The kids' uncle is, as all babus are, the kind who underlines favourite passages in books, learns by rote obscure quotations, offers up abstract math puzzles by way of charming dinner-time conversation, and will coach his children to the point of excellence or annihilation. So my wife came back from a family holiday some years ago at her brother's convinced that there was a faulty gene or two impeding our children's intellectual growth. "My brother," she said, "thinks they're dumb." Okay, maybe the word wasn't dumb, but you get the drift.
In his defence, I will say that my son was at an age when he got up to more mischief than studies, and though you wouldn't think it now, my daughter had a retiring nature that made her naturally timid and, therefore, reluctant to respond to clever questioning, preferring instead to be left alone. But as was his wont, my brother-in-law challenged them with quizzes and number games and logic problems when all my son wanted was to hit or kick a ball, while my daughter would simply dig in her heels and refuse to reply. His own daughter, somewhat precociously, had all the answers handy. If intelligence could be measured, ours was a family sorely in need of grey cells.
"What idiotic nonsense!" exclaimed a friend, when my wife lamented that our children were possibly lacking in the brains department; yet, she was convinced they needed help. She watched over them for clues that they were slow, or dyslexic, or otherwise learning-impaired for which every spill or fall or red mark in a copy was interpreted as evidence. She empathised with their teachers who said while one was a source of disruption in class, you could hardly tell that the other existed at all. They were marched off to counsellors and mentors and class prefects; their inability to solve a theorem, or learn a five-page Sanskrit chapter by rote, was measured against other paragons of virtue and high marks.
Till, that is, my wife resumed working again. She no longer took them for tuition classes, forgot the subjects they were studying in school, failed to sign their report cards, frequently even forgot the class they were in. (My daughter insists that when her mother came to attend a parent-teacher meeting in school one month, she failed to even recognise her in class.) "Oh, the children..." she told anyone who cared to ask after them, "no one's complained about them in a while."
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This week, when I told her that our daughter's results were to be out, she said, somewhat vaguely, "So late, I thought she'd given her exams a long time ago." I explained that board results take time to table, so there's usually a gap before they're announced. "Good, good," she said approvingly, "did you say she's in school or in college?"
So when we finally got the results yesterday, and were cheering for her, my wife said to my daughter, "I always said to your father there's nothing wrong with my children. But for some reason I cannot now remember, he seemed obsessed with the idea that you were slow on the uptake." And then, after a pause, "Are you?"