The bell rang with its single stroke.

Everybody in the room hustled and bustled. They had impatiently been waiting for the moment for a while. The sound of the bell suddenly passed energy in them.

The exam invigilator was carrying a bundle of question papers in his left hand and distributing them among the students in the exam hall one by one. While doing so, he frequently licked his right index finger to pluck the sheets of question paper out of the stack one by one.

The students, on the other hand, had been anxiously waiting for their turn to get the question paper. With the bell’s clang, they whined and rattled.

Sanumaya closed her eyes momentarily when the invigilator gave her the question paper. She held the question paper on her chest and took a deep breath. She remembered that deep breathing was a way to calm oneself down when one felt nervous. She knew she would not fail the exam. She was good at Compulsory English, today’s subject. Again, as soon as she held the question paper, she felt her heart pounding, her breath swollen and her mind going blank.

She had been too excited about this exam because everybody around her—her parents, her friends, her relatives, her teachers—had been talking about it as the most important exam she had ever taken in her life so far.

Sanumaya opened her eyes and slowly read the questions on the paper. She knew that she had to keep herself calm. When she had surveyed all the questions on the paper, she realised that she knew the answers to most of them. Only a few questions were a bit difficult. Therefore, she decided to write answers to the easier questions first. Then, she would deal with the difficult ones later. She had always used this technique in her previous exams with great success.

A thin ray of sunlight had entered the room through the chink of the wooden window pane. It had landed on her desk where she was supposed to write. While trying to write an answer to the first question, her hands trembled. She composed herself with the determination to keep her handwriting neat and clean.

When Sanumaya looked around, she saw some other examinees nervously whimpering. The environment of the whole exam hall seemed tense. Those poor students might have imagined themselves helpless before the fiery ‘iron gate’, as the Secondary Education Examination (SEE) is commonly perceived in Nepal. Sanumaya herself was not feeling better.

It was the first time Sanumaya’s school had a chance to conduct such a highly prioritised and revered exam as the SEE. The students of ten other schools in the surrounding villages had gathered there to take the exam. Most of them seemed nervous. The number of parents and guardians crowded at the school’s main gate, back gate and surrounding areas showed how important the exam was for them and how much attention those people had given to it.

It was the first time Sanumaya had a stranger, perhaps a teacher from another school, as an invigilator in the exam hall. He was behaving strangely. She had been told that an invigilator in the SEE exam hall would be very strict.

“Dear all, do what you want carefully,” he coaxed his audience almost in a whispering tone, “But don’t try to drag me into the ditch.”

He said that he would inform the students about the exam supervisor coming towards their hall. Then, everyone would have to hide their notes immediately and pretend to be good examinees. Sanumaya thought what a clown he was in the name of an invigilator.

Not even the first ten minutes had passed when Kunal sir, their science teacher, appeared at the window panting and panicking more than his students. Hurriedly, he threw some market guidebooks and guess papers onto Sanumaya’s desk and ordered her to pass them to all her classmates. She did not need any of them herself, so she immediately thrust all of them towards the needy cheaters.

After a while, everyone in the hall seemed busy passing the notes to each other and writing hurriedly in their answer sheets. Slowly it became clear to Sanumaya that the invigilator was a teacher from another school and his students were also in the hall. He was trying his best to support them in the exam.

People started throwing handwritten notes and pages of guess papers in the form of balls and rockets from outside through the open window. Some of them hit Sanumaya’s left cheek. Looking out, she saw a big crowd of village boys running here and there, throwing note-balls into the exam halls.

The police personnel on duty, who were trying to shoo them away, were outnumbered and bullied. After a while, the floor of the exam hall was full of paper balls and rockets. The examinees could pick any one of them when they wanted and check if any of them contained the answer they needed.

“Where are my sheets?” Someone shouted in a corner of the exam hall, “Give it back to me quickly.”

Sanumaya looked toward the boy. He was Shailendra, a flirt in her class who often tried to impress girls. He was good at English, so he often passed it with good marks. He was better at his showiness. At this moment, he was asking a girl next to him, from another school, about the whereabouts of his answer sheets.

After a while, he was shocked to see that the girl didn’t have his answer sheets. The invigilator had already passed the sheets to the other students in the hall.

The invigilator assured Shailendra of bringing his sheets back. However, he did not find them in the hall. A boy at the last desk informed him that somebody from outside the window had snatched the papers while he was copying answers from them. The invigilator rushed to another room to fetch Shailendra’s answer sheets. Meanwhile, the exam hall became chaotic and unruly because no one was there to control them.

The invigilator returned empty-handed. Shailendra was now searching his answer sheets in every nook and cranny of the hall. Sanumaya was writing an answer to the last question when Shailendra started whining like a young boy.

When the last warning bell clanked, Sanumaya had completed writing all the answers. She reviewed her answers but did not submit her sheets to the invigilator until the final bell rang. After the final bell, the invigilator came to take her answer sheets and she handed them in.

As she exited the hall, she felt pity for Shailendra, who was sobbing for losing his precious answer sheets. She just could not understand why this examination was made such a big deal if the teachers themselves had to urge their students to act dishonestly.