Writing a Board Exam

As teeny fifth graders, my friends and I had observed pimpled, gawky teenagers going to write their board exams. Their face full of dread, their hands full of books and their house full of panic. Year after year lakhs of children have had the joy of learning what shifting cultivation is called in Brazil (Roca, by the way, if you didn't know that what even have you studied? education has failed you). 

And like a movie, where a page flips rapidly to segue into the protagonist's adult life, we find ourselves in tenth grade. The night before our first board exam was panic and excitement. My parents hovered around double-checking and triple-checking hall tickets and uniforms and shoes and pencils and other necessary items. Our class group was abuzz with nervous chatter and my stomach felt like competing with KBR gardens over who could amass the most butterflies. The morning of the board exam was the most determined I had felt in my life. Like the culmination of so many things and the start of so many more. 

To help ease my jitters, my father and I started earlier than usual for school so that we could listen to a couple songs. You'd be surprised how much a little music can do for your nerves. Britney Spears really takes it out of you.

At school we all sat on the sidelines of the school hallway, shaking with excitement. We bid adieu to our English teacher and set off on the one-hour journey to our exam centre. Having each other for company makes us feel less alone in our fears and take life a little less seriously. It could also just be us having false superiority complexes by flexing random pieces of information we learnt, but it helps nevertheless.

We got off our school van and oh, what a feeling it was. Matlab Survivor would have come and personally performed "Eye of the Tiger" for us.

It was the war scene of a historic movie, where I walk off into the exam centre, head held up high, pen in hand, as I climb off my royal steed that is the school's Tata Winger. My comrades beside me.

We were lucky, most of us were in the same exam hall. Each bell sent a shiver of anticipation down my spine. I watched as the question papers were opened, the answer sheets distributed and the invigilator announced a final "Good Luck!". My head was a little shaky for the first few minutes, but once I read the question paper faith was restored. Our teachers had prepared us well and the exam went off satisfactorily. After the exam, we shuffled out of the classroom to a school full of deafening noise and paper discussions. We rushed out and got in the van, where it finally hit us. We had written a board exam!