Freyan Wadia

 

I have to admit, it took an embarrassing number of years after learning Newtonian Physics, to figure out why people in Australia don’t just drop off the face of the earth. That may have had something to do with flunking that particular terminal exam, so even my grades said, “Welcome to Australia!”

 

“Welcome, Mrs. Wadia!” said my teacher to my mother, at the biannual parent-teacher meeting. Probably because my creative writing abilities were best demonstrated in the Physics paper and not the English one. Ah, well, so much for “we endorse creativity.” Hypocrites!

 

“… marked by her complete disinterest in the subject,” droned Ms. Ratna. I hoped my mother was listening better than I was, for my attention had been snagged by the little sparrow at the window. Ah, little sparrow, rejoice, for thou art not encumbered by the value of the gravitational constant! Well, technically, neither was I, as I had long since forgotten it!

 

I intermittently tuned into her diatribe the way the Mars Rover checks back in for signals from Earth. I happened to hear only one statement. “Extra classes after school are a must,” she said, with a sneer. All my protests died within my throat, as my mother gave me her signature trade-marked Death Stare. And on that salubrious note, I ended up in an empty classroom at 3:00 PM in front of a textbook called, ‘Concise Physics’. Which was not very concise at all.

 

Ms. Ratna turned to the problem page in the book… as though life needs supplementary problems! “A coin kept in water (RI=4/3) when viewed from air vertically appears to be raised by 3.0mm. Find the depth of the coin in water.”

I paused to think about this. “Won’t the coin sink to the bottom? So, if you just measure the height of the container the coin is in, isn’t that the answer?” Ms. Ratna looked like she was in need of an aspirin. “Let me explain,” she began, rubbing her temples…

 

It was in the middle of the lecture on something called “apparent depth”, which was frankly quite out of my depth, that my English teacher came into the room. Mrs. Banerjee, short, round and pleasant-faced, looked quite a contrast to Ms. Ratna, who was lanky and gaunt. Mrs. Banerjee was also my favourite teacher in the whole school.

 

“Oh, hello Ratna, could I have a moment with the genius you are sitting with?” Ms. Ratna actually scanned the entire class of empty benches as though they might sooner be called geniuses than I.

“What?” she said, as though unable to believe her ears.

“Your student there,” Mrs. Banerjee pointed at me. “Has captured the true essence of surrealism.”

“What?” I said, unable to believe my ears.

 

She shuffled forward and thrust a paper with illegible scrawls on it, which I recognised as my handwriting.

“We held a poetry competition about a month ago,” explained Mrs Banerjee. “I had not expected to read anything like this.” The first paragraph of the thing I wrote a month ago revealed itself to be:

‘Paupers scarred with rich paucity,

Fate yearns for a white banana;

Saffron pearls undermine liver pâté,

Ivory melts like liquid moonlight.’

 

Up until now, I could not recollect anything of the poem Mrs. Banerjee had praised so highly. Now that I had just begun to, I wondered if she was making fun of me. The truth of the matter was that I had been dawdling for fifty minutes of the hour in which we had to write poetry. In the last ten minutes, I realised my paper was blank, my head was empty and Gujarati expletives, despite their natural fluidity, were not exactly poetic material. It was 7:50 am in the morning, which is too early to be poetic about anything. But I was smart enough to realise that the more highfalutin and meaningless something sounds, the more likely English teachers are to deem it a masterpiece. So, in ten minutes, I wrote down random words that possessed a certain gravity and strung them together.

 

But no, her praise was sincere. Her eyes were shining, her gestures grand and animated, her voice babbling like a brook. “Do you recognise the symbolism, Ratna?” she said to my Physics teacher, who had clearly never had her senses assaulted by this brand of nonsense. However, Mrs. Banerjee did not wait for a response. “Such a lament of poverty and the illusion of wealth – I cannot believe it!”

“Neither can I,” said Ms. Ratna.

“The desire of Fate to go against its own dictation has been incredibly portrayed in line two.”

“Fate yearns for… a white banana?”

“Out here, ‘white’ symbolises light, as in the light one sees when they are about to die. And ‘banana’ implies the curve in the path of Life. So, it implies that even Fate might have its own regrets.”

I did not have the heart to tell her that I had written that line while thinking of the Minion movie.

“And what does the next line mean?” said Ms. Ratna.

“If I’m right,” she looked over at me with a smile, to which I nodded as if I was understanding her train of thought. It is something I’m getting very good at. “I believe ‘saffron’ and ‘pearls’ symbolise richness, where the liver conveys a living being at its simplest. So, wealth has been given priority over simple living.”

 

She beamed at us. Ms. Ratna looked like she had accidentally been locked up in an asylum.

“There’s more,” said Mrs Banerjee.

“Oh God,” said Ms Ratna.

‘Waterfalls of lava enslave

Eras of belligerent sediment;

Fossils are their mothers,

And mothers are their fossils.

 

Wayward tributaries of rivers

Beg forgiveness from the sea,

The sea is bare,

And swallowed by the Kraken.’

 

Mrs. Banerjee straightened up suddenly. “Let me show this to the school magazine editor!” She collected my paper and shuffled towards the exit. She looked over her shoulder at me and said, “And you, keep writing wonderful things!”

 

“Where on Earth did all of that come from?” asked Ms. Ratna to me after she had gone.

“Now you know what Physics looks like to me,” I said, shaking my head as I picked up my pen.