Who do the board exam results really affect — children, or their parents?

It’s the time of year when teens bite off every fingernail and begin to eye their toes — as the board exam results flow in. Pasted across national dailies are the zealous faces of toppers who manage to tote up percentages that beat the average age of the Japanese. As you marvel at their genius and grit, you can’t help wonder: Are these kids human? Or the result of some underground lab experiment years ago that embedded chips in them?

Mrs. Rai almost falls over her balcony to ask after your own progeny, whose only embedded chips are courtesy Lays. ‘Did you hear that Shankar’s son got a 96.3%? What about your Bantu?’

Your Bantu has something in the middling 80s, after all your fervent fasts at the feet of double-crossing deities. How could this happen? Shankar, you’re certain, didn’t share the details of that coaching class he was whisking his son off to, shifty that he is. You certainly won’t eat the celebratory ladoos he sends over.

You call a family conference to assess Bantu’s future options. College cut-offs are strangulatingly high. Some of his classmates are joining their family business, but your family’s lead business is getting together at weddings and hooking up youngsters so that you can attend other weddings.

Bantu wants to start up a start up. The only eligibility he says is to first drop out.

You give him a serious motivating speech, punctuated only by the crunch of his Lays. The eighties are high up there, you point out. He is eligible for IIIIT, no one will notice the extra I’s. Or for Cambridge (Super College) on the third floor of the dentist’s building on the next road. There’s a place of higher learning in Syria, that’s offering success in many lifetimes. Look, how they encourage young girls especially to come and join.

For now, however, a new world order has been drawn. Suddenly, your world is divided between new haves and have-nots (and even Delhiites stop comparing cars for a week). You magnanimously congratulate the toppers (except that shifty Shankar’s shifty son), while you continue to be besieged by those wanting to know Bantu’s results. Soon, you begin to answer your phone in the shower, shouting ‘Oh, this line is so bad.’ You even flush once or twice to add to the authenticity.

Bantu has finally got an acceptance letter: for Farrier Science in some college overseas which you can’t find on the map. He will spend the rest of his life tickling the toes of horses (at least their feet don’t smell), but it is “Science” and it will do. His father puts out an ad to sell your apartment for the Farrier-furtherment. And you can hold your head up high and yell towards Mrs. Rai’s balcony that your son is ‘pursuing abroad’.

Where Jane De Suza, the author of Happily Never After, talks about the week’s quirks, quacks and hacks.