“O
my God! How did you do it?” My distant cousin exclaimed over the phone. Her
highly pitched voice tore through my ears. And I had to bring out a gap between
my left one and the receiver. I replied low.
“Well...mmm....it’s nothing, you just have to
learn it fine.”
“No, wait. Did you dream of the questions the
night before?”
I thought of what to reply! It was an insane
question to me but, she didn’t own the blame for her phobic self. Maybe, I was some
crazy nut to be floating on craziness at a height I never should have been. I
convinced her at the cost of application of a word which I hated the most.
“Just practice,
that’s all.”
I
was 16 then. Relatives, from all corners of the state, some I never knew, they existed,
flooded our home. The reason was someone in their family had done something
that no one of the blood ever did: 100
out of 100 in Matric. It was like celebration time for them. My parents
were the happiest persons on earth. I was relieved but, nervous as well. Interrogations!
I loathed facing them: What will you do now?
How much did you practice? Can you do it again in future? I felt I was
caught red handed in the relationship I had been secretly involved; my affair with maths.
It was not the case of love at first sight, for
sure. I hardly do remember getting a maximum of 50, not until I realized a
depth about it, somewhere between seventh and eighth, during the era of simple
linear equations perhaps. I began to swim over the subtle flows to solutions. Chords,
logs, i’s, ratios and sets functioned
like functions in paperless thoughts.
Maths had the most beautiful art, the art of approaching things. It had ways
where I was the most confident. My intimacy with it anyway proved that it
explained everything, even physically. Numbers were my best friends; I have been to glaciers with them!
But everything was not at all rosy; there were
villains in my story. Fighting them was the toughest of all. I mean, why the
hell should I care about Wordsworth’s lovely spring that never occurred to me?
Revolutions, Movements and Kingdoms were like pages of fever. Literature hit me
hard. One of them was different: Science, who is still faithful to me. It
isolated our secrets dates.
“How much will you practice maths? You must make
time for other subjects also.” My mother told me as she looked at what I was
penning down while placing tea and biscuits on my table.
Practice,
I hated the word. Practice is done for a reason and I had no reason for Maths,
I just loved it. Filling pages with the colours of graphs, shades of
rationalisation and the hearty numerical solutions didn’t imply the so called Practice. It was funny playtime with the
closest thing that ever happened to me.
“This is not maths, Maa. I am doing Science.”
“Ok, sometimes it looks so similar.”
Well, it was not similar for me. For Science to
succeed, it had to climb the universally true staircase called Mathematics. It
is a total proof of the world of Science. In fact, it was a proof of everything
for me then. Four = Five or cow = fish, all these were like weapons for
challenges thrown to me. I blended all elements of destiny by figures from zero
to nine. I measured eternity in my age of teen. I was at the top. I was in
love.
------------
“Bang bang...! Wake up or you’ll be late again.”
Someone thumped my door and growled aloud to break one of the softest of many
mornings I used to grandly sleep out on the cosy bed of my hostel room.
Friend’s you know, so obedient they are in following your orders for some classified
brutal things like waking you up in the morning. More often, I peacefully
denied myself to accomplish the expected task.
By grace of God or by some inherent numerical
skills, I somehow figured in the list of fellows who could step into our state
Engineering College for study: my
father’s dream. Though I had no idea what would I do after being an
engineer, I was happy. Settlement of four years, I thought was enough for me to
figure out what future had in store for me. I was confident in all points of
life till then. Numbers and measurements have always helped me, they were my
silent strengths. But I strayed.
Overconfidence, I suppose will be the best word to
describe my deviating ways to a future I had never imagined. A future destined
for a struggle in every step! A future where the doom breathes past every now
and then! I know some has had seen worse, but mine was not supposed to be like
this. And my love, Maths, I don’t know how I lost you. I was not faithful, I
know that. Actually I was always searching for you in the various tastes I
developed in methods that don’t work with you. You didn’t seem to have any
rational answers to them either.
The thing that happens to most of the guys who
come to engineering colleges, especially those living in the college hostels is
something that can leave mathematics clueless. Well, someone like me whose
prime starting idea of being an engineer was to stop the blabbering mouths of kith
and kin from further comparing my dazzling past with the present vices was the
most suitable victim. Young boarders like us tend to develop immeasurable
nocturnal habits. We did what we never did before. Ate, drank and slept like
kings. Attending classes was the last thing we thought about.
Lady love, from the view of my short span experiences
with a few of them is beyond trajectory and projection. Mathematically
speaking, it’s an undefined function that can uproot your function from the
algebraic origin of where you belong, to the infinity of emotional crap.
Numbers have no clues to it. It demands those which your calculations reject.
So, with all these theories of my pitiful old love, what I always did was I
returned each and every time. All my relationships lasted for countable days,
sometimes months but never in years. No offence to the ones called real lovers,
sorry to say, but you’ve already sloped away too far.
It’s the worst phase where human emotions and all
the colours of life which you never experienced before suddenly appear and that
too in a stage when you need to keep them aside. Such situations lead you to make
mistakes that you normally won’t do. In the case of academics during my time in
Engineering, I suffered with that. Parties even during exams, being the
egoistic bad hero to faculties against the low figures on my mark sheets,
cultural dreams during high times of paperwork and many other momentary flash
points were the description of the sick me.
It was the time when I really needed my Maths
back. I missed the rational thinking and the logic it offered to me before. I
missed the ultimate plan! Frustrations heaped a pile over my head yielding
nothing but miscalculations of life. I was left jobless (still the same) to sit
and stare bewildered beings of the past, race past me to glory. I remembered my
day in school when I failed in Maths in class V. The teacher slashed me on my
butt and growled, “If you don’t practice, it will happen again.”
That was the point! That was the word, Practice! This hateful word was what I
once followed with love. It came in various forms. I just needed to catch the
actual emotions to do it. It wouldn’t be incorrect if I say Mathematics did
break my heart at that co-ordinate of maxima. But I was equally to be blamed. I
didn't maintain what my only true relationship demanded and that was some time
of closeness like I gave it before.
Anyways, I now think I have started trying for a
revival, an attempt of pulling my curve back to its domain, for a proof that my
point of extrema was an inflection in disguise, a final test for my love.
And few months back when a little one of the
Matric aspirants from my place happened to chat me online, he asked, “Dada, how
can I score a 100?” Though I still hated the word, but this time I meant it.
“PRACTICE.”
