Mumbling #6

I remember waking up slightly breathless from a dream a few months back. I would have fancied it happening in the over-dramatic Bollywood style, complete with a scream and an appealing heaving chest, then frailly scampering for a glass of water. It was anything but that. The next few moments were spent in figuring out what the hell the dream was about which came to me in bits and pieces.

I was back in school, standing in this stadium sized chemistry lab and my Chemistry teacher, her head three times larger than the rest of her body, was bending over and furiously asking me questions in a language I didn’t understand. Meanwhile, rest of the kids kept sniggering at me. Flicking back her Snape-like hair, she smirked and said something rude and I threw the shit in the test tube in her face and ran. I ran for my life.

So this morning I had a revelation of sorts. I think I have realised what I have feared the most. It is the fear of not knowing and then being put to test. Like how S says she sometimes feels when she’s in her Political Science class and everyone else except her has read the fucking paper. It’s that feeling when we don’t know the answer to a question and we avoid making any eye contact with the teacher hoping that she would just look through us and ask that twit sitting in the front row. Almost all of us have felt the same one time or another, mostly in school. I’d like to think I have grown out of it but on some days it haunts me still. The feeling of being constantly accountable.