Medha Joey Chakraborty

Roll Number Seventeen

Every morning, his name disappeared. 

It wasn’t that he didn’t have one—he did. A perfectly good, three-syllable name his mother whispered when she combed coconut oil into his hair. But once the school bell rang, he was no longer Aashutosh. He became Roll Number Seventeen. 

“Roll Number Seventeen, stand up.” 

“Roll Number Seventeen, where is your homework?” 

“Roll Number Seventeen, late again?” 

He got used to it. Like the chalk dust on his shoes, the ink smudges on his fingers, and the way the fan creaked louder than the voices around him. 

He didn’t speak much. Not because he didn’t have words, he had plenty. They lived at the back of his notebooks, hiding behind pages of long division and labelled diagrams. Little poems shaped like rain. Dialogues between stars. One-act plays where the last benchers became heroes and the toppers forgot their lines. 

But no one asked what Roll Number Seventeen was thinking. That space was reserved for the loud ones. The ones with neat handwriting and fast hands during dictation. Aashutosh moved like an ant between periods. Unseen, undisturbed, unnecessary. 

Until the day she walked in. 

Ms. Roy. A substitute for English, filling in for the regular teacher who had vanished behind maternity leave and polite applause. 

She had silver jhumkas and the kind of voice that didn’t raise itself, but still made the room quieter. On her first day, she took attendance without looking at the roll list. 

“What's your name?” she asked, when his turn came. 

He froze. No teacher had asked him that before—not really. He hesitated, unsure if the truth would even matter. 

“Aashutosh,” he said quietly. 

She smiled. “Aashutosh. Nice name. Means ‘one who is always content,’ doesn’t it?” Something flickered in him. Not quite pride. Not quite disbelief. Just… warmth. The next week, she gave them an assignment: Write something that only you can write. 

Most of the class groaned. Aashutosh didn’t. That night, he filled five pages with a story about a boy who spoke to shadows. The next morning, he placed it on her desk and quickly walked away.

She returned it with red underlines. Not to correct, but to highlight. 

“You’re a writer,” she said. “Not Roll Number Seventeen.” 

He didn’t reply. But later that week, when the bell rang and someone called, “Seventeen!”, he didn’t stand up. 

Because that wasn’t his name anymore.

Words from the Author:

“Roll Number Seventeen” explores the quiet erasure of identity in rigid Indian school systems. It follows Aashutosh, a boy reduced to a number, whose creative spirit is ignored until a substitute teacher calls him by his name for the first time. This small act becomes a powerful moment of recognition, reminding him and the readerbthat every student carries a story beyond the roll call. The piece highlights how a little attention and empathy can restore lost self-worth and awaken hidden potential.”