“Will you help me
on the moon rover project?” Manu asked again, and Vikram forgave
him all the insults and jokes that moment. “I heard you can solder
wires,” said Manu, and Vikram nodded. “Then you are our chief
engineer, get your tools along tomorrow, and extra tiffin too,
because we will be working after school.” Vikram was nodding so
furiously Manu thought his big head would come loose.
The soldering
business was just a ruse, and Manu came to the real point: “And
hey, do you have any old switches and wires lying around? Maybe a
cassette deck motor?” Of course, Vikram had everything, Manu just
had to name it. “Cool then, maybe you can finish making the rover
first thing tomorrow with Samar and Raj. Just get that motor and a
battery, a switch and some wires … but why am I telling you all
this, you are the expert,” Manu said slyly, and Vikram cried “Aye,
aye captain!” He had been transported to an adventure fantasy.
All right,
everything under control, Manu thought but when he turned around
Neha had gone off to her girlfriends and matters of the heart would
have to wait till the next day.
***
Next morning,
the class divided into three camps on its own. There were the
participants and the non-participants, and among the participants
there were the moon rover and water cycle teams. The
non-participants filled the middle row and the fronts of the two
side rows. The water cycle team occupied the last three benches on
the cupboard-side, and the rover team took the last three on the
window-side. It was Manu’s idea, of course. Neha now had to sit
with them, and Manu, without telling her where to sit hoped
fervently that she would take the aisle seat beside him. But Vikram
arrived before her, and sat down with Manu to show all the things
he had brought. It was a tactical mistake, Manu realized, but there
was nothing he could do about it now. With his motor and switches,
Vikram had the key to the project’s success. And since Neha sat in
front of Vikram, Manu could see her all the time unnoticed, which
wouldn’t be possible had she sat beside him.
When Uma Ma’am,
their class teacher, walked in, she was surprised and annoyed with
the new arrangement. It was her privilege and right to assign
children their seats and this simple, unwritten law had been
broken. “Who allowed you to do this? This is my class. You children
have grown too old to need my permission, have you?” she demanded
loudly. Uma Ma’am was big, but nobody called her fat like they did
Bajaj Ma’am, the stand-in maths teacher. Uma Ma’am had airs, style,
a short haircut, a fancy car, a fancier accent and blouses that
lassoed boys’ eyes whenever her sari pallu slipped off her ample
shoulders, which was very often. Uma Ma’am taught history and got
all the dates wrong. So, her lessons were very lively as the
students outdid each other to inform her of the correct dates.
But now, they were
very quiet. Some eyes turned accusingly towards Manu, but he
remained calm. Getting no answer, Uma Ma’am slapped the attendance
book on the table and declared that the whole class would be marked
absent unless she got an explanation that minute.
Manu stood up, and
turning on all his charm, apologised on behalf of the class (not
that the class had anything to do with it) and explained that
Rachna Ma’am had handed them this enormous responsibility (so, it
was Rachna Ma’am’s fault, in a way), and it was a matter of the
class’ pride, and not meeting her the previous day after the tiffin
break the students (not he alone) had decided to start work on
their own, knowing that she, their class teacher (almost a mother),
would always want them to win the competition and wish them all
success. And then he cast his eyes down guiltily.
Uma Ma’am’s ego
had been salved. With a saintly smile she forgave the change, and
the drama over, the class got on with “present ma’ams” and “absent
ma’ams”.
Manu found it hard
to focus on the lessons that day. His eyes kept wandering towards
Neha. She listened to every teacher wide-eyed, he noticed, and
congratulated himself for falling in love with the sweetest,
sincerest and prettiest girl in class. When the tiffin break came
around, he proposed another council of war, although there wasn’t
anything left to discuss. It was an aimless meeting and broke up
within minutes when Ginny came and dragged Neha away for something
important and “private”.
The tiffin break
passed, then the fifth period, the sixth, the seventh, and then the
final bell rang. The corridors bubbled with the sounds of dragging
shoes and hundreds of students talking together as the classes
emptied. And then, the two teams were left alone in the class. It
was the first time most of them had stayed back in school, and at
first, no work was done. Forgetting their rivalry, the two groups
shared meals and talked. Only Manu held aloof, pretending to be
deep in thought.
