The Dummy School Agreement

The Phantom Roll Call

Every morning at 8:30 AM, my name was officially called out in a small village school in Haryana. I was not there. None of us were. Two thousand names were checked off by a bored clerk who signed every register with the same blue ballpoint pen.

We were sitting in air-conditioned basement classrooms twenty miles away, solving kinematic equations while the State Education Department registered our presence among dusty wooden benches we had never seen.