Choosing different paths at NMKRV
Vijaya High School had given them their foundation. Then, for the two years of Pre-University, the 11th and 12th standard equivalents, which in Karnataka were called 1st and 2nd PUC, or Pre-University Course, both girls enrolled into NMKRV College for Women in Jayanagar, another popular institution in Bangalore South.
(A note for those unfamiliar with the Indian education system, specifically in Karnataka state, the 10th standard board examination, called the SSLC or Secondary School Leaving Certificate, is a major milestone. Students then spend two years in a Pre-University College, or PUC, studying either Science, Commerce, or Arts before taking another set of board examinations. These results determine entry into undergraduate colleges. The competition is fierce, the stakes are high, and the pressure on sixteen- and seventeen-year-old students would alarm most European educators.)
Shyla enrolled into Science stream. Biology, Physics, Chemistry, Mathematics, the standard combination for students heading towards medicine. She was, as her teachers put it, an exceptional student. Her biology teacher, a tall woman named Mrs. Saraswathi, said that Shyla had an unusual quality, that she did not just memorise structures, instead asked why those structures had come to be and always tried to understand the logic and concepts.
Radha enrolled into Arts stream, choosing Economics, Political Science, History, and Sociology. This was, in the social calculus of a 1980s South Indian middle-class family, a slightly daring choice. Arts was for students who had ‘not done well enough’ for Science, went the conventional wisdom. Radha calmly ignored the conventional, with the same calmness that she would later apply to ignoring bureaucratic obstacles.
They still walked to college together on mornings when their schedules aligned, catching the BTS bus, the Bangalore Transport Service, the state’s public bus system, painted cream and red, from the stop near Jayanagar 4th Block. Student bus passes cost a fraction of the adult fare, and they held theirs with the pride of small citizens. The buses were crowded, often late, smelling of humanity and diesel and the jasmine flowers the women commonly wore on their hair, and flowers the conductor sometimes bought from the flower seller at the terminus for photos of Gods in the bus. They would stand holding the overhead railing, swaying with the bus, talking across the noise.
“I read about a case last night,” Radha would say. “ The Geeta and Sanjay Chopra kidnapping case (also known as the Ranga-Billa case) was a kidnapping and murder crime in New Delhi in 1978. It involved the kidnapping and subsequent murder of siblings Geeta and Sanjay by Kuljeet. It was reported by a couple of people on the road that saw the kids being taken in a car, I mean .. just by some common people! “
“Appa says that is how most cases break,” Shyla replied. “Not dramatic revelations. Small observations by ordinary people.”
“That is exactly what Holmes says, though. The commonplace is what people miss because they are waiting for the remarkable.”
The exams came and they both did what they had always done, they excelled. Shyla’s SSLC results had placed her in the top one percent in the state. Her 2nd PUC Science scores were the kind that made college principals call parents to offer seats. The trajectory of her life, from the outside, looked like a straight and well-lit road to medicine.
And in a way, it was. But the road had a fork in it that nobody could yet see.