DTEA- Sarojini teacher

DTEA- Sarojini teacher

Our favorite English teacher at School, Sarojini maam, is no more, but it still feels like yesterday when all these events happened..

Some memories of dear "Sarojini maam":

• 8th Class, 1986 – Today, Sarojini maam delighted us in the morning class. She delights us anyway by her presence – she is non-judgmental, patient with our deeds, not easily shackled by our cleverly designed irritations (“if he/she is rattled, we will harass that teacher” syndrome), and takes time to laugh with us. Whoever loves us, laughs with us simple. Anyway, she purposefully hid the back in a backbencher’s desk and then nonchalantly walked around “looking for her bag” and then claps. Yes, claps. And Voila!! – the bag beeps and leads her to the desk. I was 13 and mesmerized.

• 10th class, 1988 - An unusual lyrical Ballad for its era (“Lucy gray” by William Wordsworth – 1799). Sarojini maam comes to the class (her usual daily routine period class) and we do too (usual post prayer, chattering us). The day is different. We enacted in the crumbling edifice of the DTEA Lodhi estate class upstairs - lucy gray lost in a thunderstorm, guiding weary passengers lost in storm to safety. It’s not lucy but us – struggling in the storm. “And sings a solitary song; That whistles in the wind.” Yeah – that’s what she did. 

• 2012 – trek to Roopkund- 10000 feet - the highest pre-alpine meadows of rhodendron forest in snow here – the way at Bagua Bhasa is littered in snow and a thunderstorm howls – the guide holding our bags and running next to me holding my hand – we must reach that protective crevice. Face numbed to snow, legs slipping in hardened glaze of snow- Lucy’s voice comes to mind – singing hauntingly a memory that was heard 24 years back from my favorite, beloved English teacher. Singling pleading guiding to safety…lest you lose the way home like me..
From the poem:
“The marks were still the same;
They tracked them on, nor ever lost,
And to the Bridge they came.
They followed from the snowy bank
The footmarks, one by one,
Into the middle of the plank,
And further there were none.”

• 12th class – 1990 – year of farewells to close friends – year of saying “I love you” to all fantasized girls that one never had guts to say, and there is no time. Sarojini maam is no longer my class teacher, but we are enacting “King Lear” with J.Padma in lead role with her eloquent English (Bless her soul). And there, in that practical lab auditorium, with one of ma’am’s old students (Shelly) dangling precariously on the ledge with a Torch in hand, and Lear telling Shylock what a loved daughter she is, the Jester laughing, the auditorium in dark, flashes of light on Padma’s anguished face – the narrator voice of maam slowly dissipating the tragedy.

• 2010 – Tenkasi – Maam’s home – I and Sushma and my mom (Muthulakshmi teacher) visiting her. Showing their garden with exotic plants, maam quips “ this Tenkaasi climate…this soil..you throw anything on this land – it breathes life then and there” – her face silhouetted by the evening twilight of the beaming sun. My last visual memory of her, but thank god this memory that she lives forever in.

The land she nourished and stood by, the people she loved, the children she taught - where is she but in them and us. Sometimes, I sit and think about the futility of words, their inept hollowness in expressing a deep grief or their "falling short" in expressing a deep happiness.

I will remember how she was so kind and loving and compassionate to a poor, confused, and shallow boy like me, and to many others like us; and I will always remember how DTEA, and its salary, and its petty politics of an operational school etc never came in the way of her motivation and love for us; It could be a private US school, it could be an airconditioned Art and Literature appreciation class in a fancy school of Goenkas or Ambanis, and yet, (and even when it was not and it was my poor, dear DTEA, Lodhi Estate, who mustered all she could as resources and helped us thrive), the quality of her teaching and the love that emanated from her appreciation of reading those chapters or pages never waved.

If I read Loren Eiseley's excavation notes as an archaeologist, I thank her; if I read of Shiva sutras or Wordsworth poems or the twisted world's Le Clezio created in his stories, I remember her.. out there, hopefully glowing like a Star out there, happy that she could bring deep Joy in our lives, despite some immense sadness she went through...happy that immortality lives like effervescence in each life she touched..