The night before his last board exam, Arjun could not sleep.
He had studied. He knew this. He had studied more for this exam than for anything else in his life — more than was probably useful, more than was definitely healthy. His notebooks were colour-coded. His revision sheets were laminated. He had done the last five years' question papers twice.
None of this helped.
He lay in the dark and thought about every question he might not be able to answer. He thought about his father's face at the breakfast table the morning after results. He thought about a boy in his class named Rohit who seemed to find everything easy and never appeared to study and would probably get a rank anyway.
At eleven-thirty his mother knocked and came in with a glass of warm milk.
She didn't say anything about the exam. She sat on the edge of the bed and asked him if he remembered the time they got lost driving to his cousin's wedding in Bareilly and ended up in a small town where a family invited them in for tea and they stayed two hours and were the happiest they'd been all year.
Arjun said he remembered.
His mother said — "That is the day I think about when things feel too large."
She left the milk and went to bed.
Arjun drank the milk slowly. He thought about that small town. The family's dog that had fallen asleep on his feet. The way his father had laughed at something the old man said. The tea that was too sweet.
He slept.
He wrote the exam the next morning. He did not remember every answer. Some questions surprised him. One whole section felt harder than expected.
He walked out into the afternoon sun and called his mother.
"How was it?" she said.
"I don't know," he said. And then — "I think it was okay."
It was. It wasn't perfect. But it was okay.
Which, it turned out, was enough. ✦
