perry's blog

the adventures of rajappan

This was a story I wrote in 2021 for a college magazine. The story was published in the 2022 edition of the magazine, but less than 10 copies of the magazine were printed to keep the costs low. The university rules manadates the college publish an annual college magazine run by the college union, but does not mention anywhere the number of copies to be printed.

Rajappan sat sulking at the bench in the corner. It was his usual spot, and he had a bird’s eye view of much of the campus from the window. He looked at his watch. He was hungry. He had to wait for thirty minutes for the lunch break. Time is relative, it was said. But lunchtime was largely an exception. He looked at the clouds through the window. They were grey and it would rain very soon. He hoped the downpour would flood the college. The water would reach the second floor and his bench would carry him through the water like a low-budget boat. He would row the bench with his Java record book all the way to his home in Peroorkada, while the others drowned. He was an optimist even during trying times.

He looked at his watch again. Forty-five seconds had passed. Cool, he thought, and proceeded to sulk further. Meanwhile, the teacher – or the assistant professor, as she liked to be called – was engaged in a monotonous debate on the advantages of OOP over POP. Rajappan hoped the assistant professor would be popped out of the college like data being deleted from a stack and disappear forever. He smiled quietly, and the bell rang.

The assistant professor went out, and Rajappan soon went to the washroom to wash his hands. He came back to his class, took out his lunchbox from the bag and ate his lunch. There were no potatoes in his stainless steel lunchbox as he had hoped. His household confirmed to patriarchy like an ISO standard. His mother was programmed to feel it her duty to make his lunch, even though she was perfectly aware he was old enough to cook his food. So he did not complain about his food. He gobbled his lunch in twenty minutes and went back to the washroom. He walked back to the class and took out his phone from his pocket on the way. Students were, according to the rule book stored safely in a very old box hidden somewhere in the college premises, supposed to turn off their mobile phones while in college. Naturally, it was not enforced after the Pandemic That Must Not Be Named. He had a message from his staff advisor Spuff, sent two minutes before the lunch break.

“Roll no 1,3,7,24,37 meet me in staff room”, the first message said. Spuff religiously believed that commas should not be followed by spaces under any circumstances.

“Visit before lunch break..”, said another message. The two dots at the end were his trademark sign-off, and Rajappan knew something was fishy. His roll number was on the list, and he shot off to the Department of Silicon Sorcery. He reached the door and looked around. His advisor Spuff was sitting on a corner. He went in straight to him.

“Good afternoon”, Spuff said. “What brings you here?”

“I saw your message. My roll number was in the list.”

Rajappan was allergic to dust and all forms of authority. It was, therefore, not very easy to conceal his contempt towards his advisor, and towards the HOD who was sitting right next to the former and yawning.

“Oh, that! Talk to Suni sir.”

Suni was the sleep-deprived HOD of the Silicon department. Spuff suddenly began to stare intensely at Suni. Spuff believed that if you stare at a person long enough in their eyes, the person will look back. Suni was at the moment doing something on his laptop. He looked up, glanced at Rajappan, and then resumed working. “Sir, this is Rajappan from S3”, Spuff began. Suni typed something in his laptop. Spuff continued, “their internals were published today, and his marks were – what’s the word – bad.”

Rajappan was not yet used to the advisor’s quirks and vocabulary, or to be precise his profound lack of the latter. He looked at Suni. Suni rotated his laptop so that it faced Rajappan. Rajappan looked at the screen. The screen blinded his eyes. Suni insists on setting his display at 100% brightness while Rajappan uses his phone at the minimum brightness possible. His iris slowly adjusted to the LED backlight, and Rajappan understood he was staring at his internal marks on some spreadsheet. It was said that every student needed at least 35 marks out of 50 to be able to write the exam. It was with a great deal of annoyance that Rajappan found out his teachers had given special attention to cap his marks at 29 for all subjects. Now it struck him. He was screwed.

“You have very low marks”, Spuff grumbled, just in case it was not clear. “Yes, sir”, Rajappan said, without looking at his advisor.

“Would you like me to phone your parents and tell them your marks?”, Suni suggested. It was his new year resolution to make as many students suffer as possible, and being an HOD, he had found it was not a very difficult task at all.

“No, sir.”

“Then, you will do as I say. For each course you failed, the teacher shall give you twenty questions which you shall answer and submit as an assignment. If, and only if, you attend all the questions without fail, they will grant you five marks. Do you understand?”

Under normal circumstances, Rajappan would have considered scenarios he faced from all sides and would have taken into account the point of views of everyone involved through civilised decisions before coming to a conclusion. Unfortunately, the current circumstances did not qualify as normal. “Eat slugs, you pumpkin faced monster”, Rajappan wanted to tell Suni. This was, the reader must have guessed, not exactly what he wanted to say. The actual adjectives he used in his mind to describe the sleep-deprived HOD was the kind of words that would lead your humble chronicler to big trouble. And your humble chronicler would not like that, and thus your humble chronicler has shown some restraint to publish his remarks verbatim. “Yes, sir”, said Rajappan.

