Every family gathering seems to come with an interrogation, and "The Boards Syndrome" turns one into a small comedy. The speaker, a Grade 10 student, greets an older relative and answers a string of questions we never actually hear. We piece them together from the replies: the reminder about exams, the question about life after tenth, the doubt over choosing Humanities. The aunty exists only as pressure, a voice that has the speaker on the defensive before anything has gone wrong.
The central idea is the gap between what a teenager says aloud and what she thinks, and how tiring it is to keep that gap polite. The opening is textbook courtesy: "Namaste Aunty, it's nice to see you." But the manners crack almost at once. "You must be enjoying oldage these days" is a compliment with a sting in it, and "Exams are in 10 days as you reminded so nicely" turns "nicely" into its opposite. Even the apology, "Oh sorry was that rude?", is rude on purpose. The title's word "syndrome" frames exam anxiety as a condition, one that relatives seem to pass on every time they ask the same question.
The most important structural choice is the parentheses. The spoken replies run in the open, while the bracketed lines are private: "(See how her smile suddenly fell!)", "(How come she stopped smiling; was it something I said?)". The speaker plays innocent aloud and keeps score silently. The final bracketed pair, "(Ask about my hobbies too; I do have a life! / Oh wait, I'm in tenth, my neck is on the line!)", is the sharpest, because the speaker catches herself mid-protest and admits that even she has absorbed the exam-first logic.
The form suits this chatter. The poem is built mostly from rhyming couplets such as "days/says", "sure/cure", "well/fell", "great/hate" and "down/frown". The chiming gives it a bouncy, almost sing-song comic energy. Many pairings are looser, though: "you/brewed", "me/fifteen", "life/line". Together with the long, uneven lines, these make the poem sound like speech that has outrun its tidy form, which is what happens when someone is trying to stay calm.
The imagery is light but deliberate. Faces serve as the barometer: the poem begins with a smile, "her smile suddenly fell" marks the turning point, and it ends on "frown". Food and drink words quietly return too. The aunty's "freshly brewed" news at the start is echoed by the closing hope of "fresh air", so the outing the speaker was sent on turns out to be more gossip than relief. The hyperbole of "Perhaps I'll write a book or find cancer's cure" mocks the size of the question about "plans". The reply "How can I decide, I'm only fifteen!" shows that the sarcasm hides a real objection.
The one moment when the jokes drop is the Arts passage. The capitalised "ARTS" is a sharp retort, and the scare quotes in "I'm not 'bad' at studies" expose the assumption that choosing Humanities means failing. The speaker is fair about the other streams, saying "Science is too complex, and Commerce is actually great", which makes the aunty's reaction look narrower by comparison. Then the sincere question: "why does it get so much hate?" It is the poem's most direct line, and it is a real question.
The ending is the funniest. The speaker is so drained that Physics, which she called too complex earlier, now looks like a pleasant alternative, "though it is a bore". She turns to Mom with a mock-innocent question about why she was sent "down", which suggests she was packed off from somewhere else, though the poem doesn't say where. The question goes unanswered, just as the speaker's own feelings have gone unanswered all along.
The words "Namaste", "Aunty" and "boards" suggest an Indian school setting, though the poem never says so outright. The poem matters because it takes an ordinary, slightly embarrassing moment and shows the weight under it. It also stays one-sided, since the aunty never speaks, so we get only the speaker's version of events. That limitation makes the poem feel honest, because it captures how the conversation feels from inside it. Humour here becomes a way of surviving a question that sounds friendly but treats a fifteen-year-old as a result still to be announced.