Page 3 of A King's Oath

“Sorry?”

“Ms. Veda woke up today chanting Ava-the-chatterbox, walked into the class with that same rant and you didn’t hear her?”

Samarth definitely hadn’t heardthat. He turned to Jai — “Did Ms. Veda enter the class out for Ava?”

“No,” Jai laughed. ‘Stop exaggerating, Ava!”

“What exaggerating? Didn’t you see how she singled me out first and then the entire last row?!” Her lips rounded in some angry indignation. Her wide eyes widened even more. Samarth sat down in his place, resigned now that she wasn’t planning to get out anytime soon. As she went on chattering about what Ms. Veda had said or done to her, he leaned up to see if the horses had been let out. It was Monday, which meant the foals would be brought out first.

“…and do you think we will have… oh, you didn’t tell me what this is, Samarth?” She held his horse charm up again, turning it from side to side.

“A horse,” he answered distractedly, hoping she would shut up.

“Heisbright, huh?” She spoke to somebody behind them, probably Jai. His sputter signalled it was him.

“Is he so lost all the time?” She asked again.

“He topped last term, you think he would if he was lost?”

Silence prevailed. Relative silence. The class kept chattering around him. But she was silent, finally. And the foals were let out. Like a hurricane of tiny horses they galloped into the pen. Samarth eyed them, all eight of them, at different ages. He wanted to run down and nuzzle their soft coats. He wasn’t as young to climb and ride one of them but baby foals were the sweetest things in the world. He could spend hours holding their necks and rubbing their coats with a…

His body jerked. She was pushing him.

“Hey? Wha…”

Samarth was shocked at how easily she bodily nudged him out of his seat, slipped out of the bench, then again pushed him back. He resisted but she was strong for a girl so tiny in height. Back, back, back he went until his bum had bounced down on his window seat.

He stared at her incredulously as she sat down beside him, took his head and turned it to the window. “Keep staring, a unicorn might fly from those horses.”

“Foals,” he corrected, but happily kept his eyes on them.

“Same shit.”

Samarth smiled. She wasn’t so bad.

“I’ll explain the difference to you in a minute.”

“You are not allowed to talk to me.”

The tiniest baby foal ran between her elder sibling’s legs and got smacked in the tail by the sibling. Samarth laughed.

“Good moooorning, Ms. Nandini…” the whole class chimed and his shirt was again pinched and nudged until he was standing up too like everybody else, tearing his gaze from the foals.

“I will talk to you during the breaks,” Samarth announced as Ms. Nandini started setting up her collection of whiteboard markers. She carried a whole box of those in rainbow colours, thinking Math sums in different colours made the subject more attractive. It didn’t. But he was good at Math anyway. Jai winced behind him as she wrote Trig-ono-metry in three different inks — blue, red and green.

“The word Trigonometry comes from the Sanskrit word trikon. One that has three corners…”

“Why do you like horses, Samarth?” His bench partner nudged. He ignored her.

“Hello? I am talking to you!”

He ignored her again, concentrating on Ms. Nandini’s history of Trigonometry as she wrote down a simple sum on the board. She had this great way about her to unearth the sleeping past of Indian knowledge. The Ved, Shastra and Puran studies had so much science and mathematics. She would often veer from Math sums to the philosophy behind them, telling stories of sages who had set out to attain answers for a philosophical question and stumbled upon an equation. Samarth’s favourite story was the discovery of the number zero…

“Eeeee!” His horse charm trotted on the open page of his notebook and he glanced sideways at the girl making neighing whispers.

“Finish the sum…” he tried to push her away.

“It’s done. Take, copy it.”

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