On Home

Are there deadlines in fourth grade? At that time homework left over for after ten o' clock was a taboo. There were phone curfews, some people slept early, others did their homework right after reaching home, and I admit I've done it in school if someone was late picking us up. Calling a friend to ask a particularly difficult question at eleven in the night was outrageous. You could tell it was - your parents thought so, their parents thought so, they thought so and you thought so. Eleven! What did you do the other six hours you had to yourself? That's what everyone asked implicitly, always implicitly because the question spoken aloud was always about how long it would take, when you would sleep. I remember calling a friend at six - six! - in the morning, to tell him excitedly how I'd solved the question we couldn't understand last night - this was seventh grade - and setting off a whole chain of calls that ended with people hurriedly scribbling homework before class. On the school stairs, with nothing to balance their copy on, in handwriting that was spoiled bycopies balanced on knees. On the canteen shelf, standing up, with more support but a lot more discomfort. In their cars and vans, juggling copies and pencils and erasers while assiduously filling in an answer consisting of all of three lines.

But that was them. I had deadlines. I left the homework I hated for last, willing myself to believe that I'd finish it soon. Even the word 'homework' sounds funny now. Mostly it was the urdu homework - a set of muzzakar muannis that would take fifteen minutes, two of ten assigned math problems that would take ten, or anything. Something was always left over in fourth grade when I finally went off to sleep around twelve. I would will myself awake, forcing my eyes open, fooling myself that I'd wake up after just those ten minutes, that I needed those ten minutes of rest. Sometimes I finished it when I woke up at seven in the morning - the taboo was so great that I would lock the door, pretend to be in the bathroom and hurriedly jot down words and sentences and numbers in an attempt to finish it. The embarrasment was so great, and the occurence so frequent, that it made me feel sick every time, generating promises and resolutions that never, ever, would this happen again.

I still feel the same sickness, because very little has changed. I lost an assignment just as I was ready to paste it for submission. The PC rebooted and I could only sit there and stare dumbly, as if staring would recover something, but also, I stared in defiance. How could this happen to me? But I felt saved - saved from the embarrassment of not having finished it, saved from having to explain that I hadn't been able to will myself awake one more time. I felt unreal and elated and relieved and worried at the same time. It became an even stranger mix when it actually was recovered. How do you feel about something that you need to happen and don't want to at the same time? Six in the morning and another fifteen minutes to sleep. It's not optimistic - it's stupid.