Paper Trail

One gratifying thing about fiction is the inevitable appearance of some benevolent force just when everything seems dark for our heroes. A terrestrial bacterium, US Air Force, Fenton Hardy, there is absolutely no limit to what can be conjured up to extricate the hapless protagonist. Deus Ex Machina, however, seldom comes to the rescue of ordinary mortals. More often than not, we have to rely on our brains and just sometimes, even the lack of it in others. Which was how Sagar came out tops in what might have been his Waterloo.

An ideal exam would be one in which you had all the answers, could finish everything in time and come out of the hall with a warm fuzzy feeling inside you. In a less than ideal situation however, you would have to keep peeking across the shoulder of the person sitting in front of you. And in a downright hostile situation, the supervisor would catch you doing this. It doesn’t take a genius to guess the scenario in which Sagar found himself during that fateful day. Now Miss S (our supervisor), having observed poor Sagar taking a more than passing interest in another’s paper, promptly divested him of his answer sheets and placed them on her own desk. Sagar was however not asked to leave the hall. The so-near yet so-far taunt has been refined by supervisors over a period of time and Sagar looked set to spend the rest of the exam gazing longingly at his answer sheets. But this wasn’t to be, for exactly at that moment, entered the second shift supervisor, Mr.P. Now with the entrance of Mr. P, the average intelligence in the room had moved considerably southwards. And this was where Sagar’s fortunes began to change.

With Miss S having left and his papers lying innocuously in front of Mr.P’s desk, Sagar’s mind went into overdrive. Filling up a blank sheet with whatever he could think of, he duly went and placed this sheet on top of the pile of confiscated sheets sitting on Mr.P’s desk. By the time a second sheet had been placed there, Mr.P’s mental machinery had realized that something was amiss. Mustering up his most authoritarian voice, Mr.P looked straight into Sagar’s eyes and asked him why the papers were being kept there. Without missing a beat, Sagar replied, ‘Sir, I don’t have a stapler. Since the papers kept flying off my desk, I’m keeping it here.’ A visibly nonplussed Mr.P (who would later on become our HOD), then screamed at Sagar to take his papers back and submit it along with everyone else.

Sagar, never one to disappoint a prof, obliged.