“And sir, he has poor attendance”, Spuff said to Suni, just as Rajappan turned to leave the room. “That was not my fault”, Rajappan retorted. Credit must be given where it is due. “I would not have missed the bus every week if you had posted the bus timing before the bus passed by my stop”, he said as polite as he can to Spuff. His reply was unexpected. Spuff was at a loss for words. He did not speak.

“You can’t put the blame on your advisor every time you commit some stupid mistake”, the HOD blurted. Suni had meant to say something else, but these words came from his mouth like a recorded message you hear from the answering machine in call centres with overworked employees. He pondered over this, thought it funny and opened his mouth to laugh loudly, but suddenly realised this is not the best time to do so and turned his laugh into a yawn, and then instantly it struck him a yawn was not the kind of thing an important person like him would do in front of a student, and somehow converted the yawn into a polite cough. He regretted that the cough was a wee bit too polite and went into a philosophical meditation to communicate with his inner self. In fact, he thought, a cough is a natural response to combat outside particles and there is no need to be apologetic about a cough. He suddenly forgot what he was thinking and woke up and saw Rajappan. All that time Suni had his mask conveniently dropped to his chin, protecting it from insects and the like which would negatively affect his beard’s health. As a result, Rajappan could clearly see Suni’s face. Rajappan was staring at his face. Suni looked stupid. Rajappan guessed incorrectly that Suni was acting stupid to annoy him. In fact, the HOD of the silicon department was pretending to be stupid to hide the fact that he was genuinely stupid and did not have any idea as to what was going on in his head.

“You can leave now”, Suni said suddenly and wondered why he said that, and then continued anyway, “I will send the questions on the Group”. The Group was the holy source of information through which the staff informed the bus timings twenty minutes after the bus reached college, ordered students to “pay the regn fee tdy itself..”, told students to “join now” during online classes, and to invite the students to important webinars two days after they have commenced. Rajappan left the room and walked back towards his class. He thought on the way out that Spuff was smirking at him. Maybe it was just his imagination.

Rajappan climbed the stairs and reached his class. It was empty. He wondered where everyone went. There was a faint sound not too far away and he found it oddly familiar. He went out of his class and walked down the stairs to the entrance of the building. He saw something big and yellow. Ah, it was the bus honking, he realised. That was why it sounded familiar. The bus began to move, gaining momentum slowly and Rajappan wondered where it was going in the afternoon, when the sun was bright like roast beef. To his horror, he saw the bus was packed with students, some of whom were in his class. Of course, being an undergraduate engineering student his immediate reflex action was to run to the store to buy an A4 paper, write a complaint to the principal regarding the early departure of the college bus, get it signed by his advisor, the HOD, the three security guards, the gardener, the woman who runs the canteen and of course the owner of the nearby stationery shop. But Rajappan prevented his spinal cord, which deals with such reflex actions, from making him run to buy an A4 sheet. He had a better idea. He took out his phone. He would call the principal directly and tell her exactly what he thought about his advisor, the HOD and the college in general. He searched for the principal’s number on the Group, and was shocked to see a message from his advisor a minute ago on the Group. It said the classes will end by 1:40 PM due to a cyclone in the Arabian Sea, and the buses will depart ten minutes later. It also said “sry” for the inconvenience it may have caused to anyone who uses the excellent bus service provided by the charitable institution.

Rajappan took a deep breath. The situation was, as Spuff would say, bad. He hissed a few nouns and adjectives out loud, which scored rather high on the global filthiness index. Again, your humble chronicler, who takes pleasure in annoying the reader by constantly referring to themself as the humble chronicler, has censored the nouns and adjectives to avoid getting this wonderful piece of fiction rejected, even though it is obvious by now that the editorial board does not read the articles before publishing them. Rajappan walked slowly to the gate, and suddenly it started to rain heavily. The roads began to flood and eventually he drowned to death on the way home. Later that day, at 11:57 PM, a staff in the Group announced that “tmrw” will be a holiday for the institution.

the end

Rajappan was born a cishet male and is quite comfortable being himself everywhere, except perhaps the silicon department staff room. But unlike Rajappan, not everyone has the privilege to be themselves freely. Sometimes, other people decide who should have that freedom. In a patriarchal world that does not recognise their identities or lived realities, transpeople and people of nonbinary genders often have to prove to strangers that they are “valid” and deserve to exist. In India, reversing decades of hard-fought rights, a bill was introduced which takes away the right of transpeople and people of nonbinary genders to identify themselves. Among other things, the bill makes it harder to get a transgender id, criminalises people and NGOs that work with the trans community, and makes exercising constitutionally guaranteed rights even more difficult. The bill, which was brought without consulting the transgender community, was passed by the Parliament yesterday, ignoring two weeks of protests by people and elected members of parliament.

Please read more about the bill:

#Fiction