Fall of Icarus
Anannya Nath
‘Ma’am,’ the boy utters carefully, standing at her door.
Nilima looks up from her desk, her brows still knitted into a frown. She eases her frontalis.
‘Yes?’ she asks curtly.
The boy timorously starts up and hesitates to answer. His eyes fall on the two large mounds of answer scripts over her desk. These are testimonials of students who skip classes with the primitive assurance that their parents’ money would guarantee them a degree without their participation. They appear, quite dramatically, on examination days and finish their answers with great nonchalance. If she wished, she could evaluate them with similar flippancy but Nilima was known for her implacability. Quite ironical, really, for she was the youngest faculty. The corporal proximity of her age with her students was overpowered by her sense of discipline. It was not that she did not want to participate in their lives, but her academic expectations created an impassable wall between her and her students, dulling all her efforts to assimilate.
‘Yes? What do you want? Speak,’ she asks again, the frown back on her forehead.
‘I need your help, ma’am,’ he says, fighting his dread.
Nilima asks him to come in.
‘Ma’am, I wrote an essay for the inter-state annual literary competition,’ he waits for a response that does not come. Nilima nods with her head hung over the answers. ‘But,’ he continues, ‘I don’t know if it is coherent.’ Nilima nods again, still reading an answer that visibly upsets her. She draws an aggressive circle over it and slams it atop the pile on her right.
‘What essay?’ she asks, lifting her head briefly.
‘Asymmetrical Power Relations in the Classroom, ma’am.’
‘Alright.’
‘I thought you might … you could … perhaps, help me with it?’ he keeps on egging.
Nilima picks another unevaluated sheet and leaf through the pages before reading the contents. ‘Keep it on that shelf,’ she points him to a shelf in the corner of her cabin.
‘When can I come back, ma’am?’ he asks, placing his file in place. Nilima looks at the calendar that flutters from one of the walls. She opens a diary, skims through the details of an entry and clicks her tongue. She barely has any time to spare. In fact, the pressures of random extra classes, the mounting administrative responsibilities, and the overbearing orthodoxy of most of her colleagues were all part of a huge summation that left little time at her personal disposal. Embittered, her face was the first thing to always betray her irritation.
‘Wednesday. After lunch,’ she replies, a little composed.
‘Thank you, ma’am.’
The boy does not move. He looks around her cabin – the chest of drawers on the right, files of different colours stacked inside it. He eyes her desk floored with all kinds of stationery, a printer and a scanner, the long registers where she kept tabs on her students and Nilima herself, sitting on her chair. He notices the low neckline of her kameez and the dupatta stuck slenderly on her neck, like a rope fastened around a pole. Every time she sighs to show her disappointment, his eyes follow the ebbs of her breaths.
‘You can go,’ Nilima says, suddenly aware of his presence.
Her command breaks his trance. His cheeks burn. Without another word, he drags himself out.
Nilima inadvertently stares at him. Unlike her many students who study Marx in air-conditioned libraries and carry totes imported from Shakespeare and Company, he wears a backpack, slung in tandem on his back and walks with a limp, his shoes torn at the seams. Most of her students usually give away their wealthy parentage with their often-credulous behaviours as their affections tilted, like a broken pendulum, towards their privilege.
*
Wednesday, he comes to her cabin exactly at three and finds her doing exactly what she had been doing two days ago. She uses a sharp, red ball point pen and scrawls comments on the margins of these papers, the noise of corrective remarks filling for the silence around her. The boy hesitates, again.
Nilima tilts her head and starts up. She was not expecting punctuality. She motions him to come inside and offers him a seat, meanwhile taking out his file from a drawer.
‘Your arguments are good,’ she begins. ‘Valid, even,’ she finishes.
‘Thank you, ma’am.’
‘But they are,’ she thinks through the word, ‘radical.’
‘Radical?’
‘You make claims in your paper as though you would not like to consider any other possibility.’
‘But it is true. Personal bias in class is a reality. I mean, you have seen it, haven’t you?’ his voice becomes accusatory.
‘What do you mean?’ Nilima presses on.
‘I … I mean, you are … I am sorry.’
‘That is a very discreet observation.’
‘Well, there are teachers who do that…’
‘Probability is not conviction,’ Nilima smiles. ‘Alter the conclusion, please. You cannot pass a verdict. No one can. Keep it open to interpretation.’
‘Verdict?’
‘Declaration.’
‘How am I passing a verdict?’
‘You are. You are claiming that you have suffered because of this, well, have you? What proof is there?’
‘I am not lying. I have suffered because of…’
‘Oh, I am sure you have. We all have, at some point.’
