My mental arithmetic

The very name Dhawan used to send fear through everyone. One day I was in Shivaram’s section showing the amount that we had spent for the day. Dhawan saw me adding up the figures in my head and he said, “I see! Here is the proof that you did not go to college! Had you been to college, you would have used this adding machine instead of calculating everything mentally.”

Dhawan was joking because all the other workers were using adding machines and I was doing it mentally. I used to say the figures aloud in Bengali and they would laugh at me.