BACK TO SCHOOL: The Power of a Teacher.

A phone-call to say a school needed an Administrator, would I be interested? Ten minutes to make a decision. A government-aided school (and a small non-aided one sticking to it), not a fancy salary, but it’s not far from my home. I will be able to make a small difference in the life of some little ones. I say ‘yes’. Since that day in mid-June, my world has changed. I have to get up and out of the house just after dawn. The clouds and rain don’t allow me to guess the time, so I keep looking at my phone (my collection of winding and batter-run watches rest in a wooden box, regularly serviced and gloated over, but now seldom used on the wrist). I carry a bag with a tiffin, a water-bottle and a napkin. Pens, pencils, erasures nestle alongside the notes and coins in my purse. My house-key has a companion: the office-cupboard key. I see things differently already. The flooded roads remind me that three-year-olds can easily be sucked into drains and drowned. One morning, as I take a left turn at a signal—very, very slowly, because it’s pouring heavily and visibility is poor-- a scooter-driver wanting to overtake from the wrong side bangs hard into my vehicle and falls head over heels on the road. I get out, to find that her young son has also fallen down. I help her park her scooter and take both to the hospital. She tells me she was rushing because she was late. I tell her she’s fortunate to have got away with minor injuries. I phone her husband to fetch her. Driving back, drenched, I make a mental note to tell ‘my’ teachers and students to follow traffic rules and be careful. It’s only later that I remember ‘insurance’. Like I said, I see things differently already. The girls’ toilets bother me. They are at the back of the building, the way to them camouflaged by grass in which I know reside snakes and other crawlies. They are tiled and the plumbing is in order, but the method of cleaning leaves them slippery. The woman who cleans them believes that water and phenyl must be poured and swept off with a coconut-stem broom. Scouring and scrubbing are unknown. Keeping the floor dry is an alien concept. The boys’ toilets are no better. I have a long way to go, I sigh to myself. The stores are places of mystery. Mould-covered white-ribbed cricket-leg-pads embrace hollow, faceless tablas. Crumpled still-glittering ribbons, frayed plastic festoons, a discarded sink, an unused gas-stove, a jerry-can filled with foul-smelling liquid and hundreds of bundles of unlabelled papers have been pushed into closed cupboards and open shelves. Untidy, grimy, slimy, ugh. There’s one store behind one toilet, another opposite a teacher’s office, yet another behind the same office. A clerk tells me the story of each piece of scrap as I go along, sniffing dust and mites, and fungi-spores, breaking cobwebs and tradition. None has ventured into this hallowed space for a long, long time. I touch the corner of a mossy wall and get a mild shock. There’s a crisp plastic near it. I move it aside and find the water-pump. It’s new, works well. I touch the wall again, no shock. Did I imagine it? Will try again with a tester, I decide. Work is worship, I remember these words from somewhere. I dress and talk formally, so unlike me, to remind myself that I will not take the smallest thing casually. I go through files, manuals, speak to students and the security guard to familiarize myself with the environment. I’ve never been a teacher, and my school journey ended forty-five years ago, before 10+2 started. We wrote with fountain-pens and hadn’t heard of traffic-jams. One ‘difficult’ student is talked about. Some teachers tell me they’ve taught his father in this same school. The student lost his mother early in life, the father married her sister and she, too, died in childbirth. How are the teachers going to deal with his misbehavior? In our times, our teachers were soft-spoken and kind; but our Head-master was allowed to use the cane and he believed that sparing the rod would spoil us. In these times of no corporal punishment but roughness in tone and choice of words, I guess disciplining young ones is a challenge. A far greater challenge, the teachers tell me, is that all students, irrespective of ability, effort or talent—or the lack of any—have to be promoted from class I to VIII. In class IX, therefore, it comes as a shock to some parents and their wards, that they’ve learnt almost nothing after attending six hours of school nearly two hundred days a year, for eight years. I had (still have) friends who were bright and friends who were duffers, friends thin and fat, tall and short, cheerful and whiny, failures and successes. I agree with the teachers. One day, a snake visited my office. Mr Krishna, sent by the Forest Department in response to my call, arrived in fifteen minutes. “It’s a boa,” he said, picking it up and offering it to me, “non-poisonous, harmless.” I decide to introduce it to the students. I carry it, to set an example of overcoming fear, to the classes and ask the children to touch it with a finger. Some are bold, others back away. But in every class, I notice, every child turned to the teacher to see her reaction. If she was calm, they were calm. If she squealed, they squealed. When I invited them to come closer, they looked at Madam for approval. When I explained to them that the creature was harmless, they turned to her to check whether that was true. They trusted their teacher. Only her. We were strangers, we were outsiders. She was part of their world, she moulded them. Whatever a teacher does or says echoes in eternity. I am here, writing, or working as Administrator, because long years ago, some teachers did a sincere job. I bow in thanks to them, and to my parents for leading me to their capable hands. So my new adventure has begun. I go to school every morning with humility in my heart and a prayer on my lips… and skip of joy in my heart for the chance to make a difference to young lives. Wish me luck, dear readers.