I Used to Hide in the Back Row

I had a system. Sit in the last row. Keep my eyes on the notebook. Never, ever make eye contact when the teacher asked, "Any doubts?"

Because here's the thing about doubts: if I raised my hand, thirty-eight people would turn around. Someone would smirk. And the teacher — not unkind, just tired — would explain it the exact same way she had the first time, the way that hadn't worked. So I learned to nod. I nodded through fractions. I nodded through the parts of a cell. I nodded my way to the bottom of the class.

The first time I used Abhigyaan's tutor, I was sure it was a trick. We were on photosynthesis and I'd missed something basic — what chlorophyll even *was*. In a classroom I would have died before admitting that in Class 8. But this was just me and a screen. So I typed it. The dumb question. The one everyone else apparently already knew.

It answered. Simply. No sigh, no "we covered this." Then it asked if I wanted it explained another way. I said yes. It tried again, with a different example. I still didn't fully get the second part, so I asked again. And again.

Nobody turned around. Nobody smirked. The tutor just kept going, patient as anything, like it had all the time in the world and there was nothing strange about a boy needing four tries.

That was the part that broke something open in me. Not the explanation — the *permission*. The permission to not understand yet.

I started asking it everything. The questions I'd been swallowing for years came out, one after another. Some of them were probably ridiculous. The tutor never let me feel that they were.

A month later my science teacher pulled me aside. She said, "You answered in class today. You haven't done that since Class 6." I didn't tell her it was because I'd already asked the same question to the tutor three times the night before, in private, until I actually knew it. By the time she asked, I wasn't guessing anymore.

I still sit in the back row. Old habits. But I don't hide there now.