Ms. Fatima stopped. “Yes. Exactly. Arabic grammar isn’t a cage. It’s a musical scale. Once you learn the notes, you can sing any sentence.”

A metaphor that almost worked. Almost.

Slowly. But surely. Like every past tense turning into a present one.

Ms. Fatima closed her marker. “For that observation, Kabir—no homework tonight. For you, anyway. The rest of Class 10: exercise 12(b), all conjugations of fa’ala .”

Ayaan, sitting by the window, had already surrendered. He was drawing a camel in the margin of his notebook. Beside him, Riya was meticulously color-coding every harf and ism with highlighters, as if her life depended on it. And in the front row, Kabir—the class’s accidental philosopher—was trying to figure out why Arabic verbs changed shape depending on who was doing the action.

Ayaan wrote: Anti tadrusaana al-nahw . (You—feminine—study grammar.)

It was the tenth period on a Thursday, and the October heat had turned the CBSE classroom into a slow-cooker. Twenty-eight students of Class 10—mostly staring at the ceiling, the fan, or the last shred of their sanity—sat in Ms. Fatima’s Arabic grammar session.