Standing outside his office, all kinds of thoughts about an impending doom passed through my mind. It was the 8th standard and it was all started by Alex. And look at him, happily sitting inside the class and enjoying. Speaking about Alex, the guy was very vocal plus he had an extremely good vocabulary of swear words in English; in fact, I first heard the F word from him. So you can’t really argue with Alex, he will strip you down with his ear-ripping language.
It was another of those days when I got involved in an altercation with Alex, and as usual he just excoriated me and made me speechless. Mortified, dejected and depressed, I meekly went and sat beside Maximilian. An empathetic Maxi advised me that if I ever want to retaliate against Alex, I need to work on it. How? For starters, he said, one should go to the library, take the Tintin comics and search for all the dialogues of Captain Haddock. Seeing a ray of hope in Maxi’s words, the next interval, I ran to the library, took out a piece of paper, and filled the whole 2 pages with absolutely hair raising beautiful words such as ‘cachinnating cockatoo’, ‘blue blustering barnacles’, ‘gibbering anthropoid’, ‘macrocephalic baboon’, ‘thundering typhoons’ and the likes. Feeling completely satiated I went back to class and started memorizing all those words, coz next interval I’m going to pounce on Alex and annihilate him. Now, I was sitting in the corner right next to the window; the corridor ran next to it; and while I was juggling between memorizing the expletives and writing down what the teacher was writing on the board, a hand barged through inside the window and snatched the paper with me. The hand belonged to our Vice Principal, Fr. Edassery.
Me: "It isn’t…..I didn’t mean….that is, it was…..yak yak"
He carefully glanced through the paper, folded it, kept it in his pocket and walked away after asking me to meet him in the interval.
Standing outside his office, all kinds of thoughts about an impending doom passed through my mind. What am I going to do? How’s he going to respond? Will he call my parents? Will I get suspended? Oh man I’m screwed. The brief period of wait outside his door seemed like an eternity for me; well, Einstein's theory of relativity is true after all I guess.
As soon as I entered his room, I begged, I apologized, I pleaded to spare me this time, and told I will never repeat this ever again. I almost fell into his legs. After hearing all my melodramatic histrionics, Vice let a deep sigh, removed his specs, slowly wiped it with his kerchief and said,
"It’s not blustering barnacles, it’s ‘blistering’ barnacles."
