Skip to main content

Online class

Fiction


The online class began at 9. James woke up just in time to switch on the phone and log in to the class. Attendance is important. Having marked his attendance and making sure that both his audio and the video are switched off, James got up from bed. The teacher’s audio and video are on.

‘Inertia is a property of matter…” Malini Ma’am has already begun class. James searches for his toothbrush among all the pens, pencils and other such litter on the study table. ‘… existing state of rest or uniform motion…’ Malini Ma’am goes on. Phrases like straight line and external force are heard while the toothbrush is fished out and James moves to the washroom.

Ensconced on the commode and chewing the toothbrush, James wonders why people like Newton had to bother about motions in straight lines and all when what matters most in real life is this motion in the toilet.

Appa and Amma were busy in the cowshed and pigsty. Their motion starts at 4 o’clock in the morning. Can’t the cows sleep a little more and wait for a decent time of the day to be milked? Who cares anyway? There must be some laws of motion for cows too. Newton be damned.

‘The final velocity of a moving object is dependent on three things,’ Malini Ma’am’s class is continuing as James emerges from the washroom feeling fresh enough for a glass of Bournvita. James picks up the phone and walks to the dining room where his glass of warm energy drink must be waiting. Amma must have taken the usual tangential motion from the cowshed in order to get the Bournvita ready at the right time for the darling son. ‘… initial velocity, acceleration, and time…’ Malini Ma’am, can’t you make this a little less complicated?

We = you + ATM will demand more attention, James decides. He can make that equation an excuse for chatting up with Megha in the afternoon. ‘Hi Megha, what’s acceleration got to do with ATM?’ And then Megha will flip the kiss-curl from her plumb cheek with her sleek fingers and say, ‘Jerk, acceleration is a tough concept. Very creepy, you know.’ And then she’ll go peppy on the phone screen with her kiss-curl accelerating onto her chubby cheek as if there was a Newtonian force acting on it irresistibly.

Sipping the warm Bournvita, James flips to WhatsApp. Malini Ma’am goes on to lecture about ‘per second per second’. Let her. There are many unread messages in WhatsApp. Per second per second can wait until the motion of Megha’s kiss-curl starts flipping.

One of the messages is from Anita. Must be quite sentimental. Anita’s sentiments accelerate like the KTM 390 Duke. James opens Anita’s message. It is a video. A girl opens her notebook and reads a poem she has written herself while her father is chilling out on the couch behind her with his mobile phone in hand. The poem is about a lonely girl’s wish to be a mobile phone.

I wish I were a mobile phone..

Nobody bothers about me.

But when the mobile rings

They all rush to pick it up…

Wow! James thinks it’s wonderful. Loneliness is so painful, Anita, I know. And he forwards the video to all his friends’ groups.

The Bournvita is over.

‘When we come to the distance travelled by a body, the final velocity is not in picture,’ Malini Ma’am is teaching.

A cow lows from the shed. Another one echoes that. The echo accelerates in the hollowness somewhere.

‘Great video, dude,’ James types a response to Anita.

 

  

Comments

  1. The Moon's BOYFRIEND September 15, 2020 at 1:05 PM

    Feels like James is lazy as I am.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalSeptember 15, 2020 at 1:25 PM

      So my story does strike a chord? Well, it's inspired by some real people.

      Delete
  2. UnknownSeptember 16, 2020 at 12:27 PM

    WOW,THIS IS A GOOD STORY....THE CHARACTER IN THIS STORY FEELS LIKE ONE OF MY FRIENDS IN MY OLD SCHOOL..

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ayodhya: Kingdom of Sorrows

T he Sarayu carried more tears than water. Ayodhya was a sad kingdom. Dasaratha was a good king. He upheld dharma – justice and morality – as best as he could. The citizens were apparently happy. Then, one day, it all changed. One person is enough to change the destiny of a whole kingdom. Who was that one person? Some say it was Kaikeyi, one of the three official wives of Dasaratha. Some others say it was Manthara, Kaikeyi’s chief maid. Manthara was a hunchback. She was the caretaker of Kaikeyi right from the latter’s childhood; foster mother, so to say, because Kaikeyi had no mother. The absence of maternal influence can distort a girl child’s personality. With a foster mother like Manthara, the distortion can be really bad. Manthara was cunning, selfish, and morally ambiguous. A severe physical deformity can make one worse than all that. Manthara was as devious and manipulative as a woman could be in a men’s world. Add to that all the jealousy and ambition that insecure peo...
39 comments
Read more

Bharata: The Ascetic King

Bharata is disillusioned yet again. His brother, Rama the ideal man, Maryada Purushottam , is making yet another grotesque demand. Sita Devi has to prove her purity now, years after the Agni Pariksha she arranged for herself long ago in Lanka itself. Now, when she has been living for years far away from Rama with her two sons Luva and Kusha in the paternal care of no less a saint than Valmiki himself! What has happened to Rama? Bharata sits on the bank of the Sarayu with tears welling up in his eyes. Give me an answer, Sarayu, he said. Sarayu accepted Bharata’s tears too. She was used to absorbing tears. How many times has Rama come and sat upon this very same bank and wept too? Life is sorrow, Sarayu muttered to Bharata. Even if you are royal descendants of divinity itself. Rama had brought the children Luva and Kusha to Ayodhya on the day of the Ashvamedha Yagna which he was conducting in order to reaffirm his sovereignty and legitimacy over his kingdom. He didn’t know they w...
30 comments
Read more

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...
16 comments
Read more

Liberated

Fiction - parable Vijay was familiar enough with soil and the stones it turns up to realise that he had struck something rare.   It was a tiny stone, a pitch black speck not larger than the tip of his little finger. It turned up from the intestine of the earth while Vijay was digging a pit for the biogas plant. Anand, the scientist from the village, got the stone analysed in his lab and assured, “It is a rare object.   A compound of carbonic acid and magnesium.” Anand and his fellow scientists believed that it must be a fragment of a meteoroid that hit the earth millions of years ago.   “Very rare indeed,” concluded the scientist. Now, it’s plain commonsense that something that’s very rare indeed must be very valuable too. All the more so if it came from the heavens. So Vijay got the village goldsmith to set it on a gold ring.   Vijay wore the ring proudly on his ring finger. Nobody, in the village, however bothered to pay any homage to Vijay’s...
47 comments
Read more

Empuraan – Review

Revenge is an ancient theme in human narratives. Give a moral rationale for the revenge and make the antagonist look monstrously evil, then you have the material for a good work of art. Add to that some spices from contemporary politics and the recipe is quite right for a hit movie. This is what you get in the Malayalam movie, Empuraan , which is running full houses now despite the trenchant opposition to it from the emergent Hindutva forces in the state. First of all, I fail to understand why so much brouhaha was hollered by the Hindutvans [let me coin that word for sheer convenience] who managed to get some 3 minutes censored from the 3-hour movie. The movie doesn’t make any explicit mention of any of the existing Hindutva political parties or other organisations. On the other hand, Allahu Akbar is shouted menacingly by Islamic terrorists, albeit towards the end. True, the movie begins with an implicit reference to what happened in Gujarat in 2002 after the Godhra train burnin...
9 comments
Read more