Zyroz Max

It was the first day of Class IX.

An excited bunch of students waited for the first class of the academic year. At least, I was excited. The textbooks I skimmed through during the holidays seemed mildly interesting, but it was exciting to be back in the same classroom I had studied Class III in. That was an exciting year, what with the discovery of girlkind (we were VERY early bloomers) and a classmate asking the class teacher if she would marry him. But that's another story.

He broke my reverie. He strode in, dark, swarthy, slightly tall. I say 'slightly' because it was all relative - I was a very late bloomer height-wise - he seemed tall to me. Come to think of it, so did everyone else. Anyway, a hush descended upon the classroom. He was new, an unknown quantity, and therefore something to be feared.
He stood in front of the blackboard and looked like he was ready to address us. I'll never forget his next two lines.

"I...am Zyroz."

And I'm thinking what a fucking COOL name for a teacher! Zyroz...Zyroz...I rolled the name around in my mouth. It sounded so cool. My hyperactive imagination took off. Maybe he knows Zaphod Beeblebrox, maybe his name is derived from a lost line of Mayan kings, maybe he's into death metal and we can bond and he can introduce me to substance abuse! Wow. And he must have had a difficult childhood - with a name like that, imagine the wait till your name was called at morning roll call! Traumatic.
And then came the second line.

“I will teach you Max”.

I couldn’t believe it. This dude was going to teach me ‘Max’, whatever that was. But who cares? It sounds so cool! Maybe it’s like some lost skill or art, passed down only by word of mouth from teacher to pupil, and has been for generations and generations. Maybe it was the code of some secret sect and we would be inducted by this dark, mysterious stranger. Maybe it was some way to discover hidden powers within yourself and hence, ‘max’imise your potential. Maybe…

You get the picture. Yes, I had a hyperactive imagination which would skyrocket at the slightest mention of any remotely intellectual activity. If you knew the company I had, you probably wouldn’t have blamed me. Anyway, I was preparing for a year of excitement and discovery; preparing to be shown a higher plane. Zyroz turned to the blackboard and began to write. Slowly, my jaw began to drop. Confusion. Non-comprehension.

“ We’ll start with Yinteasers”. Some how the coolness of the sound and the profound dumbness of the word he’d written did not seem to match. He had written:

‘Integers’.

It was like that track-in,zoom-out shot they do nowadays in the movies. It dawned on me, rather painfully. Zyroz was not cool. He was not going to show me the Way or the Path. He was not going to rescue me from...well, whatever it was I was stuck in. It was like my world had crashed and I’d lost all faith and hope. Thankfully, Mr. Jairaj’s Maths classes didn’t last very long, he left two excruciatingly painful weeks later. But not without leaving an indelible mark on a young boy forever. No wonder I became what I am.

I am still confused when a person puts a ‘laaang yeff’ in front of a Greek alphabet and asks me to carry out a mathematical procedure. And I get this vague feeling he might be talking about ‘fren-zay-son...