As a child, I hated Sundays. Now that could come as a surprise to many: why would a kid despise a holiday? The reason, I assure you, was nothing extraordinary. Father would be at home and it would be a disastrous day of solving maths problems.
Tell you what, I was not the sole one nursing such feelings for the subject. My neighbour, a year my junior, hated the weekend for much the same reason.
The mornings were all right as father would be busy with grocery shopping and other such mundane errands.
How I would try to appear studious by staying glued to the study table, believing foolishly that it would lessen the ordeal of the afternoon that lay in wait. After a lavish lunch, which didn’t seem as scrumptious to me as it did to everyone else, the summons came. I was to report to the patriarch with my maths book. I went like a convict to the gallows.
I had begun to believe that maths could change personalities like nothing else ever could. A marked change came over me as soon as I flipped the maths book open. The faculties of my brain would simply shut down. Maths spawned a change in my father too. My normally mild dad would dramatically turn into someone I hardly recognised. Anything I said would lead to my book being hurled at all corners of the house. I tried all acrobatics to save it from getting damaged as a torn book would mean generous pastings from my maths teacher, who I was convinced needed psychiatric help to deal with his students. Consultations revealed that I was not the sole victim of the maths bug, many a distraught student confessed to having been spread thin trying to cope with the pressures of the subject.
I remember going into a tizzy trying to make sense of the metric system. No amount of force applied on the ear lobes or the cheeks brought the desired result. In addition to this, father’s list of adjectives that described my mental prowess, or the lack of it, had grown longer.
Now years later, I don’t require the radius or the volume of the cylindrical jar to fill it with flour or milk. My sense of proportion is good enough and what’s more, I seldom go wrong. It hardly matters whether triangular patterns are equilateral or isosceles. I have never used the congruency property of triangles in my life. I don’t calculate the price of 250 grams of pulses as they are neatly printed on packets. All the efforts of my teachers have been in vain. As I see students stomping off to school, I can’t help but wonder if the maths bug is as active as it was before.