As the signal turns green, the taxi starts after what seems like an eternity, forty-five minutes to the exam. Time is relative, they say. I call it an ice-cold ruthless assassin who sneaks in the cabinet waiting to pounce at the right moment. He then jumps out of the cabinet and offers you a race. You insist on a tug of war, but he calls the shots. The sprint against time is paradoxical; the earlier you go, the slower time runs, and you do not want to know what happens when you are behind.
Unfortunately, the assassin had caught up to me. The usual traffic, intensified by unseasonal rain, meant that my hopes of reaching the hall were drowning every passing second. Flashbacks of the months I spent solving math and regretting life were all over my mind, and the fantasy of a Shawshank-esque escape from the months of anxiety was fleeting away.
D-15, I knew there was no way this car was moving again in the 15 minutes that were left for the start of the test. Just like water trickling through cracks in a wall, I snaked through the endless line of traffic and ran.
Nearing the entrance, my legs started getting heavier, and the more I tried suppressing the gasps of breath, the louder they would be. What was louder than my breathing and becoming more apparent as I walked further was a ruckus near the gate. I sighed; perhaps the gates had been closed, and the imminent agony was from people like me flooding the place with hopes of some leeway.
ID card checked, bag checked, attendee annoyed. My entry to the hall was quite rushed, but the sight I saw was dark yet pleasant. I realised the voices in my head had superposed with the ruckus, but the reality was that, like typical Dhaka, electricity left the room before rain even began. While the security measures made me curse the slow, almost bureaucratic nature of the exam rules, the ‘can’t start an exam till the lights are on’ rule brought a smile to my face.
Psychologically, I had already defeated an unbeatable entity, so the paper seemed like a mere mortal. Twenty minutes later, the lights returned, and I waged war against logarithms. The months of work paved the way for a cruise control ride through the paper, until that one question.
The question laughed, mocked, and screamed out the challenge at me. I stared at it, twirled my pencil over it, all while the voices in my head told me to skip it. Arrogance is quite the double-edged sword, and arrogant as ever, I stuck to solving it. As always, the sword cutting both ways left me gasping for air again when I turned the pages to see 2 more questions left. With five minutes to go, I could only finish one.
Reality was nightmarish enough, and I slept throughout the next four days, waiting for the nightmare to end outside.
I got in.