The classroom was a sterile box of fluorescent light and nervous energy. The air was thick with the scent of old paper and the faint, chemical tang of whiteboard markers.
Outside, the world was a riot of noise—the chirping of birds, the distant blare of a car horn—but inside, there was a kind of solemn, suffocating quiet. The only sound was the incessant ticking of the analog clock above the blackboard, a slow, methodical hammer-blow of time counting down to their fate. For Kanha, the ticking was a taunt, each second a painful reminder of his lack of preparation. He sat hunched over his desk, his heart a frantic bird trapped inside his ribs, doing its best to escape.
Bhola, seated a row ahead and to his right, was a picture of cool composure. Or, at least, he had been a moment ago. He sat with his pen twirling between his fingers, his leg bouncing with a casual rhythm that suggested a mind at ease. Mr. Sharma, their math teacher—a portly man with a perpetually tired expression—moved down the aisles with the grave solemnity of a judge handing down sentences.
"Paper… paper… here you go, Bhola," he said, his voice a low drone.
Bhola's confident rhythm broke. He took the paper, his fingers brushing against Mr. Sharma's, and the moment he did, something changed. The easygoing swagger seemed to dissolve from his posture. His leg stopped bouncing. He kept the paper flat on his desk, but his shoulders had gone rigid. He stared at the first few questions, his head tilted slightly, as if trying to decipher an ancient language.
The color, which always seemed to sit in his cheeks, drained away, leaving his face a pale, pasty white. He wasn't just looking at the paper; he was staring into a void.
Kanha watched this silent transformation with growing dread. If the ever-confident Bhola was reacting like this, what hope was there for him? Kanha's mind had been a swirling mess of thoughts all morning. The sight of the beggar woman at the garbage bin still haunted him, an image of suffering that had lodged itself deep in his subconscious. He couldn't shake the feeling of profound unfairness, a sense of guilt that he, Kanha, with his full backpack and his school uniform, could walk past such a scene and do nothing.
The math test, in a cruel bit of irony, had felt like a fitting punishment, a cosmic imbalance correcting itself. He deserved to fail for being so helpless.
Mr. Sharma reached his desk. "Here you are, Kanha," he said, placing the test paper down with a gentle rustle.
The paper felt like a lead weight. Kanha didn't even have to read the questions to know it was bad. He could feel it in the pit of his stomach. His eyes scanned the equations, and a cold dread seized him. Functions, integrals, quadratic equations… they were all there, a jumbled mess of symbols that might as well have been hieroglyphics. He felt his face go ashen, mirroring the paleness on Bhola's face. The fleeting warmth from Bhola's praise about the party, the momentary confidence he had felt that morning—it was all gone, replaced by the suffocating feeling of regret.
I should have studied, a voice in his head screamed. Instead of spending all that time helping Mom decorate, instead of just sitting around after everyone left… I should have opened the book. I knew this was coming. This is my fault. This is all my fault.
He felt a sudden, desperate urge to throw the paper on the floor, to run out of the room, to make this moment disappear. He gripped his pen until his knuckles turned white, but the words on the page were a blur.
A quiet rustle and a low, urgent whisper broke through his panic.
"Kanha… hey. How is the paper?"
It was Bhola, his head tilted back just enough so he could whisper without being seen by Mr. Sharma, who was still at the front of the class.
Kanha looked at his friend's face. The usual coolness was gone, replaced by a desperate, wide-eyed plea. He looked like a small child who had just been caught doing something wrong.
"I'm… I'm not sure," Kanha whispered back, a blatant lie. The words felt like sandpaper on his tongue. He knew exactly what the paper was: it was a disaster.
Bhola's eyes flickered, searching for any sign of hope. Finding none, his shoulders slumped. The silence of the classroom, punctuated by the soft scratch of pens from the few students who knew what they were doing, stretched on, an eternity of quiet misery.
