The examination cell was one room behind the accounts office, and it smelled of spirit fluid, sealing wax and paper that had been in the dark too long. Shukla had been in that room for twenty-six years. He knew the shelf that had to be pushed with a knee, the fan that shook loose in April, and the exact pressure at which the duplicating machine's handle turned without tearing the stencil.
Every semester he typed the question papers. Title, subject code, time allowed, maximum marks, the standing instruction to answer all questions, the marks printed at the right margin like small change. He typed them on a Remington whose keys had gone soft under his fingers, and he typed them without reading them, because after twenty-six years there was nothing in a question paper he had not already typed in some other semester under some other code.
The students never learned his name. They learned his typeface. They would sit in the hall and see, in the top left corner, the small uneven line where the marks column had never quite aligned, and they would think about the paper, and not about the man. This did not bother him. He had a theory that every institution runs on people whose names are printed nowhere, and that the ones whose names are printed everywhere are the ones who do the least.
The machine died in the third week of October, mid-stencil, with a sound like a bicycle chain giving up. The office ordered a new one; the new one was out of stock in the district. The committee met and decided, in the way committees do, that the question bank would go to a printing shop in town, and that Shukla would coordinate.
Coordinating meant sitting on a plastic chair in that shop while a boy of nineteen named Deepak opened a template on a computer and typed at four times the speed Shukla had ever managed, stopping every few seconds to ask whether "Ques." should carry a full stop. It was faster. It was simply not his.
The faculty sent their questions by email now, or by messaging, or by a folded page pushed under the door. Most of them sent the right number. The Environmental Studies teacher, who was also the warden and therefore a busy man, sent three. The standing instruction said five. Printing was fixed for the next morning, and the warden's phone rang out twice and then went to a voice his family had recorded.
Shukla had two options, and both of them were the warden's fault, and he chose the one that let the paper go out on time. He wrote two questions himself. The first was about effluent treatment, careful and dull, and it looked like everything else he had ever typed.
The second was this: "Write down one thing you know by heart that will not be of any use to you in an examination."
He looked at it for a while after he had typed it. It was worth three marks. It had a marks column of its own, printed at the right margin like small change. He did not show it to anybody.
The paper went out on a Tuesday. In the second hall, the invigilator noticed a girl laugh once through the nose, about forty minutes in, and then stop laughing and begin writing very fast. He walked past her and saw that she had turned the sheet over and was using the back of it, which nobody had asked her to do.
Shukla did not mark the scripts; the teachers did. But the scripts came back to the cell to be counted and tied, and he was allowed, as he had been allowed for twenty-six years, to sit with them for an afternoon. He told himself he was checking for missing pages.
The answers, in handwriting that had clearly been decided years ago and never revised, were not the kind of thing a syllabus could hold. A landline number that belonged to a house which had since been sold. The order in which the 7:40 bus actually reached its stops, which was not the order on the board. The full name of a girl in the other section, spelt correctly, which the boy admitted he had never once said out loud. The eleven players of a match played before either of them was born. The names of every ward in a hospital, in order, learned while waiting. A recipe in which nothing was measured, copied down as carefully as a formula because the student had begun cooking for a household that had lost its cook. A prayer in a language the student did not speak, taught by someone who had died, and still correct.
One boy wrote nothing at all. He drew a small square in the answer space and left it empty, as though the question had asked for a box rather than an answer. Shukla, who had spent twenty-six years reading only the page numbers, thought about that square for a long time.
The trouble came in December, from a parent who had read the paper and written a letter. The question was not in the syllabus, the letter said. It was vague, it was unmeasurable, and it had probably cost a rank. The committee met. Shukla was called and asked who had set it. He said that he had. There was a pause of the kind that follows a confession which is also, unfortunately, an explanation.
The chairman asked him, gently, whether he understood that the question bank was a bank.
"Yes," Shukla said.
Then the committee did what committees do with an irregularity that has already become public: it legalised it. The question was entered into the bank as Q7, allotted three marks, and given a marking scheme — any one relevant example, clearly expressed, full marks; incomplete, one or two — so that future examiners would know how to be fair to it. Nobody asked him what he had meant. There was nothing to ask. He had not meant anything in particular. He had wanted to know.
He retired in March with a cardboard box containing a stapler, two unused stencils and a notebook.
The notebook was not official. It held, in his small forward-slanting hand, the answers he had liked, copied out before the scripts went back to the departments. He had taken nothing else. He had never taken anything else.
The question is still in the bank. It arrives every third or fourth semester, in the compulsory paper that nobody takes seriously, and the new clerk sends the papers to the shop in town, and the boy there, who is now twenty-nine and has a template of his own, types it without reading it.
Students still laugh, once, through the nose. Then they write very fast, and use the back of the sheet.
A conversation, quietly.
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