brigade, would envy my record.

Words can do justice neither to the meticulousness and skill with which I copied out (“cribbed” is hardly the word) every word from the material (perversely described as “bits”) taken out of my pocket, while watching with alacrity every movement of the bald-pate, nor to the tact with which I squelched the bespectacled bloke beside me who, at a critical juncture, was about to spill the beans.  With one eye on the b.p. and another on the m. from my pocket, I did in two-and-a-half hours what the forty-nine inefficient blokes in the room were incapable of doing in three hours.  So jubilant was I that I didn’t mind when, at one o’clock, the bald-pate tried to snatch my sheets when I was tying them together.  With a forgive-him-Father-for-he-knows-not-what-I-did glance at the gull, I handed in my answer-script.

It was a gay and bobbish P Rao that pranced out of the examination hall as though he had fed on honey-dew and drunk the milk of Paradise.  Bertie Wooster would have described my mood as chirpy.  A brave breeze sang like a bugle from the sky as if celebrating my victory, and I viewed the world with greater happiness that Pipa did.  Even that old blister who had taught me Mathematics and whose presence had never failed to have a pernicious influence on me seemed so agreeable that I greeted him with a warm ‘Good afternoon!’ when he passed by.  This stiff bird used to growl at me in class for not doing things bit by bit.

Bit!  That word had a cataclysmic effect upon me, as “forlorn” had on poor Keats.  The eruption rudely lifted me from my romantic world and threw me into the weary reality.  Where were the bits that led me to success?  I thrust my hands into my pockets, and they didn’t find any.  I searched my person in vain and madly rushed to the examination hall with the palpitations of my dicky heart reaching crescendo only to blink at the clean, empty desk at the centre, which seemed to be mocking at my short-lived jubilation.  The world began to darken before my eyes as though the sun had been eclipsed, and a bird close by which was getting outside its afternoon worm looked for an instant like two birds, both flickering.  And then, quite suddenly, out of the darkness that covered me, black as the pit from pole to pole, there shone a gleam of light.  I saw in the momentary light what I had foolishly done in a hurry: I had attached the bits to the answer-script!

The world, which had seemed as sweet as the abode of the blest until a few minutes ago, began to look an abominably hot inferno.  The sun began to scorch, the somnambulistic green fields looked stupid, the lake didn’t glitter at all, for it had no water, and sundry other things that the half-blind Wordsworth had “eyed” in nature were present in all their ugliness.  A hideous-looking black bird was shrieking from a leafless tree.  It seemed to be saying, ‘P Rao shall sleep no more!’