Tenth Grade

This is it—there’s no going back now. Tenth grade starts tomorrow. The Board year. The year of insurmountable pressure. The year when uncles and aunties will ask you nothing but padhai kaisi chal rahi hai? / Boards ki taiyaari thik hai na? at a freaking birthday party and you’ll force out a smile, saying haan ji, sab thik hai. Then they’ll begin that same lifeless story about how their son scored some good numbers in his tenth boards, then cracked NTSE, then scored well in a dozen other competitive exams, then topped in twelfth boards, then cracked JEE and blah blah blah. God, this is a fucking party—let me BREATHE! And you’ll wish you hadn’t given in to your mum’s chal beta kitna padhegi and just stayed at home, reading the fuck out of your stupid textbooks. 

But none of it yet. Tenth grade starts tomorrow, after all. I have a couple of hours between today and tomorrow. Hopefully, I won’t dream of school tonight. Last night I had this extremely weird dream in which I was running through the laburnum trees at school (funny, we don’t HAVE laburnum trees at my school) when I looked up and saw through the golden canopy two guys making out in a flying motorcycle. Then the dream-me grabbed a girl standing on the pavement and we ran into a closet in the school building and just hid there for no reason. And later I was this really sparkly peacock (WHYYY) on top of a human pyramid and the teachers were taking pictures but my picture apparently came out terribly so the teacher deleted it and told me to get off and give up, but the vice-principal (who was a demon in the dream) smiled creepily at me and showed me a perfect picture. What is that dream? Why do I even dream of school during holidays?! God.

My point is, I’m chaotic and impulsive and all over the place… kind of like an ivy creeper. I don’t think I can be a rose bush with a clipped foliage, a topiary marvel for display. I’m really unhinged and disorganised. If you give me a week to colour Nemo, I’ll colour everything on the very first day, except for the eyes, which I will swiftly scribble when the person before me submits their work. Every person who journals, who schedules their events on Google Calendar, who can follow their timetable—mad respect for you, my dude. You make me feel like you’ve got your entire life planned out, while I’m just here mindlessly wondering what to do next while untangling my hair. Whenever I look at you, I discreetly sweep my latest missed deadlines under the rug. Oh, I’m also super extra and irrelevant (like rn, why are you even reading this?) so a definitive year like this, which I can easily mess up with a single wrong step, feels very daunting. It’s almost like playing minesweeper when you have no idea how you play it. One wrong step, and BOOM, game over. The fact that I usually score good marks makes it worse, honestly, what if my usual technique doesn’t work? How fast will I adapt? What if people ask me how much I want to score? What if I don’t study hard enough? What if I don’t realise my mistakes? and endless more untranslatable fears.

They say everything’s funny as long as it happens to someone else. They don’t lie. Till last year, it was fine: some aunty nagging some poor tenth grade girl at a birthday was just a source of wry amusement, something to look at when SRK’s moves on the TV screen got too cliché. But now, it’s all too real: it’s happening to me, after all. With my shoddy photo editing skills, I paste my face unto her body and replay that moment, her voice preaching about the wonderfully distracting nature of boys and how it is “tempting at this age but it is best to stay away from them”. I hold in my laughter, she should probably have mentioned girls too. But I keep my mouth shut. Because, Golden Rule when dealing with annoying adults you can’t snipe at: keep your mouth shut.

But okay. This year will be beyond that. When you overlook the outrageous number of pages each chapter takes up, you can actually kind of appreciate the content. There are so many cool things in Science this year. Hopefully Physics is more conceptual and less formulae now. Hopefully Hindi is still Hindi and doesn’t do unnecessary crossovers with Sanskrit and Urdu. Hopefully they’ll have fewer biographies in English. When it slips from your mind that you’re studying for Boards, you’ll actually have fun learning whatever your eternally-pissed-off Biology teacher teaches you. Hopefully you don’t binge Jimmy Kimmel during Political Science lectures. Hopefully, you study something this year and manage (a semblance of) balance between everything.

Hopefully you’ll be able to meet your friends without feeling guilty. Hopefully you’ll not have your books open all the time so you don’t feel bad about not studying. Hopefully you’ll still be able to have fun with your family. Hopefully you’ll still enjoy the 15th year of your life. Hopefully you’ll learn fantastic new things, both academic and otherwise. Hopefully, you’ll see hope beyond this seemingly unnerving situation. And hopefully, you’ll score better than the son of that aunty at the party so you can rub it in their faces later. 

With hope and optimism for a new academic year (starting tomorrow),

ki <3

Photo by Nataliya Vaitkevich from Pexels