The edge of the paper was sharp enough to produce a strange sound that bordered between a whistle being blown and a paper being torn. And all the children had to do was to hold the paper stretched taut in their hands, and blow over it. The sound was loud enough to bring out the frown lines on the foreheads of teachers, but not so loud that it could be hushed, or the culprit found, let alone brought to justice. The teachers had long learnt to live with this occasional disturbance arising out from different quarters of the class. The weapons deployed for the act of revolt were made out of objects of necessity, these being the very notebooks and exam papers that the teachers would hand out to the class and scold them if they turned up without them. The low-decibel protest too was against the instructions given to fill up the very pages that would be used to produce the sound. In his quieter moments, Mr Bisht, the History teacher would often sift through the many shelves of civilizations in his brain to see if there was any parallel to such an act in the past. Where the reason for protest became the very weapon of choice against it. He doubted it but he couldn’t shake off this strange nagging feeling that the children were on to something big, something that could define the way protests were held. Where the authorities could not take away the tools of retaliation simply because by doing that they would be handing the opposing faction the victory they were fighting for. The Maths teacher, Mr Bhullar, would draw his own calculation, putting the positives on the left side and the negatives on the right and then weigh them to see if there was more to gain or more to lose if the papers were taken away from the students. Ms Bolar, the big music teacher who spoke from the bottom of her belly would be the least affected. One because the children found little reason to protest against her, and another because she rarely offered them the chance to reach out for the papers with which they could protest. On the few occasions where both these conditions would be met — as Ms Gera the Physics teacher would have put it — the sound would drown under the many sounds that the music class was always packed with.
As students grew up, sprouted facial hair and started sounding gruffy and leaving school after their board exams, they would always leave this unique art with those that followed. The tradition or the skilful art that they would teach the juniors would keep the teachers on their toes and the students in good practice. That was how it went till one day the corner room was refurbished and children would see cardboard boxes being taken in and hear sounds of pounding and drilling that would make the teachers prefer the low whistle over these. And soon, the room was opened for the school with a lot of celebration and speeches and the children walked into the school’s first computer class.
Mr Hooja, the computer teacher was as expressionless as the monitor that greeted the students before they started their lessons. A single cursor would blink absentmindedly and seemed content in doing it all its life if only somebody would let it. The rest of the screen was one blank expression. Every single child, without having pointed it out to each other, could see that the blinking cursor was the hair strand that jutted out of a mole on Mr Hooja’s right cheek. And the screen, all of it, was his face. Which is why no one could see his temper rising. It hit them at the same time as his duster, or a chalk. And as students were mostly facing away from him and towards the screen, struggling with programming that Mr Hooja said was how the computer spoke. The children felt the extent of the teacher’s temper only after they felt the duster’s soft side if they were lucky or the hard side if they were not, on their back. The soft side had its disadvantage as well, as the chalk marks made it easy for the students and teachers of the school to see that they hadn’t yet learnt to talk to the computer. And the children would wonder why the computer can’t learn their language and why must they learn its language and anyway, what was the need for the two to talk to each other. But nobody dared ask Mr Hooja that. They could only protest, but the computer classes made it impossible because there were no papers to use in this class and the children felt lost without their arms and their voice.
It couldn’t have been a smart student, because according to Mr Hooja there were none in his class, but it was someone who by mistake or out of desperation hit upon a way to make the computer’s cursor squeal. The trick was simply to keep the curson pressed in a position where it could not go any further back, and that made the cursor look really upset. It seemed to be pushed against the wall that was the outer edge of the computer’s screen, and from the end by the push from the child’s repeated pressing of the key that made the cursor scream out in its own protest, something the children used as to voice their own and Mr Hooja, would dart from one computer to another to look for the source but stopping the sound meant just taking the finger off the button and continuing to another where they could appear like making an honest attempt at trying to talk to the computer. The protestors were never caught, the protests escalated, and the expressionless face of the teacher started showing lines on the foreheads and around the eyes, giving the face a slightly human-like appearance.
Over the years, the students came and went. And in time, Mr Hooja was due for retirement after having produced a long line of students who started hating programming their entire lives. His face would now twitch and the lines on his forehead deepen at the slightest sound of a metallic vibration. He would peer closely into computer screens and wonder why they couldn’t make a more intelligent noise. Over time, he too started hating the machines and looked forward to power cuts and weekends and winter vacations.
The protests had finally achieved something, however unintentional. They had made Mr Hooja look and act more like a human. Something that his family didn’t know who to thank for.