High time I quit | Abha Prakash

A sabbatical is what I need.
Catty looks, arching eyebrows, feigned inattentiveness, mind games, ego hassles —
It’s time to retreat from the teenage mutants — from the Monday morning wrecks,
Thursday afternoon zombies, Friday party planners —
I wish for a normal workplace, humans with normal hormones.
How about sweeping off those anarchic assignments piled up high, and making space for my dwindling weekends?
I have to stop entertaining myself with lexical jokes — faulty agreements, the lose-loose connections, quite-quiet mischoices — that colour the high school world.
For all their I-can-do-Dubliners-in-2-weeks, the essays hover far from insight and legibility.
But I cannot abandon them, of course.
The long faces, droopy eyes, make me slave under mistaken notions.
I lead them to the exams, correct the mocks for the tenth time.
They graduate. A virtual hello comes now and then to revive my fainting resolve.
**************
I begin again, yet again. I smile, not too widely, and welcome the fresh faces, their youthful joy, and eagerness to be in the A-level English class.
Surely this new group can be motivated to indulge in speech analysis and explore the Joycean voice.
I alternate leniency with law and order. They accept the new rules for a month or two, sit relatively straight, open their mouths meaningfully.
And then the sluggish August afternoons, the lone plaintive calls of the peacocks take over. Eyes glaze; there is time for reveries, doodling, mocking
the sincere ones who labour diligently . . until the finishing line.

Abha Prakash grew up in Delhi graduated from Canada, is a mother to two boys born from an inter-racial marriage. She lives in a multicultural township in south India teaching English at a high school.