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Ekabali Ghosh

JUDE B.A. 2014-2017, M.A. 2017-2019

When my board results came out in 2013, I was shocked. I had gotten 86 in my English paper. You think that is good marks, right? BULLSHIT! 86 is for losers, people who could not compose a sentence in the language without an error got 92 and above. I was disappointed. But the disaster had not started yet. As I applied to more and more colleges, I realized that people with marks in the high nineties and nineties got preference in the admission procedure because they had no separate admission test. St Xavier’s College was a farce, Brabourne put some weightage on the board marks. Loreto I could not apply because they would not accept my computer science marks (I did not want to join a college where women were instructed about how to get husbands and keep them). I lost out on Presidency because my board marks were low thus beginning my grouse with 50-50 weightage. To add to this, I fell sick with diarrhoea and had to end up in a B-rung Calcutta University college as I failed to make the JUDE entrance test too.

In my short career as a tuition teacher, I realized that board marks are arbitrary. I stopped trusting them the day my board results came out.

Anyway, now about the B-rung college I joined. It was a college where TMCP ruled the student union. It still does. And I use the word “rule” very consciously. Our receiving of ID cards, admit cards and all other things would depend on the well-being of TMCP dadas. On one occasion, visibly annoyed with Mamata Banerjee’s stand on the rape of Suzette Jordan, I made some angry remark in a casual conversation with my classmates. I was immediately stopped by one of them. I still remember what she said clearly, “Ekhaneeshob bolo na.Ei je admit card pachhona, eguloTMCPrdadaderdoyay.” That was the day I decided that I would sit for the JU admission test again.

Another incident comes to my mind. Just after the elections, I had a conversation with my classmate about how the elections were conducted. He had voted, I did not. I was too afraid and too angry to participate in it in this college. My classmate informed me that TMCP dadas carried with themselves wooden guns (the kind used for bursting balloons during Pujas) during election season. I was horrified. If any doubt remained in my mind about my decision to join JUDE, it did not.

I prepared for my entrance test for a few months and filled up the form without informing my dad, keeping my mom as a confidante. I got the attestations done from the Officer in Charge of the local police station. I took the exam alright but I was sure I would not make it. How could I? I had failed to do so once. I was cursed with intestinal problems, depression and low intelligence. At the same time, I had spent most of my life in a leaky house which flooded every time it rained a little bit. I used to cry about my living conditions as nobody in the family had any money to make the repairs. My dad, of course was to blame for this. He had assaulted my mother too many damn times and she left his house. Mom claimed he was doing us a favor by giving us a monthly allowance without a divorce settlement, which again, she could not afford.

But when the merit list was released, my name was there in the first list. I do not know how I made it there. I called up my piece of shit father and gave him the news. He was not pleased but let him have my way. He suffers from the fear that some day I will blame him if my life went haywire. He does not know that I already do.

My experiences in that B-rung college made me afraid of politically inclined people at Jadavpur University. I started hanging out with people who I supposed were “apolitical”. One of them showed serious misogynistic traits and was later revealed by me and others to be a serial sexual offender. But those were the many struggles my past had left me with. For the time being, I was just happy that I had made it to a place where the educational system did not run on tuitions and mugging up notes and where I was sure someone would read my answer script.

I faced a completely different struggle in Jadavpur University Department of English. But would I be me if I were still in that hellhole of a college? I wonder.

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