My Report Card Said 'Distracted.' I Was Writing.
Under every desk, inside every dull lecture, a notebook was becoming me.
Mrs. D'Souza wrote easily distracted on my report card the same month I finished my first novel. The novel was eleven pages long, it was set in our own school, and the principal was the vampire.
I want to be fair to Mrs. D'Souza. From where she stood, at the front of Class 7B with a stick of chalk and forty children marinating in the afternoon heat, I did look distracted. My eyes pointed at the blackboard while my soul was three floors down in the school basement, where my detective, a watchman named Bahadur with a lantern and no fear, was about to discover why the principal never attended morning assembly on sunny days.
The truth is I was not distracted. I was double-booked.
The system, and I say this with the pride of an engineer, was flawless. Two notebooks. On top, the geometry notebook, open to a page with enough triangles on it to survive a glance from any adult. Underneath, the real notebook, the brown-paper-covered one, where everything actually happened. My left arm lay across the seam of the two at an angle I had calibrated over months. Page turns were executed only when chalk was squeaking, because a teacher writing on a board is a teacher who is, briefly, somewhere else too. My friend Ronak, seated one row ahead with natural sightlines to the door, served as early warning. His fee was one samosa per week. He was worth two.
Geometry period was for the novel. History was for poems. I cannot explain this division except to say that something about dates made me want to rhyme. The Battle of Panipat has been responsible for more of my verse than any girl I ever met.
There is a whole tribe of us, the daydreaming kids who write, and we recognize each other decades later at parties by one shared credential: we all got the same report card. Restless. Inattentive. Does not apply himself. Head in the clouds. Nobody ever writes the accurate remark, which would be: applies himself ferociously, just not here.
The report card scene at home went as expected. My father read easily distracted out loud, twice, the second time slower, the way you reread a diagnosis. My mother asked, distracted by what? And I said nothing, because the honest answer was... a vampire, and I did not think honesty had a future in that room.
Then came March, and Mr. Mathur.
Mr. Mathur taught geometry and was, by the unanimous vote of every batch for twenty years, the strictest man alive. He had never been seen to smile. There was a theory he had once smiled in 1987 and a boy had fainted. His chalk never squeaked. This detail matters. My whole system was built on squeak.
He caught me mid-sentence. Not mid-class... mid-sentence, Bahadur was raising his lantern over the cellar stairs, and then a hand arrived from the daylight world above and lifted the brown notebook off my desk with the smooth, terrible ease of a crane removing a car.
Mr. Mathur did not shout. He did not read it aloud for the class to laugh at, which was the standard execution method of the era. He placed it inside his register, said, see me is what he did not even say, he said nothing at all, and continued teaching congruent triangles to a room in which I was now technically deceased.
I spent that week planning my future as a runaway. The notebook contained the novel, four poems, and, catastrophically, a limerick about a teacher whose name rhymed with far too many words. Expulsion felt possible... My mother finding out felt worse than expulsion.
On Friday he called me to the staff room, handed the notebook back without one word of speech, and returned to his tea. I did not open it until I was safely behind the water tank on the terrace at home, the way you open anything that might explode.
Red ink. Everywhere.
He had corrected it. Not punished, corrected. Spelling, grammar, punctuation, all eleven pages, with the same red pen that graded our theorems. I had spelled cemetery wrong eleven times and he had fixed it eleven times, with, I imagine, mounting despair.
In the margin of page seven: the watchman cannot hold the lantern and ring the bell at the same time from two different corridors. Check. He had found a plot hole.
The strictest man alive had read my vampire novel closely enough to find a plot hole.
And on the last page, beneath my melodramatic final line, in small red letters:
Distracted is the wrong word. Occupied. Stay occupied.
He never mentioned it again. Not once... not ever. He gave me detention twice that same term, both times deserved, because the vampire novel did not exempt me from geometry and he would have considered the suggestion offensive. That was the beauty of the man. The red ink was not a soft spot. It was a professional reviewing a colleague's early work.
I wish I could tell you I became a good student after that. I did not. I became a better hidden writer, which is its own education. But something had shifted that no report card could measure: an adult with no reason to lie had treated the thing under my desk as work. Real work, with rules, worth correcting. You can run on one sentence of that fuel for years. I ran on it for about thirty.
I never took a single writing class in all that time. It was only in my thirties that I finally signed up to learn the craft properly, and I sat in the first session grinning like an idiot, because the assignment felt exactly like the brown notebook, except legal, on top of the desk at last. Around the same time I read an essay on why safe poems lose, and I thought about the limerick I had been so sure would end my life, and how Mr. Mathur had corrected its meter.
Two years ago I wrote a poem about him, the chalk that never squeaked, the red ink, the tea. I entered it into a monthly poetry contest with my heart doing exactly what it did behind the water tank. It did not win... He would have found that appropriate, and also found two errors in it.
People sometimes ask writers where the ideas come from, expecting somewhere scenic. Mine came from boredom, from chalk dust, from the fourth period after lunch. A dull lecture is just a writing prompt with an attendance register attached. The tribe knows. Every dead afternoon of my childhood is a page somewhere.
Last year I found the report card in my mother's steel trunk, between my birth certificate and a wedding invitation from 1994. Easily distracted. C in geometry, which was generous. I got it framed, one plain black frame, and hung it above my desk, alone, because it does not need company.
And under the desk, where nobody can see it, out of a habit older than my handwriting, there is a second notebook.
The geometry stays on top.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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