The question, of course, was on everyone's lips. I'm not sure which one it was, I hadn't the time to find out. I know when I fetched my daughter from the test centre that she had flung her notes into the passenger seat (despite my stern warnings against her throwing things in the car) and refused to speak to me for the first five minutes of the ride. Gradually as we headed down Dunearn Road she opened up, and I learned through her that it had stumped her friends too. I asked her if she had asked Cheryl, whom she had studied together with one time, and whose mother had told me she was on the Dean's List, and my daughter made a face so black I could not help but turn away from it and smack my lips in anger. It seemed as if the question had eluded even the brightest of their batch. It was a real conundrum. All the way home, it hung over our heads like a thundercloud.

I asked my daughter if she thought she would be getting an A. "Not after that!" she pouted. "Who'd have the heart to finish the paper after a question like that?" She stormed into her room the moment I unlocked the front door, and I heard the echoes of things thrown against the walls: books, stationery, stuffed toys, pillows.

Using the family iPad, I checked the parents' WhatsApp group for answers. The other mums were also in a tizzy. All their children had been thrown into a state of deepest disorder. The parents of the confident kids said that they had been reduced to sobbing wrecks, and the parents of the shy kids said that they had returned home incoherent and screaming. The smart kids seemed to have had it worst: they had become nonverbal upon their return, apparently sinking into a malaise so deep that speech therapy might have been needed after the semester was over. The ones who seemed to be the least affected were the kids who had never been very bright: but even they had not escaped the collateral damage of the psychic trauma of the question, and they evaded all attempts to discuss it, having witnessed so many of their friends lost to the great night of its uncertainty.

So disastrous was the impact of the question, in fact, that Auntie Sharon (who ran a photocopying shop) suggested that we should throw ourselves upon the task of solving it. But even that was no easy matter. No copies of the question existed, the papers having been destroyed by the exam's invigilators, in accordance with Ministry policy. Neither were the children able to provide a coherent question of their encounter with the question, even when coaxed with promises of screen time and ice cream, or questioned under duress. Nor had the question appeared in previous ten-year-series, assessment books, or official syllabi, as determined by Auntie Sharon through extensive consultation of her own photocopy shop's magnificent archives. In a striking feat of originality, the question itself seemed pulled out of all academic context, or even time and space itself; the examiners had really outdone themselves, this time.

I proposed, gleaning from my daughter's own reticience, that a semblance of the question could be constructed from all the students' attempted answers, after which the right expert could be consulted to solve it. But our initial attempts produced nothing but more confusion. Of the children who were lucid enough to reply, their reported answers ranged bewilderingly from the literal to metaphorical, from the simple to the verbose, even from the textual to the numerical. With not even any agreement as to where the answers lay, the parents became distraught, with more than a few quitting the WhatsApp group in frustration, or descending into unintelligible rants. Calmer heads reflected worringly that if the question of the question could not be solved by midnight, then the cumulative damage it had wrought would continue until the next day, and result in disaster for the rest of the examination season. With pain mounting in my head, I retreated, into the solace of my bedroom, closing the door to mute the noises of my own daughter, which had already passed through three of the five stages of grief, and was settling into a dull depressive moan.

By eight p.m., there was news of an official advisory. So inundated by calls had the education board been that they released an official statement on the day's exam, all but confirming that the question had left its indelible mark on the minds of students and parents nationwide. The question had thrown the nation into disarray. Sales of medications had spiked islandwide, and lines for all the clinics had stretched around the blocks, spilling into the streets. Medical certificates for the next day were being handed out faster than they could print them. To address the real and present threat of the collapse of the education system, the Ministry had seen fit to release publically a list of all the questions for that day's exam, though not the answers -- lest their strict code of academic rigour be breached for so fleeting a matter.

In a matter of minutes, the file had found its way into our group chat. Me and my husband fed it through our home printer with mounting fear. He himself already had his glasses on -- calculator, encyclopedia, printer paper, and pen at the ready. I myself was standing by with a pot of hot tea. We were interrupted from solving it by the arrival of our daughter, who had just recovered. She was standing in the doorway of our room in her pajamas and a bolster tucked under one arm. She crawled in between us and gave me and my husband a hug. Her foot kicked the question paper, which slipped under the bed and was not recovered until Christmas when the cleaning lady threw it out with the wrapping paper and crumpled old textbooks of last year.