First hand invigilation

Your purpose is to stay awake. For you function as a verb, dating 1553. Remember kid, your etymology derives from Latin invigilatus, past participle of invigilare, to stay awake; be watchful.

You keep watching from the first-floor balcony.

“Parents and guardians are not to be allowed inside. I REPEAT, YOU’RE NOT ALLOWED INSIDE,” screams a kid, in a black departmental T-shirt, who’s on the edge of his nerves.

A motley crowd of brutish father-figures are jostling and pushing, heaving and screaming, to accompany their girls to the examination-halls. An insignificant number of student volunteers are trying to be patient; a lone fatigued university security guard, past his retirement age, is trying to be invisible; it’s 11 o’clock at Gate No.4.

This year, more than 3, 500 students are competing for entrance to the English department. Around 60 of them will make to the classes in September. “What about the rest?” I wondered aloud as I remembered the day I had been there downstairs, ten years back. Nervous, anxious, drenched by the rains, and overawed by the crowd, the faces, the city and its people. Now there were two research scholars busily arguing the pros and cons of postcolonial “Englishnesses” next to me. No one heard me sigh as I went on to collect the answerscripts, the question papers, the forms with your identities stuck, pinned and stapled on them.

The next two hours simply floated away. I had been assigned to a big hall, but there I found a wonderful senior from our department, a passout of the eighties and now a chief somewhere; one of the few I envy for real. And without realizing it, the examinations were over: perfect, except two cases of mistaken identities in our room; two pairs of candidates with the same name, identical signatures and almost identical faces; five candidates confidently in the wrong room; few additional sheets appended to the answer-scripts surprisingly, but unconsciously, finding the initials of someone on them— someone who could have still been attempting a critical appreciation of a confusing romantic poem having something to do with the caressing of an old Greek statue.

I loitered about in the corridors, I refused to go away. A teacher wearing a green T-shirt, with the words “Mad Hatter” written on them, was seen seething with soft-voiced anger. A number of the examinees’ parents had manhandled him, along with a number of students, and girls, too, as they were controlling the ‘parental crowd’ at the gates.

“Why’ve you come to study English here?” someone will be asking the kids who’ve qualified, the same inane question, this year, the next year, and the year after that.

I looked over from the balcony. Again. I still didn’t have the answer to that question. I guess I'll never have. A fine drizzle caught on, the campus wore a deserted look. I kept myself from falling over the edge; it’s so confusing to be on the inside. It brings back big bad memories...