What happened to Farhan's notebook?

Farhan had written every chemistry note for two years in one thick blue notebook. It held every formula, every diagram and every trick his teacher had shown him, and his board exams were three weeks away.

On the way home from tuition, the monsoon broke. Farhan ran, but the plastic bag around his books had a hole in it. By the time he reached home, the blue notebook was a soft, swollen block, and the ink of the last forty pages had run into grey clouds.

He sat on the floor of his room and did not move for a long time.

His sister Nida found him there. She did not tell him it was all right, because it was not. She picked up the notebook, opened it gently, and began to lay the pages out one by one on the floor under the fan.

Some pages dried and could be read. Most of the last forty could not. That night, Farhan sat down at the table with a new notebook and began to write the lost pages again from memory, checking the textbook only when he was stuck.

It took him eight evenings. To his surprise, he remembered more than he had expected, and in rewriting the notes he understood several things he had only copied before.

Three weeks later, in the exam hall, a question came on a topic from those lost pages. Farhan smiled. He had not just written that answer. He had written it twice.