Material Balance

“Ahh...!!!!!” She said, sipping the hot tea in the cup. She gently lifted the spicy looking samosa from the plate and crunched it between her white teeth, while her tongue savoured the taste of it. Her eyes suddenly threw a concerned look at the flow-sheet we had placed on her table.

She inquired, “Where is the material balance?”

Le....Gosh! All you need now is Material Balance. What the heck? I would have felt much better if I could release the thoughts in the form of words. Every other group had mesmerising clear concepts about the project from their guides, but our samosa woman knew only one single thing, “MATERIAL BALANCE”. I wished if I could bark at her, Ma’am can we know what actually we are doing in the project?

“Ma’am, I think we will have to do that again.”

“Is there any kind of dispute running over you all?”

Her questioning reply hit like a stone on my forehead. I didn’t know from where the word dispute arrived, all of a sudden. To each and every doubtful query she had an answer of her own that diminished our solving hopes and totally altered the direction of our flow through the project. Little did she know what kind of woes we had surpassed not only in starting but even for developing a taste for her silly ketoneous venture. Instead of steering our wheels orderly, she would rather prefer building up a pile of flaws of our sleepless late-night hopeful progressions, which I felt was not so sinful like she expressed with her chesty sentences.

“Ma’am, actually we have a doubt on the final flow-sheet you have proposed to us.”

“What...!!? I suppose you all had shown me the balance for this flow pattern.”

My replying explanation was overlapped right at the start as her mobile phone rang. This was not the first time and it didn’t surprise me, but once again drastically minimized the enthusiasm of an elated interrogation. Yes, we had shown her before, not once but thrice and that too for three different patterns. Each time we presented her so desired balance, the payoff was no different. She would just say with her flattering but self-swollen tone, See now, I am thinking you all have to add something more which I feel will result something much better and practical. Look, why don’t you add a small .........

Why didn’t she seem to understand that her tiny varying innovations per visit boasted of forcing us to throw away ten pages of turmoil to a trash and bearing an ass burning repair of her shitty crap? If she spoke so highly of her beloved material balance, she would really have to know how her time to time small changes can unbalance the whole material and our minds as well. And when I looked at her murmuring sweet voices over the phone, no offence to the one on the other end but I really wanted to relieve myself by fouling my mouth. Not only did mine, all of our four faces revealed what was boiling inside.

Finally, after nearly killing us to what we can call to be the last micron of patience or the first of an outburst, she hung up, gave a toothsome bite of her half devoured samosa and asked us, “What’s your problem, tell me?”

It would have been much more appropriate if I told her that the real problem was she, but that would have surely bankrupted our hopes for the marks. However, she wasn’t so humane in that case too, if referred to the infamous figures on our mark sheets of the last semester despite the hailed membranes we did prepare to save her nose from the others of her kind. But unlike her, I spoke projectciously.

“Ma’am what about the water that goes in through the scrubber? I think some quantity of it would be present in the product and also in the recycle.”

And then she thought. After one month of her profitless blabbering demands finally she got some seconds to think! Were there thirsty desert Arabs inside the husky equipment to finish off the water before it comes out from the column? She had already justified our balancing as correct where we had considered water effect as zero according to her.

She frowned and murmured, “Didn’t you consider the water before? You should have done that.”

It meant that time had arrived for use of the long awaited 20% solubility in water which she had only mentioned to note it in the diagram, but never ever confirmed its appliance. The situation also confirmed her necessity of virtual practicality, though her bookish know-how was out of question. But she wouldn’t lose.

“What have you done to the condenser here! Is this how you symbolise it? Being an eight semester student it’s a shame not knowing it.” She suddenly broke loose and disparaged at us looking at her deskmate.

“It’s okay ma’am. We will correct it.” Chiranjib sounded signalling me to fuck off from the atmosphere which was starting to grow stuffier per second. Our work was over. We had at last cleared our doubt which was pinching me right from the start. And in the context, we also danced a bit in the chance of lowering our unpleasant project queen, though we didn’t show it. But still, in the end we had a new and horrifying material balance ready to boil on our heads.