Teacher's Day is here...

My first post falling on Teacher’s day is apt since Miss Zareen and Miss Parul were the ones who encouraged my journey as a writer. If they hadn’t, I would probably be taking medicines to suppress the monsters in my brain instead of egging them on for a good story. Another great teacher was ‘The Shining’ by Stephen King. Until then, I had never truly indulged the weird ideas I would get because I thought horror was dependent on sounds and visuals. But that book taught me how sharp, brutal and terrifying words can be, especially because the movie couldn’t match the tension its pages held.

Horror enthralls me like no other genre can. The jump scares, the twists, the ghosts’ back stories and the creative ways of amping up the gore are some of the reasons my heart dances when I discover a scary book or movie.

I will confess I have a lot of issues with the way my brain works but the gut-splattered stuff it cooks up is not one of them. I am proud that my ideas make my friends squirm and has pushed my husband into meditation. And now, I wish to bring this gift to you. I will be publishing one short story every week and I hope you enjoy these peeks into the world that I love so much. This week’s story is about a teacher because it just makes sense today.

Happy Teacher’s Day and Happy Reading!

We had all seen Mr. Kataria fall. It had been an exciting day – ambulance rushing in, teachers running around and the best part – we saw an actual bone sticking out of a body (we even took pictures), and we got a half-day. It was serious but he would live. Meanwhile, they would get a substitute to help us with subtext in storytelling and layers in a poem about airports.

Her name was Miss Raina. She wore sleeveless blouses and Tweety earrings. Her hazel eyes and red painted lips immediately dethroned Ms. Keerti as the reigning teacher crush. She sprinkled her class with anecdotes about her college days and her then-boyfriend-now-husband. She made us laugh. She became our favourite.

Till the exam papers came back. And our resident genius, Rishabh, questioned her marking.

He slapped the paper on the desk as soon as she sat down. She adjusted the chair, put her black hand-painted tote bag on the floor beside her and only then, looked at the paper. She didn’t blink, just stared. For ten whole minutes. Rishabh shifted his feet, his fuming cheeks losing their colour.

“Ma’am.”

“Yes?” She still didn’t look up.

“You marked me just 9 out of 20 for my essay. It’s unfair.”

“The topic was ‘My Summer Vacation’. You wrote you found a 5000-year-old hidden treasure in your village. It’s not realistic and obviously false.”

“So what? I’ve written it well! It is on topic and I used all the techniques and stuff. I will comp-”

Miss Raina folded her elbows on the table and looked up. Rishabh stuttered to a halt. We watched.

Eyes locked with her student; she got up slowly. She was a petite thing but she towered over him. She literally grew taller in front of our eyes. Everything around us dimmed. The squeaking fan blades stopped mid turn, a few pencils rolled off the desks. The ‘thought for the day’ began to run on the blackboard, each word dripping lazily across its length. All sounds stopped at once. The class walls melted into a fluid prison, encircling us as we watched.

“So, you think you deserve more marks for this?” she asked, but she shook her head ever so slowly and with an intensity that made our eyes burn. Rishabh gurgled. He was trying to nod a ‘yes’ but he seemed incapable. His head was stuck.

“You think you have truly written on the topic, do you?” She was still shaking her head. Her eyes became wider, and wider till they were all we could see. They bulged out of her skull, her hazel irises now pure black. Rishabh’s head started shaking into a ‘no’. We could hear his bones creaking in protest. And for a split second, the trance broke. He opened his mouth.

We wanted to tell him to stop. To nod. To just come back.

“Y-yes,” he said, breathless.

She smiled. The same smile with the buck teeth and a slight overbite that left us swooning. The walls circled faster now. Shadows jumped from within its folds, slithering and weaving around the legs of our desks. They smelled like fruit kept out on a warm day. We liked it, so much so that we didn’t mind their dry skin rubbing against our shins. The black marks they left behind felt icy and comforting. They helped us focus on Rishabh. Not that we could’ve looked away. Just like he couldn’t look away from her.

“Do you think you know better than your teacher?”

Her voice struck us like a whip.

“You runts have no idea how hard we work. And you come here and insult our judgement. Do you think you are smarter than us?” Her eyes swallowed us in.

Rishabh’s head said no. All our heads said no. But not like him. His head kept shaking. He needed to stop. But instead, he dialed up the speed to maximum. Miss Raina stood there with her arms crossed across her chest. A few shadows swirled into a mini tornado at her feet and lifted her a few inches off the ground. Her face had begun to glow. Rishabh was crying now. He grabbed the edges of her desk trying to steady himself. The tendons on his neck pounded against his skin. Blood started flying out of his ears. He didn’t look like Rishabh anymore. He became a mass of skin, blood and teeth as his head turned into a blur of movement. His blood decked the walls and some of us as well. It tasted metallic. Someone said, ‘Eww’ and gave a nervous giggle. Another snorted. The shadows glided onto our desks. A whisper rose from the back bench, ‘He looks like Flash caught in a glitch.’ That broke us. The shadows enveloped us all like clingwrap, making us howl even more. We knew it was wrong but it was fricking hilarious. Our jaws wouldn’t listen to us. Our ribs hurt but laughs kept ripping out of us like hiccups we couldn’t smother. Not even when we heard his spine crack.

His head flew like an angry bird and bounced off the blackboard before rolling towards the door. Oh God! We doubled over, some of us banging the desks with our fists to stop the laughs. It didn’t work. They just kept coming. The black mist around us became crisper, sharper, sweeter. Then, his body fell with a thud and made the entire first row jump up. He was killing us, man!

Miss Raina too was clutching her stomach, her mouth so wide we could see her uvula. Red drops sparkled on her yellow saree. She then picked up Rishabh’s blood-soaked paper and crumpled it. “I guess he won’t need that anymore!”

Ha! She was beauty with brains and humour. She waited till we diluted ourselves to sniggers. The shadows slowly retreated to the now solid walls parting like old friends. Miss Raina clapped her hands and said, ‘Okay class’ in her usual sing-song way. She turned to the blackboard, the tassels of her blouse swinging like a pendulum. The chalk tap danced on the blackboard. We fought to keep some stray chuckles from escaping and failed. But she was cool, so she ignored them.

“Today, we will learn about ‘The Legend of the Sleepy Hollow.’

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