Then, Bhola leaned in closer, his voice a frantic hiss. "I hope… I hope some crazy terrorist attacks the school," he whispered, the words tumbling out of him in a panicked rush. "Just so this test gets cancelled. Anything. Anything is better than this."
The words hung in the air between them. They were an absurd, flippant outburst, a dark joke born of pure teenage desperation. Bhola didn't mean it, not really. He was just a boy, overwhelmed by a bad grade, blurting out the first hyperbolic escape fantasy that came to his mind.
But Kanha's mind, that strange, boundless canvas, didn't hear it as a joke. It heard the plea, the profound, gut-wrenching desire for a way out. His inner voice, the source of everything, took the raw emotion—the panic, the regret, the shame—and translated it into a command. It didn't hear "crazy terrorist." It didn't hear "attack." It heard the raw, unfiltered plea for the test to be canceled. Please, make this go away. Anything. Please make this stop. This silent, unconscious agreement, this desperate echo of Bhola's foolish wish, was the command.
Fifteen minutes stretched out, each one an agonizing eternity. Kanha sat paralyzed, the pen still clenched in his hand. He had managed to scrawl his name at the top of the page, but that was it. His mind was a blank slate. He could feel the eyes of the other students, the occasional glance from Mr. Sharma. The feeling of being watched, of being found out, was worse than any failure. He wanted to scream. He wanted to break something. He wanted the world to just stop turning for five minutes so he could breathe.
The silence of the classroom was a living thing, thick and suffocating. The only sounds were the slow, rhythmic scribble of the few students who were actually working. The rest of them, like Kanha, were simply enduring. The clock above the blackboard seemed to tick louder and louder, each sound a tiny pinprick against the stretched-tight fabric of his nerves.
Tick. Tock.
A girl in the front row coughed softly.
Tick. Tock.
A boy in the back shifted in his chair.
Tick. Tock.
Kanha lowered his head, his forehead almost touching the unforgiving surface of the test paper. The equations swam before his eyes, a mocking dance of numbers and symbols.
This is it, he thought, a sense of profound resignation settling over him. I'm going to fail.
And it's going to be my own stupid fault. The test, once just an item on a school schedule, had become a symbol of his inadequacy, a monument to his teenage anxieties. He wished, with every fiber of his being, that he didn't have to face it.
And then, just as the silent torment reached its peak, it happened.
The sound.
It didn't start with a bang. It was a sharp, distinct crack that sliced through the classroom's silence, a sound so out of place it felt like a hallucination. It was followed by another, louder, closer. They were not firecrackers. They were not car backfires. The sound was flat and metallic, a jarring, thunderous clap that seemed to shake the very foundations of the building.
The ticking of the clock was drowned out.
The room erupted. A girl screamed. A boy shrieked. Chairs scraped against the floor as students scrambled to their feet. Mr. Sharma, his face a mask of shock, dropped the attendance sheet he was holding. He stumbled back, his eyes wide with a terror that was a hundred times more profound than the fear of a failed test.
Another shot rang out, closer this time, followed by the sound of muffled running and shouting from the hallway.
Kanha's mind, which had just moments ago been consumed with the trivialities of algebra, was now a complete blank. The world, which had been so small—a classroom, a test, a moment of teenage misery—had suddenly, horrifyingly, expanded to include the sound of gunfire. He looked at Bhola, whose face was not just pale now but ghastly white. His eyes, wide with a shock that transcended all prior fear, were fixed on something beyond Kanha, on the door to the classroom.
The test paper lay crumpled on Kanha's desk, a forgotten, worthless thing. His body trembled, not from the cold, but from a dawning horror that was beginning to blossom in his mind. He looked down at the test, a testament to a problem that had now been rendered utterly meaningless. He looked up at Bhola, at his friend's terrified, pleading face. He saw the wish they had both shared, the desperate, flippant plea to be saved from the test. And in the echoing silence that followed the last shot, Kanha felt a terrifying, chilling thought settle over him with the weight of a stone.
Did we… did I…