‘But it is the truth. Every day I come to class, I work hard and then when I do not understand something, I try to ask the professors and they … they look at me and…’
Nilima’s phone vibrates on her desk. ‘One minute,’ Nilima cuts him short and picks up the call.
‘Yes…. No … I am in a meeting’ she pauses, ‘I said I am in a meeting. No, I remember. I remember. Yes. Your mother said she would come tomorrow. No, not there. Yes…. Tomorrow. I paid the caterers already. We cannot change the menu now,’ she sighs. ‘But…. No. I cannot. Not today,’ she disconnects the call, turning her attention to the boy. ‘Yes, you were saying?’
‘They look at me and find reasons to not teach me.’
‘Who?’
‘Teachers.’
‘I see, but you cannot submit it with that conclusion.’
The boy appears small, defeated. Nilima almost feels pity for him.
‘Okay. This is what we will do. We will rewrite the essay in a way that makes it tell your story without making it obvious,’ she offers.
‘Is that doable?’ His eyes light up.
‘I suppose so.’
The boy smiles. He unzips his backpack and takes out a notebook.
‘Not today,’ she stops him from reaching for his pen.
‘Tomorrow. Come at 3 tomorrow,’ she hands him his file.
Nilima goes home to a salty fiancé who would rather she busied herself with their wedding than attend to the needs of pesky teenagers. He reminds her, crudely, for the seventeenth time that she must meet his mother for lunch the next day.
‘But the menu is decided.’
‘Oh god, Nilee, just do what she says. It is not that hard. We are having a reception afterwards, aren’t we? Let’s just have whatever food they want at the ceremony.’
‘Ro, I have already…’ she considers the possibility of another inconclusive argument. ‘Okay. I will see what I can do,’ she ends the conversation. A little later, her mother calls to know when she would pay the mortgage. The term expires in three months and if she does not clear it up by then, they would lose their house. ‘The regularisation will come about in two months, Maa,’ Nilima tries to assuage her mother’s apprehension. Once she becomes a regular faculty, her salary would fetch her a decent loan and she would start earning just as much as her associates who taught at public universities and were protected by the steel hand of the education department. Nilima too could have secured a similar job, but the helmsman of her fate rowed her destiny in murky waters.
For five years, Nilima appeared for several state university interviews. She was exceptional with her demonstrations and augmented her answers with a flair that only accentuated how well she knew her subject. But she had no connections. Her erudition was marred by the interviewers’ lackadaisical attitude who found her wanting – either her research deviated from her discipline, or her papers were not highly indexed and when they could find no fault, she was deemed unfit because of her body language. She understood their excuses, fought against the system but eventually lost. Filing lawsuits against them was a tirade that drained her mentally and financially and because these people had their hands deep inside the pockets of administrators, she withdrew all cases within three months of filing them. That, however, did not quell her spirit of recalcitrance. Today, she surprised even herself.
The boy who came for help was not wrong. She had suffered the same gridlocks, rebelled against similar institutions. No one can better understand the plight of seeing men in black suits evaluate her education and instate candidates who promised to ‘satisfy their students and superiors,’ a euphemism that translated into mooching them in academic meetings and union screenings. Dejected, she intended to avoid mourning her lost dreams for as long as possible.
Nilima knows that once she is regularised, her position within the university would solidify like calcified tissue, and increments would kill any desire to ever leave. Autonomous universities were a corporate extension where academic integrity was a by-product, yet she felt tethered under the bludgeoning weight of expenses that never seemed to lessen. There is no way she would favour the student who talked distressingly against authority. She cannot risk losing again. Of that, she is resolute.
*
The boy comes to her cabin the next day and sees Nilima holding her face in her hands, her eyes closed in contemplation. She opens them to find him already inside the radius of her cabin. She closes the notebook she has been scribbling on, calculating the imminent expenses, and detailing everything the regularisation would entail. She realises that a loan to clear the mortgage would stop her from taking another soon. She would be unable to afford a honeymoon, unless Rohan intervenes and decides to pay, and she cannot change apartments – not for another five years, neither can she start a family immediately.
‘Okay, let us begin from the beginning,’ she composes herself. One of the basic tenants one agrees without vocalising while joining this profession is to appear unafraid and always ready to help.
‘Actually,’ the boy replies, a little unsure.
‘Yes?’
‘Was my essay grammatically accurate?’
‘Yes, of course’
‘Then I don’t think I will alter anything about it.’
‘But you agreed yesterday. And if you don’t alter it, you cannot hand it in.’
‘I can, there are no rules for that.’
