I am not sure if it were the thunder and lightning, but something did not let me sleep after 2 AM. The pitter patter of rain drops on my windowsill finally got me off my bed. I cast a glance on the wall in front. I saw that it was almost 6 AM and decided there was no point in trying to sleep any further.
It was the start of another new year, the day on which another new batch of eager students join the Institute. It was also the day on which another select bunch of old alumni are felicitated by the Institute. I had seen the list of this year’s distinguished alumni, the famous ones, the night before.
It had been close to twenty years now as a teacher that I had been seeing such lists of the rich and the famous. Sometimes, the success of my students surprised me. Often, it left me desolate.
When I boarded the train that took me to the National Institute of Film and Theatre, I found comfort in a lonely window seat for the one-hour journey. I kept my umbrella under the seat and opened my bag to pull open a book that I had been reading since the past few days.
“May I take a seat here?” a man in his late sixties, with a cap on his head and a muffler around his neck, asked me after the train left the next station. He carried a bag on his shoulder and a newspaper in his hand. He had a bright smile on his lips which couldn’t stay hidden on his face despite his thick, bushy moustache and grey beard.
“Yes, Sure. I don’t own this train,” I said in a grumpy mood after a night spent half awake.
The man sat in front of me and kept his bag under the seat. He seemed to be eager to have a word with me, but seeing me stare outside the damp window, he held himself back and stared out too.
“J K Mohanty,” the man finally said. He couldn’t hold himself back and stretched his hand forward.
“Dr Arabinda Bose, Professor Bose.” I shook his hand with surprise and gave a sultry smile. Here was one gentleman who brought some light on a gloomy morning, I thought. I told myself that I should have been happier today morning, but the list of famous distinguished alumni had got to me again. I couldn’t justify this feeling I had about my own past students. I couldn’t talk about it with anyone at the Institute. Teachers were meant to be noble.
But every such list of the famous actors the Institute had produced had got to me for the past five years or so. Their celebrity status and my complete inconspicuousness stared me in the face.
I stayed silent lost in my thoughts not paying attention to my elder co-passenger. I pretended to read the book in my hand.
“Professor? I was also a teacher,” the man said after a gap. I looked up from my book at the man. His face seemed to emit a glow of a contented person, the reasons for which I didn’t understand.
With his tall frame which must have been muscular many years ago, a firm grip in his handshake and a flat stomach even at this age, he didn’t look like a teacher to me. I wondered what he taught.
“I see, what did you teach?” I asked.
“I am a retired sports teacher,” the man replied.
Well, that explains it, I restrained a smile within. Sports teacher, of all things! Does anyone really need a teacher for sports? Children play on their own, anyway, while a sports teacher blows whistles. I felt ashamed of the disdain I nursed inside myself but didn’t let it show.
“I teach films and theatre,” I explained, claiming the higher moral ground among teachers. Everyone says teaching is a noble profession, but I know that it is a competitive vocation, like all others. Mine was an intellectual area of art, yours is just a physical game, my body language said.
“Great, you must be having a lot of famous students, then,” the cheerful Mohanty teacher said.
I turned my pensive gaze towards the misty wet window for a moment. The cold, rainy morning seemed to be getting gloomier. Or was it just me? I wondered. How is it that the world always catches a fellow at his weakest point? I had suffered enough and more people enquiring about my famous students. Nothing irritated me more than such enquiries. Their fame, my obscurity.
I bent down and picked up my bag. I decided to quench the curiosity of this sports teacher once and for all, at one shot. I removed the list of distinguished alumni that I was going to felicitate today. I handed the list to Mohanty who went through it with awe, like everyone else before him.
“That’s a list of the who’s who of the film industry,” Mohanty remarked after going through it. “You must be a very proud teacher,” he added. I crunched my mouth.
“Yeah, true… but..,” I said and stopped, wondering if I should say anything further, especially given my current, bitter state of mind. Teachers are supposed to be selfless.
