is going craazyyy!!!

This is my prison.

This is my whole life.

For the time being, that is. Barely a week to the exams and I am confined to one room, forcing myself to study even when my brain is saturated, even when my eyelids feel like they weigh a ton from lack of sleep. I have become used to having the glare of yellow lamp-light over my head at all times, my ears have grown accustomed to hearing the bland, quietly roaring noise from the fan, running at high speed. For the fan has two speeds only, you see. High, or zero.

The noise is interrupted at two-hour intervals, though. The electricity goes out with such punctuality that I have taken to telling the time according to when the light goes. I really don't bother with watches anymore. The fan slows down gradually -- the noise gets softer and softer until it stops revolving and comes to a shuddering halt, and all I can hear is the silence of the night. Or, if it is day, I can hear the birds (crows, mostly) cheeping and chirping and cawing.

So. I'm studying, right, and my leg goes to sleep. I shift it slightly, and pinpricks of pain shoot up through it. I grit my teeth and massage it with one hand (the other is holding a pen and is busy scribbling away on an enormous register) until the feeling goes away. Then I put my other leg where the first one had been. They exchange places, like guardsmen on duty.

I stare blankly at a diagram illustrating the heart as if only this action would somehow transfer all the information to my brain.

The brain! I still have to do that! I flip frantically through the pages of my textbook until I reach the topic I want. Inscribed on the top, in black block letters, are the words THE BRAIN. I stare at the insipid lettering, and as I do, my mind starts going fuzzy. Somewhere, in the back of my head, I can vaguely sense a thought. I am thinking about why textbook designers are so creatively challenged. But before I can completely register that thought, it is cut off. Amazing thing, really, the brain…

I wake up with a start to find one side of my face wet. It is also stuck to the table-top. I grimace as I un-stick it. I wipe the stuff off, recoiling with disgust as I realise that I have been drooling. Apparently exams also cause the salivary glands to work in overdrive. I curse as I peek through the curtains to discover that the sun is well above my head. Six perfectly good hours wasted!!

I lie with my head on the desk for a few minutes, my eyes open, but screwed up against the bright light streaming in through the window. I can see dust-mites dancing in the sunlight. They sure seem happy. I then get up groggily, unsteadily on my feet; I probably look like a zombie. I am muttering indistinctly under my breath about how doctors should do something useful for once, and invent a cure for sleep, already.

My mind is all befuddled, you see. Completely bamboozled.

I finally go downstairs. My mother is watching television with the most bored expression imaginable on her face. I plop myself down at her feet and start staring at the Indian movie showing on the screen. It's not really showing, though, that's not what I'd call it. The stupid cable guy has put up so many lurid, eye-poppingly bright advertisements on that they're taking up nearly half the screen.

'What d'you want to eat?' my mother asks.

'Nothing,' I grumble back. My usual reply.

She marches off to the kitchen, leaving me feebly protesting and scowling at the TV. Now there's an advertisement on for Sheikh's Shopping Mall. I forlornly listen to the horrible jingle. Oh how I hate the jingle. I've never even been to the stupid place and yet I know the damn jingle by heart.

Mumsy has now returned with a piping hot omelette and toast, browned just so. I stare at the yellow, fluffy edges of the egg for about five minutes. I feel like puking.

I turn my head slowly towards my mother, whose eyes are fixed on the telly, which is now showing the news. More killing. More violence. Joy.

'The exams have taken away my appetite,' I moan to her.

Yeah, right. And that wasn't me eating chocolate-swirl ice-cream out of the tub at four thirty last night, it was the bogeyman. And doesn't my mother know it. She just gives me a Look, so I end up forcing down the breakfast or lunch or whatever within the next ten minutes.

The idea of hitting the books again is filling my mind with melancholy thoughts. Shaking them off, I force myself to start studying again. It is a labourious process indeed. At first, my mind is being repeatedly assaulted by the annoying strains of a cheesy old Indian song. It is from Mughal-e-Azam, if you must know.

zindabaad, zindabaad

aye muhabbat zindabaad

Grrr. And as if that is not enough, the pencil I am holding is scribbling all over my physics book of its own accord; I have made quite a good caricature of my brother, and have written the phrase 'current is high, voltage is low' thrice, each time in a different hand. The curly backhand is particularly annoying. I smack myself on the head, throw the pencil as far away as the room allows, and tell myself (firmly) to concentrate. All goes well for about an hour. My attention starts wandering again and I burst into a rendition of 'Somewhere Over the Rainbow'. I sing in an overly affected, supposedly Judy Garland-y voice. I probably sound like a drowning cat, but still. I shut up then, and finish another chapter.

'Oh, Auntie Em, there's no place like home,' I suddenly squeak in the highest-pitched voice I can manage.

Then I start barking. Dorothy had a dog, too, you see. Toto, its name was. Bark bark. Woof.

(If you have never heard of The Wizard of Oz, go drown yourself in tomato juice.)

These aren't the only instances of lunacy, you know. I often have conversations with myself in King Julian's (the lemur from Madagascar) voice, his accent really, and then laugh like a hyena. Or I have bouts of depression where I lie face up on the floor of a darkened room, and try to sort my noisy mind out. Other times I sit, doing nothing, with a glazed, blank look in my eyes, thinking for hours about how far the vacations are. As if that'll accelerate the process somehow.

Accelerate? That's force divided by mass, right?

Noo!!! The exams really ARE making me go crazy!

Ah, well. Not much can be done about craziness, can it? I suppose I'll just have to wait it out…

Just a spoon-full of sug-aaaaar makes the medicine go dowwwwnn…