‘Well, remove my name from the supervisor’s space.’
‘But I cannot send it without a supervisor’s name.’
‘I definitely did not supervise that.’
‘You did.’
‘What?’ Nilima agitates.
‘You signed the essay.’
‘No, I did not,’ she refuses vehemently.
‘Are you sure? Because I know you did,’ he hands a photocopy of his write-up, the original safe in his bag.
Nilima frantically flips through the document and finds her signature on the margin of the last page. She does not remember signing it.
‘You forged my signature?’ she points a finger at him, rising from her seat.
The boy smirks. Yes, he did, it was easy.
‘Do you know what this means? You will be suspended,’ she threatens him.
‘By whom? You or the administration?’
‘How dare you smile? Here I was trying to help you and you dare do this?’ She fumes, her body sweltering in the sudden heat of her rage. In the commotion of pointed fingers and her permanent scowl, her dupatta, placed messily over her shoulder, falls off on the desk. Standing across, the boy leans towards her and glares at her chest. He picks up the dupatta and puts it on her shoulder. His hand slides down and finds way to her neckline, brushing her soft skin. Nilima flinches, falling back on her seat. Everything happens very fast, too fast to make sense of the boundary crossed. The boy steps away, gulps down his primordial instinct and picking his file, darts out of the room.
Time stretches on tearing into Nilima’s reality. She does not move. Her phone, ringing on her desk dies several times before she finally hears its shrill ringtone. With a jolt, she breaks from the stupor, and gropes the ground below her feet, feeling gravity pull her back to earth. The noise frequents, but Nilima feels tethered to her surroundings, as if she is cursed by a spell breaking which would drown her in shame. For the first time since her appointment in the university, she is scared. The ringing stops for a while. When it screams again, she fumbles and picks it up.
‘Do you know what bloody time it is? Do you know how many times we called you?’ Rohan thunders, throwing a volley of questions at her.
‘I was … I,’ words refuse to make meaning, the knot in her throat getting tighter with every word she speaks.
‘This is unbelievable. What do you want to prove, Nilima? Only your job is important?’
‘No, Ro, not at all. Please listen to me, something happened.’
‘Whatever it is, this is more important. Come out. We are late.’
‘Ro, I cannot. Not today. Please reschedule it.’
‘What? Why? Is it about that boy you are helping?’
‘No, it’s not.’
‘Stop your excuses and come out,’ Rohan disconnects the call.
Nilima goes into the restroom and washes her face with an uneasy urgency, as if by washing away the tactile sensation she would undo the dirt of his act. She hangs her head over the basin and runs the tap, the water streaming down the bridge of her hair. She rubs water on her hands and scrubs them over her chest until the skin hurts, turning red and itchy. When she emerges out to meet Rohan, her voice shakes.
*
Nilima is surprised when the Internal Complaints Committee calls to discuss her complaint just the day after she had filed the case. Rohan, however, warned her against it. He told her not to sabotage her chance at getting regularised.
‘Dr Nilima Saikia, I believe you are well aware of the charges…’ the director of the committee begins.
‘Yes, sir, I am’ Nilima interrupts.
‘…that have been levied against you?’ he finishes, raising an eyebrow.
‘Against?’ Nilima twitches.
‘Yes, you are accused of misusing your power.’
‘Misuse? Me?’ she cannot process the grievance.
‘That is what the petitioner says,’ the director shows her the file containing the complaint letter written in bold, black ink about how she fails students who do not meet her personally. The filer’s name is struck off for privacy.
‘This is ridiculous, sir. I have never done so,’ she roars.
‘Well, actually, Nilima, we did some research and found that maximum number of students fail your papers. Why is that so?’
‘Because they write rubbish.’
‘Even the scholarship students?’
‘I do not know who is what. My job is to teach and evaluate. If students do not take studies seriously, is it my fault?’
‘No, definitely not. But if indeed your papers are difficult, why don’t you take remedial classes?’
‘I do. I mean, I did.’
‘You leave the campus before five.’
‘They do not show up. I waited for them every evening for three months after the semester commenced. Only recently...’
‘Dr Saikia, you do realise the precedent you are setting, don’t you?’
‘Sir, I have been busy with my wedding preparations for the past two months,’ once she claims it, Nilima realises what is at stake. Her life, clamorous as it already is, might come apart in that very moment, all because of the piercing testament.
‘Two months? How could you think that you can leave before time for two months straight?’
‘Sir, I never miss any class. I tell them, repeatedly, if ever they have doubts, they can ask. I have never misused my power, in fact, I have tried all in my capacity to execute it well. If students fail, that is because they do not study nor desire to.’