***
Then the work
started. Of course, there was more talk and merriment in it, but
what do you expect from 11-year-olds on a day camp?
Manu surveyed his
team’s goods with a critical eye. Neha’s brother’s old pull-back
car for wheels, check; thermocol, check; paints, check; motor,
battery, wires and switch, check, check, check, check. “Let’s get
this started,” he said and the others waited for instructions.
“Neha, you take charge of the moon’s surface. We will need to make
tracks for the rover to go round and round, but I will take care of
that. You just focus on the craters and peaks for now.”
“I will need more
thermocol to make the peaks,” she said, “and something sharp to
scoop out the craters”. “Of course,” agreed Manu, “Akshay, haven’t
you brought any cutters, and why only one sheet of thermocol?” Poor
Akshay was speechless for a while. “You said I was to bring a sheet
of thermocol,” he protested. “I said bring thermocol. Use your
common sense, Akshay,” Manu replied. “Now we will waste a day.”
There were titters
from the other team, but when Manu glared at them, they looked
away. Akshay was packed off to fetch more sheets, Fevicol and a
cutter from the stationery outside.
“Never mind, we
will make the rover today,” said Manu. He picked up the tiny
barrel-shaped motor and attached wires to its terminals while
Vikram touched their other ends to the blue-coloured 9-volt battery
he had brought. Wheeeeee, the motor whirred and everyone smiled in
delight. Its working seemed like half the battle won and even the
other team, Ginny included, came over to have a look.
“Vikram, you fix
these things together in a circuit with that switch, and Samar, you
get the wheels off that toy. If we are lucky, the motor will fit
into the spring’s groove and we won’t need to do much there. Now,
if you will excuse us (this to the other team, especially Ginny),
we have work to do,” Manu said.
Vikram had
everything connected in 10 minutes, and then making the motor run
was as easy as flicking the large white switch. But turning that
pack into a rover was the big challenge. The wheels of the toy car
were large and chunky, and looked the part, but the thin axle
didn’t have any groove to fit the motor’s pin into. Raj said they
could make it a three-wheeled rover, with the motor driving a
single rear wheel and the front wheels moving freely guided by the
tracks.
It sounded like a
good idea and Samar pried one wheel loose, pushed it over the motor
pin and demonstrated the feasibility of the idea. But Rohan pointed
out that the wheels would have to be attached to a base if they
were going to build a moon rover. But how?
They considerred
using the toy car’s base, but it was designed for four wheels, it
couldn’t take a wheel in the centre. Then Manu said all moon rovers
had four wheels, and they wouldn’t make a ‘moon rickshaw’ either.
So the car’s base was all right, but the problem was, how to attach
the motor to the axle?
Akshay came back
with the goods and a packet of chips to wriggle back into favour
with Manu. But it was past 3pm, and Neha had a Bharatnatyam class
to attend. So they all called it a day and went home, promising to
come early the next morning and get cracking. Before leaving, they
locked up their material in a cupboard casting a suspicious glance
at the water cycle team.
***
When Uma Ma’am
arrived next morning, she was horrified to find the floor littered
with thermocol beads. It was a sunny morning and the breeze coming
in through the open windows swirled the beads around. The moon
rover team had been hard at work since 7am, and on the last desk
there was a grey and black representation of the moon’s surface
complete with craters and peaks. Neha had finished her end of the
job. Ma’am came up to have a closer look at it and forgot the
untidy floor. “Good job, children,” she said, “is it over
then?”
“No, Ma’am, we are
still working on our rover,” said Manu, “it is to be a working
model and so it’s very challenging”. It really looked like a
challenge with the motor and battery stuck on a thick thermocol
square that dwarfed and hid the wheels underneath. It looked more
raft than rover. They still hadn’t been able to get the wheels
running.
On the other side,
the water cycle model was coming along nicely, although as Manu put
it, it was very boring. They had painted their base sheet green to
show a meadow, and stuck little plastic cows and sheep on it. In
the middle was an impossibly blue pond shaped like an amoeba, and
from it three wires zig-zagged vertically to show evaporation. They
were making a few smaller, white amoebas to represent clouds, and a
hut to put on the meadow, and God knew what else. It was going to
be a very picturesque model but “totally girlish and boring”, Manu
kept repeating out of Neha’s earshot.
