longer.blue

All The Small Hurts (ATSH) Chp1. Whenever a place involves seating, statisticians come up to tell us which seat to choose best. The tail end seats of a plane get hailed for being safe, and the passenger’s seat in a car is best for car sickness, and there has been similar debate for the chairs in a classroom. Mira couldn’t care less for the math behind it right now, however, as it’s for certain that her weak eyes are not going to magically be able to see from the last bench suddenly. And the only math important right now is the blurry numbers on the board written in Marathi, her native language, that couldn’t be the furthest thing from foreign to her. Mira didn’t choose her own seat. No student that joins in the middle of half a month into the new school year gets to have it their way. But Mira feels hopeful. A student is changing classes after lunch, which is any minute now. And his seat which is the second one in the centre will be up for grabs. Mira is impatiently shaking her left leg under the table. No table, she feels, is worth it in this class. No one is paying attention and the back benchers, near whom she's sitting, are a particularly unruly lot. They're all chatting in Marathi, clearly defying the school rules to maintain classroom discourse in English. To be fair, the language class is ongoing and even the teacher, Mr. Sri, is talking in Marathi.