A confident lie

School memories have a way of flashing back. I was never really a big fan of school, but I think some days were better than others. Like the day we counted 27 bikes on the road. Here’s what happened:

There was this class once a week called SUPW where you painted and sewed and sketched. For me, being artistically challenged, it was a good distraction that helped me take my mind away from Math, Science and EVS. Mrs. Ratna Patwardan took the class from the time I was in Class 1 till the day I left school in class 10. Only recently, I went back to visit my alma mater. She still teaches SUPW to this day. This was a teacher who had a great sense of humour and a way with handling pesky brats (and the girls too, but more on that some other day).

One day in class 4, Jesu and I sat in the last bench with the window behind us. It was SUPW class, and the Mrs. Ratna had stepped out of the class briefly. The two of stopped our work mid-way (painting a piper, maybe) and started looking outside the window and talking. A minute went by, and the teacher came into the class. And she was not very pleased to see Jesu and me gazing at nature (well, peak hour traffic on Bellary road is about as close to Nature as you can get to in Bangalore). We got our punishment: for the next 10 minutes, we were to count the number of cars, buses, bikes, cycles and birds that we could see from outside the window and go back and report the numbers to her.

I felt smug and self-assured looking out of the window. The rest of the class was painting away. I told Jesu, “We’ll just go and tell her some random numbers. She won’t know it.” I mean, I had read the story where Birbal confidently says that there are one thousand four hundred and thirty three crows in the city.

10 minutes went by in mindless chatting; and then we were summoned to the teacher’s desk.

“So, how many crows did you see?”

“17.”

“Bikes?”

“27. 5 red ones.”

“Maruti cars?”

“11.”

“Buses?”

“6.”

“How many bees did you see?”

I looked confused, and I could see from the corner of my eye, that Jesu was just as perplexed.

“I said “How many bees did you see?””, she said trying to look annoyed. I could see this woman was having fun.

“None, Maam.”

“None?”

“Yes. We didn’t see even one.”

She stood up from her chair, and told us to follow her to the window at the back of the class. The other kids stopped painting and became the audience. We walked to the window.

“So, are you sure that you didn’t see even a single bee.”

I’m a believer in confidence. “Yes, Maam. Not even one.”

And she pointed at the bee hive hanging from the ceiling of the building across the road.