In the third
period, Rachna Ma’am also surveyed the models, and felt even more
doubtful about Manu’s idea. “We are almost there Ma’am,” he assured
her, “the wheels, the motor, everything’s working perfectly and
it’s just a matter of joining them together. We will be done in a
day or two”.
How wrong he
was.
Neha’s moonscape
waited patiently for the rover to arrive. Every afternoon Akshay
rushed off to buy more thermocol and it was promptly cut into
squares to make the rover base, but every time the base cracked
under the weight, or was cut so roughly that it had to be thrown
away, or they got the size of the motor wrong, or made one of the
wheel wells too big. There were mistakes and more mistakes.
When they tried
running it with a wheel stuck to the motor, there wasn’t enough
clearance for the motor and it touched the base. One time, they got
the whole ugly thing to run a few inches but as soon as it hit a
turn, it stopped. They realized the tracks they had carved were too
rough, and decided to smooth them with a hot blade. It seemed like
a good idea at first, but then, sometimes the blade got too hot and
the thermocol shrank and curled, while at others it wasn’t hot
enough, so the thermocol melted and stuck to it. And all the while
a river of candle wax flowed on the last desk.
Friday came, and
Manu again told Rachna Ma’am it was just a matter of a day or two,
but she wasn’t bothered any more. The girls had finished their
water cycle model, it was beautiful to look at, their charts were
neatly drawn and the whole had been stored safely on the top of a
cupboard in the science lab for the big day.
The first battery
ran out during trials, and it was an expensive one. Manu cajoled
Vikram to get another. Their parents were tiring of the incessant
demands for the project, and the team, barring Neha, was turning
irritable. Manu most of all. On Thursday, the second week, and two
days before the exhibition, he had another idea. He tore two gears
out of the toy car Neha had brought and stuck one of them to the
motor’s wheel with instant adhesive. The other he attached to the
wheel axle, and now the motor was raised sufficiently for the rover
to run without its parts scraping the bottom. However, they still
couldn’t make it go around the bends. The motor, they realized,
wasn’t powerful enough.
It was Vikram’s
fault, Manu decided. He should have brought a better motor. “But
this is the only one I have,” the other boy protested. Things were
looking ugly, and realizing that Vikram would walk out with his
things, Manu patted him on the back and said he was just
kidding.
Would Neha please
make another moonscape, with wider tracks at the curves? “No way,”
she said. She had had her fill of the project. Manu didn’t even try
cajoling her. He had to think about their shared future. So then,
it was all over. He looked at his weary friends. Samar was still
game, but the others he couldn’t count upon. He was in for some
embarrassment, he realized, unless he could find a face-saver.
Rachna Ma’am had stopped asking him about his project’s status
completely. “Say, should we make a boat? We have a motor, and Raj
will bring a tub, and…”
“Who said I will?”
snapped Raj. Manu’s aura had worn thin, if he tried using it any
more, it would tear.
“All right, forget
it. Go home if you want to.” Nobody moved, so there was just a
little bit of loyalty and team spirit left. Manu searched
desperately for inspiration. He had half a sheet of thermocol, a
motor, a fresh battery, wires and a switch, and four wheels too.
What could he make with them? He walked up and down the class. He
picked up one little piece of wire and started chewing on it. He
walked out of the class, and when he came back the others hadn’t
moved from their places.
***
Manu stood at
the door and turned on the fans, raising howls of protest from his
team. Then he turned on all the lights, and said “ding-dong, wake
up, wake up”. They became children again and laughed. Then he
noticed the middle switch. It had been there since before Manu came
to Sunrays but he had never paid any attention to it. He thrust the
little piece of wire he had been chewing into the positive and
negative terminals of the socket, stepped back and turned on the
switch. Bam! A long tongue of fire leapt out of the socket and
nearly struck Manu’s outstretched arm. He froze in fear. He knew he
had done something wrong and dangerous, and he had done it in front
of witnesses. Maybe his parents would be called to meet the
principal, his good reputation would be in tatters.