Woohoo! Finally, we were going to visit the Biology Lab. Class 9 was an innocuous period — Little did we know, little did we bother. Just like any other day, I dressed up and cycled my way to school. Bell rang and It was our biology class and the teacher entered the class. Professor Afsar Khan had a weird personality — witty and strict at the same time. We never understood if we should laugh at his jokes or not. If we did he might scold us and if we didn’t we might disrespect his joke. Despite this, he was a brilliant teacher. But an unusual thing happened as he entered the class, while we were taking out our notebooks he asked us to pack our bags. At first, we were confused because he has never asked us to do so but later we thought he would take us to the ground and we will play. Instead, we were going to perform an experiment — Onion Peel Experiment — in the Biology Lab. And, for those of you who don’t know, it was our first time in any kind of laboratory.
The silence of our class broke out and it seemed like a fish market — everyone was super excited, but our teacher had a dead look on his face. In a matter of seconds, we formed a queue, which otherwise used to take an eternity, and jollily marched through the corridor. And as a matter of fact, for students of boys school, we behaved the best. No one jumped the queue, none stopped for toilet or water break, and even the disinterested students were gleaming. As we approached the laboratory, our Lab Assistant unlocked the lab. As soon as we had a glimpse of the lab, our jaws dropped. We did not expect anything like that in our old school building but little did we know, we never saw a lab before. It seemed like Potions class from Harry Potter, there were jars of different specimens all around us. Skeleton hung by the wall, there were diagrams of plant and animal reproductive parts. Boys started to conspire about all of them and came up with the most unlikely theories and ambitions. However silly they seem now, they all made sense in 9th standard. I vividly remember one, a friend of mine claimed, on seeing a brain inside a jar, that the brain belonged to Albert Einstein which left us all in awe. While we were extending our eyes as far as we could, Professor Afsar grabbed our attention and started to explain the experiment.
He asked us to take a piece of chopped onion and told us that the lab assistant will provide tools. Professor Afsar asked us to start performing the experiment but everyone was blankly staring at each other because we were so deeply engulfed that anyone barely cared to listen. There was awkwardness in the environment and our teachers could sense it and they loved to feed on it, so did Professor Afsar. He gave us a piece of his mind, but he explained it to us again. We were asked to take off onion peel, place it on watch glass, then add safranin and let it soak. Then wash the peel with water, soak it in extra water, add a drop of glycerine and then examine it under the microscope to observe the plant cell. It might seem simple now, but we found an opportunity to mischief at each step. Aware of the danger that Professor is watching, we fought for a bigger onion piece with a tweezer as our sword and watch glass as our shield. In another corner of the laboratory, students were pinching each other with a tweezer, some of the students tried to create music by clicking tweezers together. The impressive thing was that Professor Afsar did not lose his cool, it seemed like he had already experienced all of this earlier as well. Once in a while, he took a check on us and taunted us for not doing any work. As the class was about to get over, he created two watch glasses and put it under two microscopes because we all were too busy with our own stupidity. He asked us to form two queues and look at the onion peel through the microscope. No one understood what they were looking at and what was the purpose of it. Everyone was having the time of their life while some students were still in line and the bell rang. Students in the queue looked disappointed but Professor Afsar allowed them to fulfill their wishes to look into nothingness.
We packed our bags and walked back to classes as if we had just performed a surgery. This was the most fulfilling day of our school life. And Period.