Read Online I Kissed A Girl In My Class by Abhilash Gaur - Free Book Online

Radhika, and she allowed her class the
shocking liberty of calling her by her first name. In fact, she
insisted on it. When the older teachers heard of it, they were
horrified, and pouted reprovingly. And since they turned against
her, it was clear that her stay at Sunrays was going to be
unpleasant and short. But she wasn’t bad as a teacher. In fact, she
was a very good teacher. She knew the subject well, was patient,
and did her best to clear doubts. She marked notebooks so
thoroughly that every page bore a lot of neat red handwriting.
    The new teacher
and her spellbound students soon formed a warm bond. She demolished
the old section lines the very first day, by ordering everyone to
sit in the order of their roll numbers. A nudge was all that was
needed. By the second day everybody knew everybody else, and the
class was as noisy and as full of friends as any other. But that
did not mean the old friendships were forgotten. Before the school
assembly and during the tiffin break, the students made sure to
spend time with those friends who had been assigned to the other
section.
    ***

15. An
Important Visit
    Neha always
greeted Manu warmly in the corridor, but he felt tongue-tied again
in her presence. He wondered whether he had any business talking to
her now that they were in different sections. He did not want her
to misunderstand him. He even shuddered at the thought that she
would UNDERSTAND him. “Can she guess, does she know?” he wondered
and wracked his mind for excuses to talk to her. Then, suddenly, an
excuse came his way.
    One Sunday in the
middle of the month some very important people visited the school.
They were the people who owned all the buildings and the grounds of
Sunrays School. And that was only one of their many businesses.
They had big hotels in the hills and near the sea, and they had
factories whose bread sat on breakfast tables from Shimla to
Chandigarh, and then right down to Delhi. Oh, they were rich
people, and they came in long German cars, for which common people
had only one word in those days—imported.
    They came early in
the morning, in the cool hours of late April and walked around the
school, peeping into dustbins and looking at Saturday’s last
chalk-written lessons on blackboards. One of their lackeys walked
at their heels, and so did the school principal while the teachers,
all turned out in their finest silks, stayed a respectful distance
behind. They were very upset to have been called away from home and
family at this early hour on a holiday, but you couldn’t have
guessed their thoughts from their smiles.
    The procession
moved up and down corridors, up and down staircases, all of which
had been cleaned and polished more than usual. From time to time,
the lackey bent his head deferentially and noted down what the VIPs
said. And after this long, significant stroll, they all came to the
forecourt where tea was waiting. The teachers, who were bored and
puzzled and tired, looked longingly at the gold-rimmed China cups
and the biscuits on platters, but the principal led them on to the
edge of the orchard that was one of the school’s two playing
fields. The sun felt hot now but the morning breeze was still cool
under the shade of the old mango trees. The troop paused there
while the school’s gardeners hurried up with watering cans and six
saplings—one each for the visitors. The VIPs, who lived abroad,
would “make the memory of their visit everlasting” by planting a
sapling each.
    They went in a
group from hole to hole, merely lowering a sapling into it while
the mali did all the pressing and patting before they sprayed a
little water from the can that had been decorated with ribbons.
They were healthy mango saplings with bright green leaves, and each
one came up to the tallest visitor’s knees. As soon as one was
planted, a T-shaped tag with the name of the dignitary who had
touched it was stuck beside it. One, two, three, four, five, six.
In all, it took about 15