Chapter 7: The Great Bottle Experiment
Draft chapter for It's Tough Being a Student
Parveen had not slept much that night, and for once the reason was not a horror movie or a late-night episode of Ball-Monsters.
It was a problem. Not a maths problem, those he was perfectly happy to ignore, but a real problem, the kind with gold cards attached to it.
How do you find a person with no name, no age, no height and no face? He had stared at the ceiling fan for three hours, counting its rotations, and somewhere around midnight, between the four-hundredth and four-hundred-and-first, the answer had descended on him like divine light.
'Honesty,' he thought. 'The most honest person she has ever met. So I don't need to search for a boy. I just need to find the one honest person in the school and that's him. Genius.'
He fell asleep smiling, and woke up still smiling, which his mother found so suspicious that she checked his forehead for fever.
...
He reached school so early that the guard was still opening the gate and gave him the look usually reserved for thieves and teachers' relatives. The cycle stand was empty. The corridors were empty. Even the basketball court looked like it hadn't woken up yet.
The classroom, however, was not empty.
"You're early," Tanya said, without looking up from her book. She sat on the last bench exactly where she had sat yesterday, as if the bench had been issued to her along with her admission form.
"I am a man of my word," Parveen said, dropping his bag on his seat with great dignity. "Unlike some people, I honour my side of the deal. I thought about it the whole night."
"The whole night," Tanya repeated flatly. "And?"
Parveen cleared his throat and drew himself up to his full five feet.
"I will leave my water bottle in the middle of the hallway. On it, a note with my name and my class, saying please return to Parveen, Class VIII. Whoever brings it back to me is honest. And the honest person is your boy. Simple."
Tanya finally closed her book. She looked at him for a long moment, the way a doctor looks at an X-ray that has just revealed something unexpected.
"That," she said, "is a bad idea."
"It is not."
"Returning a bottle only proves someone is honest. It doesn't prove he's him. Half the school could return it."
"Then half the school is a very good start," Parveen said. "If you have a better idea, I am all ears."
Silence.
Tanya opened her mouth. Closed it. Opened it again. Nothing came out, because she genuinely did not have a better idea. She had a chat history, a missing boy and a stolen packet of cards, and absolutely no plan.
'It is useless to argue with a monkey,' she thought, 'especially one who is the only monkey I have.'
"Fine," she said. "Do it."
...
The bottle was blue, dented on one side, and carried a faded sticker of Grey Souce's electric rat on the lid. Parveen tore a page from his notebook and wrote the note in his neatest handwriting.
THIS BELONGS TO PARVEEN, CLASS VIII. PLEASE RETURN IT TO HIM.
He stuck it on with a piece of tape, placed the bottle at the foot of the staircase landing where every student had to walk past, stepped back, and admired his work like a man who had just built a bridge.
"You wrote 'please' in capital letters," Tanya said behind him.
"It's called being polite."
"It's called shouting."
They went back to the classroom and sat in their seats just as the first students began trickling in, bags thumping, voices rising, the morning noise filling the room little by little. Parveen kept his eyes on the door like a hawk who had been told there was a mouse somewhere.
Minutes passed. Kavi arrived and started reading. Guru arrived and started complaining about the heat. Tanya went back to her book, apparently unbothered.
Then the door swung open, and the biggest liar Parveen had ever known walked in holding the bottle above his head like a trophy.
"Oi, Peenu! Look what I found lying outside!" Hero announced to the entire classroom. "Can you believe it? Some people have no sense of responsibility. I knew it was yours the moment I saw it. I recognised it from its face."
"From its face," Parveen said slowly.
"A man of my honesty cannot walk past a lost bottle," Hero said, placing it on Parveen's desk with a flourish. "The normal finder's fee is ten rupees, but for a friend I'll accept five."
Parveen turned his head, very slowly, towards the last bench.
Tanya had a hand pressed over her mouth. Her shoulders were shaking. A small, muffled sound escaped her, the sound of someone trying very hard not to laugh and failing completely.
