Dramatic Reading

By Tahameem Sultana
Born 1992, F, from Jeddah, Saudi Arabia
The Ex-Student
The man beside her looked familiar. She felt like she knew him. But as the crowd in the bus jostled and grew hot, she tried to think about something else. There were plenty of distractions. For one, given the fact that she was in Mumbai, the heart of Bollywood, she could always stare at the movie posters, theactress usually frozen in a sultry dance step. Otherwise she could always do some serious people watching, but she decided to drop this because, for some unknown reason, she felt uncomfortable to think about the man. Yet, she turned towards him and concentrated her gaze on him.
He was in his late fifties, tall, lanky and olive skinned. His hair was black, with white streaks here and there. His eyeswere well spaced and thick lashed, and she thought he must have been handsome in his youth.
She suddenly looked away from him as he looked up to meet her eyes. But as soon as he bent over to pick a book from his bag placed between his legs, she stared again. Then when he opened the book on his knees, she instantly knew who he was.
"Now, if anyone ever has a doubt regarding factorisation, justonce, read page number thirteen in your textbook. There would be no more doubt."
She giggled at the memory, remembering his patient, cool face. She recalled one by one, all the memories of her middle school Math teacher.
He was a widower and sometimes, looking up from her algebra, she would marvel how sad he seemed. He looked tailor-made for a dust allergic librarian, silent as his books, or aromantic poet, but a mathematics teacher was the last guess anyone could make about him.
Oh, how they used to make fun of him, play tricks on him and laugh behind his back! He never laughed but smiled politely at everybody. Sometimes he would make silly mistakes on the blackboard, then apologise as he erased it out. He always gave in to the girls' demands of shortening his class, and usuallyended up completing the syllabus a few days before the exams. They never had time for a proper revision, but then, his correction was always careless and lenient, and the middle school girls thrived on this fact to pass through the hardest of mathematics exam papers.
But she didn't remember him for this.
Long lustrous hair and soulful big eyes. A tall, lean frame draped in light silks. Hisdaughter. They had been best friends and were inseparable. She recalled wistfully all the fun they had in middle school, wild and carefree...until his daughter went down with pneumonia. The doctors said it was a bit late...but they said that she had a good chance for recovery.
But it never happened. She could never forget the suddenness and the meaninglessness of it, the feeling of emptiness.After that, his sad eyes seemed to recede even more. But, life went on for all the girls. They graduated high school and moved on, found jobs and married, had kids of their own. Sometimes, the girls would bump into each other, in inconspicuous places like supermarkets or local fairs, and would greet each other with a mixture of surprise and curiosity. Some would be with little kids, some would be withtheir spouses, some expecting, others still unmarried and philosophic. They would have contacted through facebook. They would notice each other's wrinkles and obesity, meet their spouses and kids, and marvel at the time.
Now, after almost 25 years, sitting beside him, with a dirty city bus aisle between them, she thought about him with less amusement and more sympathy.
She remembered, in hertwelfth grade four years after they all had outgrown his amusing math classes, and after many serious mathematics teachers and many no-joke and very tough mathematics question papers, they went to sit for their final school exams and glanced up at their familiar old invigilator.
She remembered precisely, how they had all flocked into the examination hall and taken their places. Then as their...