MADNESS
The teacher had a tiring day reading something. Three dreams later, the teacher woke up. Those were the kind of dreams, in which one fails to stitch in a reason. Still he was trying, in his stupor. A stupor that was to go on till long. In the breaks between his busy head remembered to get up, start brushing, stop brushing, turn on the shower and so on. Finally he reached his class.
“If you start vibrating at light’s frequency, you become light.” His students looked at him in disbelief. He scribbled a few Physics equations on the black board. His students stared on. The class has to begin with attendance call. And he is an English teacher!
Peter, the front-bencher, raised his hand.
“Yes Peter.”
“Our attendance?”
“Ah I was coming to it. So change your frequency and become little twinkling lights. Let’s begin our class afresh.”
If you were in Peter’s place, you wouldn’t have bought this philosophy shit. But Peter pulled down his hand, maybe just relieved to see the attendance register taken out.
The professor continued. He added bits of everything he knew to the class. He told them that the Periodic Table was a smaller theatrical stage. He told them that Jhalianwala was a blood smeared tear and not a place. He called Darwin a well-known figure in literature and Wordsworth a butterfly.
You see, he was making sense in parts. He was sincerely trying to. He was trying to bind his scattered thoughts with language. But language became a mere clown, forced to step to the backstage.
The children listened silently. They busied their heads trying to find a connection in what he said. All of them were exhausted and when the bell rang, the sighs came from their grey cells.
By day end, the school was talking about the teacher. Some called him a genius. Peter’s cheeks were glowing as he explained to everyone, how profound were the words that caused him to sit straight. His classmates were bragging too that they understood. In a month or so, the news reached teachers and the headmaster. The headmaster wished to listen to the teacher. The teacher obliged. Nobody could understand anything. But nobody admitted it.
Soon, it became known to the entire town that the teacher is a genius. The teacher was invited to give lectures and speeches. Half-witted men, caught in boardrooms, called him for discussions. And later in the evenings, he had parties to attend to. Dumb bimbos and the sexist wise men who named the former so, were equally ashamed to announce their ignorance. The days that followed had intellectuals talking about the wise man.
His questions were met with pauses. Who can answer anything they can’t understand? Thoughts flowed in complete disharmony. Applauded by the snobs of the town. The teacher was glad that everybody else could understand what he could not.
After a year, he was about to sleep. He remembered that he was reading something before the world discovered him. A book. Or rather a heap of papers. It was a will addressed to him. The end of it read “For these reasons, I bequeath to you my five cars, two bungalows and the only beach resort.”
