Skip to main content

Priya becomes a trigonometric ratio


“Why don’t you do something useful?” I asked Priya. Priya is a class eleven student of mine. I had been asked to look after their class for a while as their mathematics teacher was called to the office on an urgent task.

Priya looked at me and smiled indolently. Her maths notebook lay open before her even more lethargically. Sin Ө and Cos Ө floated on the page like butterflies looking for roses. All her classmates were busy doing one thing or another.

“Why don’t you solve a problem or two of trigonometry?” I asked.

Priya was not amused. She didn’t seem particularly fond of Sin Ө and Cos Ө.

“Why don’t you write a story?” I knew she liked stories.

Write a story?” She blinked at me. Writing is not something that her generation likes to do. I learnt that as their English teacher. They will listen to stories. Some of them, at least. But write? Oh no, that’s so boring, dude.

“Hmm,” I said in her generation’s lingo.

“What about?” She demanded.

“Priya was in love with Sin Ө. Start with that.” I said.

She grinned at me before taking her rough book and a pen.

Priya was in love with Sin Ө. But Sin Ө did not reciprocate her romance. ‘You silly girl,’ Sin Ө said. ‘Do you fall in love merely because your witless old English teacher orders you to? Don’t you have brains to know that I’m perpetually committed to Cos Ө?’

Priya had more brains than her English teacher. English is the subject of semi-mental retards, she knew. They say things like I am a petal of flower offering itself at the feet of your love. As if love has feet! Priya knew very well that Sin Ө and Cos Ө squared so perfectly with each other that they merged into the best possible union like Yang and Yin did in the Taoist symbol. Sin2 Ө + Cos2 Ө = 1. One. Oneness. Perfect union.

‘I should not meddle with that union,’ Priya said to herself. Her romance ended.

Priya gave me her story. It made me laugh though I didn’t quite like her calling me a mental retard. But the story made me love Priya ever more. I am an expert in fooling myself into believing that anything said negatively about me by my students is not meant seriously.

“Priya’s romance is so fickle,” I said. “I wish it didn’t end so easily.” The maths teacher was not back yet and Priya had to be engaged still.

“Okay,” Priya said, “I’ll continue Priya’s romance.” She took the book back from me.

Priya felt sad that her romance was spurned so heartlessly by Sin Ө. So she went off on a tangent and became Tan Ө.

I didn’t laugh. I felt sad, in fact. I couldn’t bear the thought of my beloved student metamorphosing into a trigonometric ratio.


PS. The last time I wrote a short story was in September last. More or less of a man.

My most read short story: Halley’s Fishes

 

 

Comments

  1. Hari Om
    Oh, by Priya might turn out to be a budding Celestial Mechanic! A rising star, you might say... YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
  2. That was a real fun story. Your have talent for writing on any genre. Woke up just half an hour back and read it. Put me in a great mood for the rest of the day.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Happy to have kicked off your day in a cheerful mood. And thank you for sharing that cheer with me.

      Delete
  3. Replies
    1. One good thing about being with youngsters is they add fun to existence.

      Delete
  4. Priya is a potential genius.

    ReplyDelete
  5. That's an interesting classroom anecdote. :)
    I'm glad my Maths classes are behind me. :D

    Happy New Year to you, your lovely wife and your feline friends. (...and to Priya, too.)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thank you for remembering all of us on the occasion. :)

      Delete
  6. Great story sir, i never thought maths could be romantic. It was a fresh story ✨

    ReplyDelete
  7. ...and it's funny how I was sitting next to Priya when this happened,I remember this incident and had fun reading this..wish you'd write about me too sir! :D lol

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. 😊 You'll inspire a story soon, I'm sure. N, right?

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

The Second Crucifixion

  ‘The Second Crucifixion’ is the title of the last chapter of Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins’s magnum opus Freedom at Midnight . The sub-heading is: ‘New Delhi, 30 January 1948’. Seventy-three years ago, on that day, a great soul was shot dead by a man who was driven by the darkness of hatred. Gandhi has just completed his usual prayer session. He had recited a prayer from the Gita:                         For certain is death for the born                         and certain is birth for the dead;                         Therefore over the inevitable                         Thou shalt not grieve . At that time Narayan Apte and Vishnu Karkare were moving to Retiring Room Number 6 at the Old Delhi railway station. They walked like thieves not wishing to be noticed by anyone. The early morning’s winter fog of Delhi gave them the required wrap. They found Nathuram Godse already awake in the retiring room. The three of them sat together and finalised the plot against Gand

Cats and Love

No less a psychologist than Freud said that the “time spent with cats is never wasted.” I find time to spend with cats precisely for that reason. They are not easy to love, particularly if they are the country variety which are not quite tameable, and mine are those. What makes my love affair with my cats special is precisely their unwillingness to befriend me. They’d rather be in their own company. “In ancient time, cats were worshipped as gods; they have not forgotten this,” Terry Pratchett says. My cats haven’t, I’m sure. Pratchett knew what he was speaking about because he loved cats which appear frequently in his works. Pratchett’s cats love independence, very unlike dogs. Dogs come when you call them; cats take a message and get back to you as and when they please. I don’t have dogs. But my brother’s dogs visit us – Maggie and me – every evening. We give them something to eat and they love that. They spend time with us after eating. My cats just go away without even a look af

The Final Farewell

Book Review “ Death ends life, not a relationship ,” as Mitch Albom put it. That is why, we have so many rituals associated with death. Minakshi Dewan’s book, The Final Farewell [HarperCollins, 2023], is a well-researched book about those rituals. The book starts with an elaborate description of the Sikh rituals associated with death and cremation, before moving on to Islam, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and finally Hinduism. After that, it’s all about the various traditions and related details of Hindu final rites. A few chapters are dedicated to the problems of widows in India, gender discrimination in the last rites, and the problem of unclaimed dead bodies. There is a chapter titled ‘Grieving Widows in Hindi Cinema’ too. Death and its rituals form an unusual theme for a book. Frankly, I don’t find the topic stimulating in any way. Obviously, I didn’t buy this book. It came to me as quite many other books do – for reasons of their own. I read the book finally, having shelv

Vultures and Religion

When vultures become extinct, why should a religion face a threat? “When the vultures died off, they stopped eating the bodies of Zoroastrians…” I was amused as I went on reading the book The Final Farewell by Minakshi Dewan. The book is about how the dead are dealt with by people of different religious persuasions. Dead people are quite useless, unless you love euphemism. Or, as they say, dead people tell no tales. In the end, we are all just stories made by people like the religious woman who wrote the epitaph for her atheist husband: “Here lies an atheist, all dressed up and no place to go.” Zoroastrianism is a religion which converts death into a sordid tale by throwing the corpses of its believers to vultures. Death makes one impure, according to that religion. Well, I always thought, and still do, that life makes one impure. I have the support of Lord Buddha on that. Life is dukkha , said the Enlightened. That is, suffering, dissatisfaction and unease. Death is liberation