D

She caught me looking at her note-book.

"What do you want?" she demanded, annoyed, her eyebrows questioning.

"Nothing." I remarked."Your 'd's look nice."

She gasped, and before she could raise the alarm we got our next word. The teacher hollered from the front of the class:

"Emancipation! EMM-an-SEEEE-pay-SHUN!"

I finished scribbling and looked at her notebook again. She was still crossing her 't' and dotting her 'i's. I shot a look at my notebook, and shrugged my shoulders.

***

Do I believe in perfection? Do we believe in perfection? Do perfection and morality go hand-in-hand? If so, where and when and how did all these notions ever get into my, your, our head(s)?

It was Monday night and I was mulling the above questions over an unappealing dosa. And as I took apart the dosa piece by soggy piece, I remembered where, and when, and how.

D, of course!

And I felt like Archimedes out of a bath tub. No, no, before you ask I didn't, unlike the great man I have no illusions about my...err...anatomy. Not that many people would be interested in the first place anyway.

D was a classmate in school. We kinda grew up together. As in both of us were the tallest members in our class of our respective genders, and since we had this rule of a boy sitting next to a girl sitting next to a boy sitting next to a girl, we ended up sitting next to each other for the whole of primary school and for a couple of years after that as well.

Anyway, coming back to the point about perfection, it was an alien concept to me. Of course you can't expect 8 year olds to be bothered about perfection, can you? But then all that changed when D joined school.

You couldn't miss her in the crowd. She towered above the rest of the girls. And she stood out in other ways too. Everything about her was perfect. Right from her laminated text-books (which never tore even at the end of the year when I would be lucky if I retained the cover page on mine) to her spotless and shining shoes (maybe her Dad polished them at night; maybe she had a maid who took care of everything; maybe...) to that irritating oh-I-finished-my-homework-didn't-you-? smile of hers. And it hurt. Oh yes, it did. In a very juvenile, male-chauvinistic, how-can-a-girl-be-so-damn-smart-? way. Yeah, yeah, the male ego is fragile, I know.

And you know what hurt the most? Her handwriting. You could take a ruler and all her letters would line up, as in the legs and the loops would all be of the same height, down to the last freaking millimetre. I actually did that once when she wasn't looking, just to make sure, and I nearly died of shock. And mine? Forget it, you don't want to know...all that I can say in my defence is I was practising to be a doctor. No, really, I was.

But yes, being benchmates took its effect. And it was not long before I chucked my ego into the class dustbin and started taking writing lessons from her. She couldn't believe it initially, becasue we had this anything-you-can-do-I-can-do-better clash going on. But once she got over the shock of schooling the enemy, she turned out to be a wonderful tutor (sheesh can't believe I just called her "wonderful"; note to self: tighten up! tighten up!).

We had copy-writing class, and my letters which would go climbing all over the page started dropping into a disciplined order. She would prod with her pencil and mutter under her breath when my 't's started getting lazy and began looking like my 'f's. She would taunt and tease me for my 'p's and 'q's. I guess that's the only way I would have learnt. But slowly, the writing improved and it was not long before my marks improved as well.

The reserve between us melted as well. We started exchanging books (I read most of Nancy Drew thanks to her), hell, we even did a play together in school which had just the both of us! And it was not long before she forced me into changing again.

I used to be a shameless cheat when I was little. Exams and games mainly, and there were other things which didn't matter at all.

It was on the day we got our Maths test marks -- a test in which I placed my notebook on my lap and copied my way into the cheaters' hall of fame. She looked at me in disdain and asked me, "How can you lay claim to something you've not earned? What are you proving? And more importantly, who are you fooling?" This was in class 5; we must have been 10-11 years old. Gee, the girls start early, don't they? I took a one-way guilt trip to hell that day.

And again it hurt. Not in a moral sense or anything, I was too shameless for that. In the same juvenile, male-chauvinistic, how-can-a-girl-be-so-damn-right-? way. And I decided to give up cheating. I tried. I struggled (old habits die hard). But I never cheated for the rest of my school life (or rather, for the tests that mattered; I still continued to do so on inconsequential tests which carried fines), and the thrill kinda died after that, and the guilt was overwhelming (All that changed in college though when the usual disilusioned-with-the-system phase hit home and cheating didn't matter anymore; at least morally).

Anyway, it was not long before we were slugging it out in the tests on honest terms, competing for the top honours in class, sometimes losing to the other by the slenderest of margins (you will forget what I just wrote. You are feeling sleepy. I will count upto three and you will forget everything. 1...2...). But she was a sport, probably the most sportive female I've run into, and she would be the first to congratulate and acknowledge her coming second. And I learnt to do the same.

Anyway, coming back to the questions I was mulling over, D was undeniably the first person to teach me that 'If something is worth doing, it's worth doing it well', that 'You cannot claim that which is not yours' and that perfection and morality are one and the same. D left school after class 7, which was quite sad actually, and I've not seen her anywhere since, but I guess I owe her a lot.

In this age of cover-your-back environments at work and cut throat competition around you, it's often quite easy to take the easy way out and compromise. Sometimes I stand tall. On other occasions, I've gone to sleep with a heavy heart. All the same, I guess D would be happy knowing how I've fared.

***

"Come on, let's go! It's late. We can tune the carby* tomorrow."

"We were supposed to finish this today. And what if the boss asks us?"

"We'll tell him we finished it. Besides how much more can we tune it? This is as much as it can go."

"Naa, let's tune it one last time. I'm sure we can squeeze some more torque here..."

"F*** man. Why are you doing this to me?"

"Because if something's worth doing, it's worth doing it well, and besides you don't claim something which you've not earned..."

"Spare me the philosophy. Where is that frikkin spanner when you need it? Might as well get started on this."

"Over to your right..."

***

* carby - Informal term for a carburettor