The Tribulation Today
It was an uplifting evening on Sunday. So soon as my grandmother shut the door, proceeding downstairs for her evening stroll, my younger brother and I worked apace in preparing sandwiches for dinner: a simple matter of pizza-pasta sauce applied to one side of one slice, seasoning, and cheese slices; and toasting them on the pan with salted butter. Before my grandmother returned, we had finished with our meal, with doing the dishes, and with cleaning up the kitchen countertop. Dad was in his room, and he wanted only one of the triangles into which we had cut the toasted sandwiches, leaving fifteen to the two of us. My grandmother prefers not to eat anything for dinner.
After half an hour or so, I began to feel some soreness in my throat. I realized that my body had begun secreting an excess of mucous. The subtly changing weather had begun to work its effect on me; or, perhaps, it was a reaction to my inadvertent inhalation of trace amounts of gaseous pesticide being released in our society. Sunday evenings are, incontestably, the worst occasions to develop a cold, for one has to report either for drudgery the next morning at office or for sitting as an unreactive sculpture for lectures at college. In the interests of accuracy, I add that it is I who sits like an unreactive sculpture without exception. I feel disinclined to volunteer in answering questions in class. I am not alone in this regard, but others are more prepared to stray from this custom.
I retired for the night at 09:30 P.M. I had consciously chosen to absent myself from the first lecture, and slept until 05:42 A.M. yesterday morning instead of the usual 05:15 A.M. The soreness of throat endured until my hour of rising. I boiled milk for my morning coffee; and having consumed it, the soreness of my throat began to subside, eventually into nothingness. It has less to do with the throat itself and more to do with the wayward ways of the stuck mucous.
Sometime after 09:10 A.M. when our third lecture commenced, the mucous, hitherto a little cooperative, began murmuring in a strain of liquifying disobedience. One trip to the taps and sneezing out the rebellious element sufficed to keep it in check. But, after I returned home, the mucous broke out into cascading mutiny. I had frequently to visit the taps at home.
I retired for the night at 08:30 P.M. wishing to sleep longer, but sleep fully embraced me at about 09:00. I rose at 05:15 A.M. today. It was no premonition of worse things to come, but merely a vague disinclination, that made me resolve not to attend college today. Nevertheless, I had to go to college to submit my admission form for the second year. I have been a complete stranger to such custom; I thought it was common for students to secure admission and stay on that secure footing until graduation. But here, with the conclusion of our first year, we were to fill our online admission form anew, pay the fees, and submit a hard copy of the fee receipt and admission form, printed on legal paper, to the administrative office. Dad found it strange that we were required to do so, given that the college itself generated a fee receipt after we paid online from the comforts of home.
My penchant for procrastination alone is to blame for my ordeal today. I could have completed these formalities last week and enjoyed today a sedentary peace; but I chose to wait until today, the deadline. And so, notwithstanding the somewhat feebling effect that my cold has had on me, I bit the bullet and rode to college, starting from home at 09:27 P.M.
Nor was it uniformly breezy to ride all the way to college. It is a ride through the University Road (my college is incidentally affiliated to Pune University), then a right turn and through the great length of Senapati Bapat Road, and then a right for Law College Road. Yes, the final stretch of road is named after my college — ILS Law College, Pune — which was established in 1924 and has consistently been among the most prestigious law schools over decades. At risk of being accused of penning a commercial, I state that my college is blessed with first-rate professors, most of them alumni themselves. Dad explained to me last year that the legal profession evolved precisely in this fashion; students became practitioners and applied for teaching positions to raise the next generation of lawyers. As I understand it, the commonness with which this is found in the legal field does not reflect in most other fields.
The University Road, predictably, witnessed vehicles coming to a standstill. To date I have not quite been able to figure out the reason; perhaps it is so because the right turn to Senapati Bapat Road is blocked because of the vehicles running in the opposite direction on the opposite lane. But some distance before the right turn, one encounters a traffic signal, situated at the ‘University Circle’ (an intersection of roads, on one side of which stands the gate to Pune University). Long before we could arrive close to the signal had the traffic come to a standstill; and it was taking unusually long for the traffic to clear. The early morning hours these days herald the proximity of winter, but the later hours feature oppressive heat. A mist of cold has begun to settle on Pune, but it has yet to assume the intensity of its later months. The bright sun and the fumes from the waiting vehicles mingled into a furnace and made me sweat like a pig!
And thus it came to pass that a ride which would last about eighteen minutes if one were to start from my home at 06:55 A.M. endured for a little upwards of forty minutes. Fortunately, once the right turn was taken, the ride through Senapati Bapat Road proved to be much easier, for the three signals were consistently green, which is a rare occurrence. The breeze seemed almost magical in making the sweat go away.
Upon entering the salubrious campus of my college, I reacted with dispassion to the mildly long queue in the Saraswati Building. Of course, I ought not to have expected a mere trickle; students were prepared to rush out from lecture halls to submit their forms which the college said would be an affair from 10:00 A.M. to 01:00 P.M. only. Few were prepared to wait until 11:38 A.M. when the final lecture concluded and then proceed to the office. But I was pleasantly surprised at the swiftness with which things proceeded. I was done in about forty minutes. This contrasts favourably with my admission last year, which took me eight hours — nine, if one included my nonchalant ride back home to have lunch and return to college to complete the process. The professors who had been tasked with document verification last year had been amazed that, unlike other prospective students, I had not chosen to wait in the campus for an hour during which the authorities broke for lunch.
I returned home at 11:30 A.M. I experienced a stomach ache, but it resolved itself after I had lunch. The symptoms of my cold seemed to worsen, as my head began aching, feeling heavy. At 01:00 P.M. I settled into an hour-long nap, hoping that the headache would wane. It was of no avail. But sometime after 04:00 P.M., the headache began waning apace. Unable to focus on anything else for too long, I resolved to write this post.
I have now had my afternoon tea, and I look forward to preparing Hot and Sour Soup as part of dinner, some packets of which my younger brother helpfully thought fit to purchase. About ten days ago, he had himself been suffering from cold; but, unusually for him, he recovered quickly, enough to cheerily consume a half-litre bottle of chilled, sugar-free Pepsi today. Customarily, it would be split even between the two of us. Although I quite like that drink myself, I consciously chose not to partake of it today, and encouraged him to finish that bottle. He decided not to opt for consuming half of it in the afternoon and the other half at night, and finished the whole of it over the course of forty five minutes. I did not lament my inability to share in it.
I hope I have sufficient vigour tomorrow to attend college. For, the requirement of maintaining 75% attendance, the bane of every student, fetters me, too, checking my lately strong urge for sabbaticals. The semester has only begun, and perhaps an additional day off is affordable; but I do not want to much depend on other students for notes.
