It was the wee hours of a cold, December morning. The mathematics examination loomed ahead, inching closer with each passing minute, like a lumbering leviathan. The main ingredient of the day’s examination would be Geometry, and the very thought of Geometry, I remember, had always given me the shivers. Showering curses on Pythagoras and his ancestors, I staggered onwards, trying in vain to memorize the countless formulae, which were strewn amidst the broad, pale-colored, unappealing pages of the textbook.
Overcome by fear, I sat sweating, near the window, praying that the morning would never arrive; the dividers and set-squares resting shakily in my fingers, as a spoon and a fork would rest in the unaccustomed fingers of a villager at an expensive buffet.
I wished I could know the result of the examination beforehand. Could have saved me all this effort, I thought. Not an uncommon wish at all. After all, it is man’s obsession with the future which fattens the purse of many a fortune-teller - the obsession to know, change and subvert God’s will through countless prayers and rituals.
In those days, I had this curious little habit, which I had picked up from one of my classmates at school. Whenever I found it impossible to resist knowing the outcome of something, whether India would end up on the winning side of a close cricket match or whether we would land a ticket for a new film release, I would toss a coin.
Up, high and handsome, the coin would soar. The coin in the air, my heart in my mouth. The coin would eventually end up on the ground, with one face upwards. Each face would symbolize a result, and the business of tossing the coin would give me a temporary respite from restlessness.
The entire ordeal which I had endured, the unbearable anxiety as to whether I would pass or fail, had enervated me enormously. I felt like a convict at a jail, waiting with bated breaths, for the dreaded moment when the executioner’s noose would tighten around his unlucky throat.
No more of this business, I made up my mind. Bring the coin!
I never used to have a lot of pocket money. Unfortunately, I did not have a single coin with me, on that wretched morning, rummage as I might, all over the room. And it wasn’t entirely normal to go fiddling in my Dad’s pockets in such unearthly hours; and if I did, landing a scolding seemed more probable than landing a coin.
That’s the way of life. When you don’t need something, it sits there, right before your eyes. When you need it so badly, as if your whole life hangs on it, the thing is nowhere to be found. A gentleman named Murphy, I heard realized this fact, centuries before I did, and formulated his own law, which was called Murphy’s Law. I couldn’t agree more with Murphy then.
How on earth, with what on earth, could I toss?
I took a bit of paper, wrote ‘Pass’ on one side and ‘Fail’ on the other, and tossed it. The paper flew away in the ceiling fan, landing expertly at an inaccessible corner of the room. The paper bit would have put an airplane to shame with its airborne antics.
Dejected, I had given up the plan of predicting the future and had gone back to the futile exercise of nibbling at my textbook, when my roving eye caught something.
Lying inconspicuously in my instrument box was the Protractor. An essential tool in a mathematics examination, the Protractor is a semicircular, plastic piece, with the angles from zero degrees to one-hundred-eighty degrees marked on one face, in a slew of closely spaced lines and semicircles. The other face is blank.
My sagging spirits soared; the situation wasn’t hopeless at all. I could use the Protractor for a toss. I took huge pride in the hidden justice that there was in it - what better way could be there, other than using a mathematical instrument itself to guess the result of a mathematics exam?
So it was toss time. Again.
I sat back, temporarily forgot everything about the exams and basked in my newfound glory. With experience, we had figured out a unique way to check if the outcome of a toss was reliable or not. Put the toss and check whether it predicts the outcome of an event that already happened.
Incidentally, I had passed in the previous mathematics exam, with a paltry forty-five percent score. I tossed the Protractor up in the air. If the side with the degrees marked on it falls, it would mean Pass and hence, the toss could be trusted, I presumed. Three times out of three, the marked side fell.
Fantastic. You could bet your life on the Protractor, I thought.
Now, to the big toss. I braced myself and tossed the Protractor up again. It soared up, did several somersaults in the air and landed on its blank side.
My enthusiasm dipped. God, would I fail?
One more toss. More airy somersaults. But again, it landed on the blank side.
Now the world came crashing down. The prospect of failure looked likelier than before. But I picked myself up quickly and thought over it. I would toss it five times in all, instead of three. So in all the remaining throws, the face with the degrees marked on it would have to fall, for me to pass in the examination. I muttered a few prayers and tossed it up again.
Up. Higher. Flipping in the air. Amidst thumping heartbeats.
I stared, anxious and open mouthed. God, It had begun its descent, and was hurtling down, right towards my nose. I backed away, just in the nick of time. The protractor brushed my cheek, diverted from its path of descent, and went sliding, nonchalantly, right out of the window.
Peering out, I found the protractor, lying forlorn, on the sunshade. Looking up at me, as if blaming me for its plight. Worse, it had it's blank side upwards. Failure guaranteed ?
I tried coaxing it down from the sunshade with a broom, but Life seemed to have chosen to teach me all the tough lessons on that horrible, chilly morning. The broom was just an inch too short for me.
Mom came in at the stroke of dawn, with the morning tea and found me, to her extreme astonishment, broom in hand, sweating all over from head to toe. She tried her hand, gave up and called Dad, who immediately took over control of the situation.
After half an hour of pushing and prodding, Dad managed to coax the Protractor from the sunshade, onto the ground. All the while, he had seemed to get madder at me with each passing minute. It was seven in the morning by then. Almost school time. Without any further preparation, I trudged off to school, ready to meet my fate.
Anyways, the toss was spot on, I must say. The day got more horrible as it progressed, especially inside the examination hall. Equations and formulae arranged themselves, deftly, into indecipherable jigsaw puzzles inside my head, and drove me crazy.
Eventually, I ended up with eighteen marks out of a hundred. For once, I remember, the marks where fewer in number, in comparison with the number of beatings I managed to get from home.
If my memory could be banked upon, it was the last time that I ever tossed a coin in my life.
