The result of results

The board exams are over, and the ensuing euphoria has subsided. My students are now bracing themselves for their results.

Over half a century ago, I knew that mine were out when my friend Pinky arrived at my home, flushed in the face. She had run from her house, diagonally opposite mine, and was clutching her sides. “ISC!” she announced breathlessly. “I have come to take you to school.”

That educational edifice was not at some distant location but just down the road.

Convinced that I needed physical as well as moral support, Pinky gripped my elbow. She walked beside me, stride for stride, as if escorting a condemned prisoner to the scaffold. Her nervousness on my behalf rubbed off on me, and I was trembling as we reached the principal’s office.

This ominous occasion had been far from my thoughts on the afternoon of my last paper. No sooner had we left the examination hall than my classmates and I set off to see Johny Mera Naam. Lost in a world of romance and intrigue, we had looked forward to weeks of unbridled freedom. Suddenly, we were seconds away from the dreaded moment we had known would come one day.

“You’ll be fine,” said Pinky kindly. Those reassuring words calmed my nerves. Actually, I was not too worried. After wrestling with math, physics, and chemistry for a year, I switched to the arts stream and enjoyed a congenial curriculum. I was confident that I had not done badly.

Then came a shock. I vividly recall my dismay and disbelief when I saw my history marks. How was it possible that I had barely scraped through? I had been thrilled with my answer on the Battle of Plassey, a conflict I probably knew better than the 18th-century warring parties. My poor performance in my favourite subject seemed like a serious setback. Any chance of pursuing history in college or beyond was ruled out.

The poet Robert Frost writes about choosing one of two paths that ‘made all the difference’. There was nothing so dramatic in my case. I had no extraordinary ambition to become an archaeologist or a museum curator. If I had fared less miserably in history, I might have gone on to teach it. Instead, these past forty-six years, I have been sharing my love of English—a delightful destiny that is the result of my ISC results!