The Classroom-by Auriv
Awakening-Tetsuya Ishida, 1998
Auriv is a buisness studies student based in Dhaka. His writing and short stories can be found on his medium.
This short piece follows an uncomfortable and bored Oliur sat at his desk in a classroom.
On a sweltering summer day Oliur sat staring at the white board as the professor went on pontificating about the literature of Tagore amidst the class. Oliur was impatient, and though he wasn’t, he still felt as though he was sweating profusely. He was somewhat concerned about what his classmates, who sat abreast of him, thought of how he appeared; from time to time he would clench his belly in an attempt to appear more slender even though he was fully aware that doing so did nothing, yet it had become an instinctive exercise. A senseless one indeed, which entailed the side effects of feeling bloated. Oliur would quite frequently glance at the wall clock, positioned right above the white board. For some reason he was quite apprehensive about making eye contact with the professors as they lectured. He felt as though they would identify something within him, that they would find the trace of something in his eyes that would deem him a culprit of some sorts. It was an everlasting temporality of poor quality.
Oliur felt sticky; his thighs would stick to each other and his arms would stick to the wooden desk. His eyes were a little crusted. After impatience, Oliur felt discomfort more than anything else. The class was almost silent, it was as though everyone was too sluggish to talk. The slide over the windows had no curtains and welcomed the sun’s rays. The heat had incapacitated them, they were like snails under the sultry sun. On such days, Oliur was estranged from him fellow classmates, even the few he called his friends. Once in a while, he would perfunctorily write notes, but he was always persistent in his scrutiny of the wall clock. He felt that the clock was punishing him, little to no progression of the minute’s hand since the last time he had checked. The truth of the matter was, each and every class for Oliur was just a race, a metamorphosis of his being into that of a simple wall clock. All of his biological functions would reduce down to a simple mechanic of measuring packeted amounts of time, his soul just the anticipation of a ringing bell. Oliur glanced at the wall clock. 10:33 am. 17 more minutes till the class ended. As this thought ran through his head, a shiver went down his spine. He has crashed into the abrupt realisation that he is living in the present, that this very him had to live through 17 more living minutes of this class. He almost let out a scream. Suddenly it went black. And that time was gone forever.