“But?” Mohanty probed. The world has a way of pointing a flashbulb at you when you least want to get out of the darkness. I stared blankly outside the train window for a moment.
“Well, nothing.. I was just saying that it’s always the actors, directors, models in the limelight. No one knows anything about their teachers,” I remarked.
I looked at Mohanty and saw a lump appear in his throat. He lost his smile, all of a sudden and bit his lips. He fiddled with his muffler and adjusted his cap to distract his thoughts, perhaps.
“You have seen the list of my students. Have you ever heard about me?” I persisted.
There was no reaction from him. No one tells anyone that they haven’t heard about them.
“The only time Dr Arabinda Bose appeared in the news was a decade back. One of my female students hit it big and, in an interview, said she loved me. Though she meant it only as a teacher, the press went bonkers over that for a day. No one bothered Dr Bose after the controversy died down.”
I could see a wise smile peeping from Mohanty’s curled lips underneath his thick moustache. But I did not pay attention to it, lest I encourage needless banter. I wanted to make sure that the world doesn’t get back to me again in the form of this old man Mohanty and his curiosity.
I did not want to entertain any more questions about my students from that list. Questions about their stardom reminded me of my utter state of oblivion. When I was younger, I pined to get out of my anonymity, but now I had learnt to live with being an unknown teacher of famous students.
He stared silently at me with what seemed like an inexplicable expression of compassion. He didn’t say anything further. I didn’t too. Good riddance, I felt for a moment, but didn’t say anything. Sometimes, it is best to be alone and quiet. We gazed out waiting for our destinations to arrive.
But the silence was killing me inside. Something told me that he would understand my predicament. So what if he was just a sports teacher?
“Isn’t it true?” I asked after a few minutes. “That no one knows the teachers?”
Mohanty nodded in silence again. His bushy moustache twitched slightly. I got a sense that he was getting what I meant.
“My students go to such heights. They become famous actors, well-known stars, the world is at their fingertips,” I continued.
Mohanty nodded again. He looked at the list of alumni again.
“Not that we teachers expect anything. A lot of it is due to their own hard work, of course. But do you know of a single teacher of any famous people?”
Mohanty realised that he was stepping on a minefield. But he still said, “No, but….“
“See. There is always some but ..isn’t it? No one knows the teachers who do so much,” I barged in and cut whatever he was going to say. I couldn’t stop my voice from choking. I turned my gaze away.
But Mohanty didn’t turn his gaze away. He kept glaring at me. I felt it bite my agitated mind. I turned my attention to the translucent wet window again, watching the cold, rainy tracks outside.
Mohanty sat silently and waited for his destination to arrive. He got off waving a silent goodbye, and soon, I was alone again in my seat, waiting for my station.
When I glanced around the empty compartment as the train left the station, I noticed that Mohanty had forgotten the newspaper on his seat, but there was no way I could give it back to him now.
I picked it up and thought of scanning through it quickly. My eyes were heavy, and I felt sleepy in the cold. A newspaper reading would wake them up in time for the events of the day, I thought.
It had the same news that I had been seeing every year during the monsoons. Headlines about rains causing traffic snarls in the city, and cloud bursts causing floods in the mountains. Weather forecasts being right in general but wrong in the specifics. I turned the pages quickly to see if there was anything interesting, when a small article on page seven caught my attention.
“Six get Lifetime Dronacharya Award,” it said with a photograph above it. The photograph had six men with three each on either side of the President. The tall man on the left looked like Mohanty. The bushy moustache and beard confirmed that it was indeed him.
I found his name listed in the names of the awardees as a coach of Judo who had trained many students who had then gone on to win medals at various events.
I looked outside the window, searching for Mohanty, but the train had already caught speed on the tracks. The unknown retired sports teacher had gone out of my sight.
Sometimes, life puts you in a situation where you don’t know whether to laugh or to cry. I waited for my station to arrive, my mind going back to him. I felt the mist in front of my eyes getting denser.
****