Aleksandra the Great’s Exploits

When Mr. Connelly told us to write in our books, I was shocked. You don’t write in literature. But I really warmed up to that, after a while. Today in my Post-colonial Lit class, we started discussing Midnight’s Children. The title of the first chapter is “The Perforated Sheet,” so we were talking about what that could mean, before you find out what it really is. Everyone thought of a piece of paper to tear out, and my professor enacted this idea on his book by tearing out a random page from the middle. One girl screamed. If throwing books is blasphemy, what on earth is ripping them apart? Another girl went further: a perforated sheet, she suggested, was something to be written on, then torn out and thrown away. So my professor crumpled the page and tossed it in the trash. I take his word for it that he won’t retrieve the page from the trash.