‘An ‘F’ in a paper can terminate the grant scholarship students get; do you know that? Others can pay for backlogs but they cannot. If we do not have scholarship students complete their graduation, we will be answerable to the government. Look at this complainant’s scorecard. They have score exceedingly well in all other subjects except yours. You have given them an ‘F’ for two consecutive semesters.’
Nilima looks at the tally of grades and notices the roll number. Her fury, latent for so long morphs into an inferno.
‘Him? He filed a complaint against me?’
‘That is not your concern...’
‘Of course it is. He is not the victim here, Sir.’
The director scoffs.
‘Why are you laughing? He forged my signature on an essay when I refused to sign it, and he … he groped me….’
‘Come on Nilima. Stop lying.’
‘He came into my cabin.’
‘You are not supposed to allow any student in your cabin.’
‘Yes, I know. I thought he needed help with…’
‘No, that is no excuse. We have classrooms.’
‘I was in a hurry and…’
‘Dr Saikia, you are one of our best teachers. You know that. In fact, you are the youngest who was considered for regularisation. But I am afraid we must cut back on that,’ the president speaks for the first time.
‘Please, Sir, don’t. I need the increment. My house will go away. My wedding-’
‘We are sorry,’ he stops her from speaking any further.
‘For now, we are only cancelling your regularisation, if students keep failing your papers, we will have to terminate your contract,’ the director passes on the final decision.
Nilima has wrongly assessed that the potency of her association with her students belonged to her. Instead, she had been a conquerable pawn despite the privilege of her position. As she walks out of the office, the clamour in the hall melts in her ears, blocking all sounds behind the cacophony of her thoughts. She sees the boy standing on the other end of the open yard. He passes her a victorious smile and disappears in the corridor behind the field. Nilima finds herself striding towards the same corridor. She enters each classroom on either side without permission and scans through the students. She finds him in the fifth room, sitting on the first bench. Without a moment’s reluctance, she goes up to the boy and slaps him across his face. Students gasp, but their uproar seem less jarring. He has, after all, destroyed everything that took her years to build.
‘How dare you?’ she challenges through clenched teeth. The boy stands up, unnerved.
‘Dr Saikia, you just can’t…’ the teacher in the room protests in vain.
‘Mr Sahai, please. I must talk with this student alone,’ she demands with such ferocity that he asks the other students to leave and walks out himself. The students do not leave the corridor. They glue themselves to the wall outside, their ears cocked towards the dramatic encounter. Nilima proceeds to shut the door but hesitates. She keeps it open.
‘Explain everything,’ she crosses her arms.
‘You deserved it,’ the boy shrugs.
‘Why?’
‘Because of you, I lost my scholarship,’ it is his turn to be angry.
‘Really? You do not study, fail an exam and when your scholarship is revoked, blame me?’
‘I don’t understand what you teach.’
‘Then why do you not just ask me?’
‘Ask you? You do not even take the remedial classes.’
‘That is not true. I do, it’s just…’
‘Just? Is it not your job to teach? Do you know how hard I worked for that scholarship? How am I going to pay for the backlogs? Will you pay for me? No, right? You will not!’ The boy unleashes all his fury. ‘If you were not so caught up in your own little world, you would have seen me.’
Nilima uncrosses her arms.
‘So, I made sure,’ he slows down, ‘I made sure neither of us got what we wanted. If I had to lose my scholarship, you should also suffer and realise what financial crisis is.’
‘This was revenge, then?’ Nilima asks, unfazed.
‘You earned it. How is it that you get to fail me, mock me simply because I lack expertise in the one thing you ace at? How is this fair?’ his words sound other worldly, as the rot of disdain spreads through him and the stink of crisis floats out in all directions.
‘You touched me,’ Nilima bangs on the desk, aloud.
The boy fidgets but smirks. ‘Yes, so? What will you do? Nobody likes you here. Did they even consider your plea?’ he taunts her.
‘You bastard,’ she grabs him by his collar.
The boy does not fight back. The smirk on his lips turns into a grin. The proximity threatens her and she jumps back, pushing him away.
The president of the Internal Complaints Committee hurries into the room. ‘Dr Saikia, you cannot talk privately with your victim. It is against the rules,’ he explains, worried.
‘Victim? Him?’ Nilima breaks into a hysterical laugh.
***
Shortlisted for the inaugural (2024) Bangalore Writers Workshop R K Anand Prize
Jury: Indira Chandrasekhar, Jahnavi Barua, Saikat Majumdar
Conducted with Bangalore Writers Workshop, Atta Gallatta Bookshop and Out of Print Magazine
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