"That's not funny," Parveen mouthed.
She laughed harder.
"It was a bad sample," he whispered to her at the first opportunity. "One mistake. Statistically unfair. I'll try again."
...
Attempt number two happened between the first and second periods, on the same landing, with the same note and the same dented bottle. Parveen hid behind a pillar and watched. A few students walked past. One stepped over it. One kicked it a little and apologised to it, which Parveen found oddly touching.
Then he got distracted by the bell, ran back to class, and forgot about it entirely.
He remembered only when Mr. Ravi walked into the math period carrying the bottle like a small, slightly embarrassing child.
"Whose is this?" Mr. Ravi asked pleasantly. "Found it on the stairs. Someone is going to slip on it and break their neck, and I would like it noted that I will be the one who has to fill out the form."
Parveen put his hand up. The class looked at him. Mr. Ravi handed over the bottle with a gentle lecture about responsibility that lasted three minutes and made Parveen feel like a criminal and a disappointment at the same time.
"He's a teacher," Tanya whispered when she passed his desk at the end of the period. "And he's thirty. He's not a boy."
"I was testing the system," Parveen muttered.
"The system works. That's not the problem."
...
Attempt number three was during the short break, on the windowsill near the water cooler, with the note taped even more firmly this time. Parveen did not hide. He stood a respectable distance away with a straight face and pretended to study the notice board, a technique he believed was called 'being invisible'.
The girl with the red hairband, the new class monitor, walked up to it, read the note, frowned and picked it up. She marched straight to him.
"I think this is yours, Parveen?" she said politely.
"Y-yes. Thank you."
"You should be careful. Ma'am will be angry if she sees bottles lying around." She nodded, a little proudly, and went back to her friends.
Parveen stared at the bottle in his hands, then at the retreating hairband, then at the ceiling.
"It's a girl," Tanya said, appearing at his elbow like a ghost with a grudge.
"I know it's a girl!"
"We are looking for a boy."
"I know we are looking for a boy!"
...
The fourth attempt was during lunch. Parveen put the bottle beside the basketball court, under a tree, in plain view of half the school, and told himself that this time it would work because this time nobody would be watching. He even held back from checking on it, which he considered a great act of discipline.
He checked on it when the lunch bell rang and the lines formed.
It was gone.
No note. No bottle. Not even the tape. Parveen stood under the tree, looking at a patch of grass that had held his bottle five minutes ago, with the expression of a man who has just discovered that his house has been demolished.
He searched the courtyard. He searched the canteen. He searched the bushes, the bins, the corridor outside the staff room. He asked Guru, who hadn't seen it. He asked Hero, who had seen it, but only in a dream. He asked a Class V boy, who started crying for reasons unrelated to the question.
By the final bell, the blue bottle with the electric rat sticker had disappeared from the world.
It was never seen again.
...
"Rest in peace," Parveen said, standing at the cycle stand with his hands folded and his head lowered.
"It was a bottle," Tanya said.
"It was my bottle. I had it for two years. It survived a fall from the second floor."
"So did your pride, apparently."
Parveen sighed and unlocked his bicycle. The sun was setting behind the basketball court, and the school was slowly emptying around them. For a moment neither of them said anything, which was unusual for two people who had spent the entire day arguing.
"At least we learned something," Tanya said eventually.
"That the world is cruel?"
"That people in this school return things when someone is watching and steal them when no one is." She was not looking at him now. She was looking at the empty court, and her voice had lost its usual edge. "He wasn't like that. He was honest even when no one was watching. That's the only kind I'm looking for."
Parveen did not know what to say to that. It was the first time all day that she had sounded like a person and not a weapon.
"So... a different test, then," he said carefully.
"A different test," she agreed, already walking away. "And Parveen?"
"Yes?"
"Don't touch my cards. I'm keeping them until you've earned them."
Parveen watched her go.
'I lost my bottle,' he thought. 'I lost my cards. I lost my dignity. All in one day.'
He pedalled home slowly, and for some reason, despite everything, he was not nearly as angry as he should have been.