Circles

by Meghana Chandrashekhar

[box]Bhayānakam | A student weak at Math, a professor who might be crossing the line, and a row of tamarind trees on a college campus – the perfect setting for Bhayānakam (Horror), don’t you think? Meghana Chandrashekhar pens a story.[/box]

My college, situated in the outskirts of the city, is well known for its huge campus stretching across many acres of land. The best part is the different kinds of trees spread across the campus. I especially like the line of tamarind trees just behind Block C. Whenever I think of Block C, the image of MD drawing a perfect circle on the blackboard in classroom C-22 comes to my mind.

It is said that over the past year, MD had started behaving very strangely. He would walk out of class looking very scared and had even demanded a different staff room from the management and when they did not agree, he had quit the job.  A few days ago, he was found dead in his house. It seems he had locked his room up from inside. Rumours suggest that he committed suicide because of the various allegations and court cases he was involved in.

I still remember the first time I saw him – the first class of my first day in engineering was MD’s. I was very excited but the excitement was short lived, for I couldn’t get any sense of what he was saying and moreover, it was mathematics – the one subject I hated and had hoped I was done with in school and pre-University College. All I heard was planes, angles and lines. Concentration is not one of my strengths. Soon, my mind happily wandered and I was imagining what would happen after four years.

My daydreaming was interrupted by the girl sitting next to me. She nudged me and started scribbling in the last page of her book.

Joined Late? First Class???

Yes.  I wrote in my book while pretending to take down notes.

U re lucky!!! U missed 3 of his classes.

Why?

Our seniors call him MAD DOG!

MD moved away from the blackboard, took a metal sphere and rotated it.

“If you see, the world is full of circles; the earth is also…”

His bald head is also a circle. I wrote in my book.

She giggled.

“Hey you green top, get up.” The two of us looked up to see MD looking in our direction.
“Why you are laughing? Is this a movie?”

“Sir, but…”

“Get out of the class.”

“Sir”

“I said OUT!”

“A circle consists of …” he continued. I felt bad for that girl. She had to leave because of me.

Soon, a month was over and it was no secret that I was the only one in the class of 35 who had not been barked at or sent outside the class. My friends told me that my turn would come soon, but it never did.

After the internal test in the first month, he told us to come and collect our papers in his staff room, and as the Head of Department of Mathematics, he had a separate room in the ground floor of block C.

“Your sheet is here,” he said, handing over my paper. His hand brushed against mine. I thought it was accidental.

“Thanks, Sir”

“I have given you 25, but you have not earned it.”

“Sir?”

“You are very weak in Maths.” He paused.

“Join my tuitions; otherwise you will fail in the externals,” he said, in a low but stern voice. He was right. I could have in no way earned those marks. I had only attempted three questions.
Everyone asked me how I got full marks in a subject I hated and wasn’t good at. The answer that everyone assumed was that MD was a little partial towards me and I was the only privileged student from my college who was about to attend private tuitions at his place.

On the first day I went to MD’s house, he was half an hour late. There were seven of us, and the other students told me that MD was always late for class. We waited for him in his house. I saw his wife pouring coffee into glasses in the kitchen.

“Coffee,” said a small boy who held a stainless steel glass in front of me.

I took the glass from his hand and ruffled his hair. He smiled at me and ran away to the kitchen to get another glass. I still remember how great it tasted; it’s sad that I can’t have it now. I was looking around the house. There was a room right next to the kitchen. The entire house was well lit but that room was dark. My first thought was that it would be MD’s.

I was right. MD came back while I was helping his son with his Science homework. He went straight into that room and returned with a textbook and told us rather politely to go to the terrace. He then told us to start solving problems from page 89 in the textbook.

It was said that the students for the private tuitions were handpicked by MD from the hundreds of applications he received from various colleges every year. He didn’t charge fees. He tried his best to make the subject as interesting as possible. Despite his best efforts, though, my hatred for mathematics remained, and I continued to be as bad at it as ever. His son was my only motivation to go to his house. I loved helping him out with his homework and talking with him till MD came.

The huge terrace in MD’s house was customised for tuitions. There were four rows of chairs and a black board. The fourth row had only one chair, and that was the one I would sit on for all classes. Sometimes, MD would stand very close to me and stare at my book. It would get very uncomfortable. I would feel his breath on my hand. He was my professor but there was something wrong about this man. I always avoided this argument in my head; I tried to believe he was just trying to make me better at mathematics and nothing else.

It was about three months since I had started attending tuitions that I received a message from MD that the class scheduled for Thursday was to be on Friday instead. My college internals had been scheduled during that period. I did not bother checking on it with the other students on the changed timing; I thought it was done for me to concentrate on the two internal tests on Friday.

I was 15 minutes early that day. There was no one on the terrace, so I went down to the house to check if anyone was inside. I couldn’t see anyone in the house, so I went to MD’s room; he was sitting on a rocking chair. My first instinct was to run from that place, but I saw him get up.

“Why did you come so early? The class is at 7.30 today, I mentioned it in the message.”

“No Sir, you said 7 pm.”

I took the phone from my pocket and began checking the message when I saw him moving towards me. I believed that he was coming towards the switchboard on the wall behind me. After a few seconds, I realised that he had cornered me against the very same wall. I had my back against the wall and his hand was by my side. Before I could react, he shut the door and slowly locked it.

The creaking sound of the lock made me shiver. I knew something bad was about to happen to me, and it did. I tried to run away from him, and he pushed me down with great force; my head hit the steel rod of his cot, and I slowly lost consciousness as I felt the warmth of my own blood oozing out of my head. Later, I realised that he had buried me in a deserted area in the college campus.

Now on to the mystery surrounding MD’s death: I was there with him that day. He was sitting on that same rocking chair all alone and I was leaning on the same wall. He was lost in his thoughts, and didn’t even notice me playing with the light, switching it on and off to get some attention. He went out and came back with a torch and sat on the chair again.

I went near him and whispered,

“Mmmmmmmmmm”

And then,

“Dddddddddddddd”

“Sir…” I said, floating above his head.

I saw beads of sweat forming on his forehead. His right hand, which held the torch, was shivering. He tried to say something.

“Wh… h… ooo”

“Sir, it’s me,” I said, and shut the door from inside and switched the light off.

He tried to get up but I pushed him on to the chair again.

“So.. ooo … rry”

He looked terribly scared, and made a desperate attempt at switching the torch on. Guilt took over him, and that’s when he finally saw me. He called my name and apologised, but it was too late.  I took a textbook from the table and tore it apart and flung a few pages around, as if for special effects. I could hear his heart thumping loudly, and then I saw his eyes close. They never opened again, no matter what I did. After that I went through the door to one of the tamarind trees in my college.

Initially I’d thought I would just trouble him; I used to follow him wherever he went, playing with the spheres in his room, sometimes juggling with them or throwing them in his direction. They always missed his head. I never thought he would die if he saw me. I should have guessed it.

Even after I died, I tried learning mathematics. Those pages from MD’s book didn’t help, but what do I see next to you? Is that a math textbook?

Meghana Chandrashekhar has a degree in Engineering and works with an IT firm in Bangalore. She is an avid blogger, fussy foodie, pampered sister and an expert procrastinator. She is instantly attracted to people whose vocabulary is better than hers. She dreams of writing dialogues for her favourite movie stars and also aims at writing a psychological thriller. Meghana attended the Bangalore Writers Workshop, an interactive method of bringing a group of writers together and allowing them to study the craft of writing while receiving constructive feedback on their own work. More details are available at http://bangalorewriters.com/

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