Tea and butter toast. Pix: From the Internet

It was 10pm. We had finished dinner, but we were expecting a visitor. My parents had stopped watching the news and my late brother was pacing up and down the sitting room. I was with my books at the dining table pretending to concentrate. I should have known this would happen. My table tennis buddies at the swimming club, who had recommended his name had also warned me about this, his late night appearances and his generally wayward sense of timing.

“But he is a brilliant teacher. He will make you love math. But it could also happen that he would disappear for days and then reappear suddenly, that too at midnight,” they had said.

“At midnight!” I had gulped.

I was lucky though. Since I was a girl, he had chosen a more ‘respectable’ 10pm.

So here I was waiting for my teacher Prodosh Sen, whom I called Gobuda, who was a career medical representative, part-time math tutor and passionate swimming director at Indian Life Saving Society, better known as Anderson Club, which I frequented.

He finally rang the bell at almost 10.30pm. I could see the throbbing vein on my father’s stiffened temples and that unsure look on my mom’s face about the choice of a tutor.

“Can I have some tea and toast with butter and sugar on it?” he asked while taking off his shoes.

Instantly the tense atmosphere in my home dissipated. He had asked for his evening staple. As if that convinced us it was only 7 pm.

My mother headed to the kitchen, father to the bedroom and brother to his room. Gobuda joined me at the dining table.

The class went on till midnight. When he got up to leave, my brother escorted him downstairs to open the lock of the collapsible gate.

He came up the stairs laughing.

“Gobuda started walking down the road shadow practising badminton. And the dogs followed him barking,” he said.

But there was no surprise there. Walking that 2km stretch in the dark of the night, working on his badminton moves was life to my tutor. He was usually walking back from a night show of a Hindi movie, if not from a student’s home or from a friend’s place after late-night adda.

My first day with my tutor

On the first day he came to teach me, I was already solving my Class X test papers. So I wanted him to solve five sums that weren’t coming easily to me.

Gobuda went from one sum to another, downed cups of tea, scratched out numbers on the blank sheet, mumbled a lot and then a solid one hour later he told me the sums weren’t coming easily to him either.

I could have been aghast at the shortcoming of the highly-recommended, star tutor. Or I could have quickly jumped to the conclusion that my own math standards were already so exalted that a seasoned tutor was struggling. But I just smiled.

He pushed back his disheveled hair and threw up his arms in a gesture of surrender.

“I couldn’t do a single sum, so you decide if you want to employ me,” was his candid confession.

“You are just nervous,” I said instead.

He looked at me sheepishly. I was 15 he was 33. The student-teacher tables had turned.

“Come back tomorrow. If you still can’t do the sums. We will see,” I said smugly.

That was exactly 30 years back. But that was probably the best decision I had taken in my life.

Photo by Thought Catalog on Pexels.com

The unconventional teaching style

Gobuda’s teaching style was as unconventional as his maverick lifestyle. If he got engrossed in math, he could sit there for four hours at a stretch, with his feet pulled up on the chair, not thinking once if the time devoted was proportionate to his pay.

He flashed a winning smile every time he solved a math problem or my mother got him tea and butter-toast with sugar liberally sprinkled on it.

I got 88 in my math paper in my Class X board exams. If the 100 per cent scoring young brigade is already laughing, then let me tell you, 30 years back that was really high marks. And to someone like me who had not scored beyond 50 all her life, it was really a big deal made possible by Gobuda’s passion for math and his capability to make me love it too.

But my association with my eccentric teacher did not end there. In plus 2 he taught me Economics. I did well in that too.

When I took up Sociology in graduation, I would make him sit and tell him what I had learned just to get an idea if I had prepared well. The same system continued in my masters. He never agreed to take a pay to listen to my passionate talk on Michel Foucault and Erving Goffman, but as long there was tea and toast he was all concentration.

Influence of teachers in our life

There’s no denying the fact that Gobuda was one of a kind, but in this article I want to focus on the influence of teachers on our life and how long-lasting that influence could be.

At South Point School, where I studied – which incidentally was the school where Nobel laureate Abhijit Banerjee also went – teachers were held in the highest esteem. They could slap, shout, rebuke, love, teach with passion, solve your personal problems, lend an ear to a complaining parent- they were like multi-tasking juggernauts who only had the welfare of the students in mind (without a question.)

And like Gobuda, they had their eccentricities as well. In fact, these eccentricities of some of our teachers became like legends that were handed down from generation to generation as classroom gossip.

But despite all eccentricity and oddity, their passion for teaching or their allegiance to their students was never in doubt.

We grew up respecting and loving our teachers with all our hearts and in all the years we went to school, not for once did it cross our mind that it was with our parents’ money that paid their salaries, an attitude that is pervasive among students in many elite schools today.

Our parents also never disregarded what the teachers said. They treated a guardian call with as much seriousness as we treated it with fear.

Read: Jashodhara Hanafi, the teacher who taught us love

Teachers in the online world

This Teacher’s Day is different from all the previous ones solely because teaching has shifted from the classroom to the virtual realm the world over.

As people struggle with the fear of a pandemic, job loss, forced lockdowns and suffer from mental health disorders, teachers are busy planning lessons, creating PPTs to make classes interesting and not for a moment do they forget to bring their appreciation and humour to their virtual class.

Some insensitive people have charged at them with the brickbats too, but unfazed by criticism they continue to do what they do best – teach.

Read: Short Story: A Teacher’s Lockdown Lessons

They have emerged as the superheroes of the new world. Happy Teacher’s Day to them.

PS: Gobuda still gives tuitions and his fan following comprises students who are settled the world over now. 

Gobuda with one of his little fans Barbie (Pix from Facebook)

Apart from our parents and immediate family the people who have the greatest influence on us are our teachers. But as we move on in our life pursuing higher degrees, careers and our ambitions we tend to lose touch with our teachers, who have had such a great role to play not only in our academic life but also in the way we think.

We all have had several teachers in our lives who have given us the wings to fly and have taught us to take on the world but there was one teacher who taught us how to love, and that was Jashodhara Hanafi. There is no denying the fact that some teachers in South Point School were more popular than others and she was one of them. There were plenty of students in our school, who had not taken a single geography class from her but they knew her, generations of students talked about her and if I may have the liberty to say so, she was kind of a legend in the long corridors of South Point High School, Kolkata.

Why? She was a brilliant teacher, yes. But as my friend Indranil Halder has written in his book Warrior In The Sanctuary, most students, especially the boys, had their eyes pinned on the silver key rings that hung from her waist and made a jingling sound every time she moved to write on the blackboard. The guys, who had made it a point to move to the front benches for her class, sighed with every move. The girls on the other hand were busy admiring “aunty’s” (that’s what we called the teachers in school) fascinating wardrobe of stylish sarees, her string of lovely danglers and her perfectly-plucked eyebrows.

When I look back and think of those geography classes I sometimes wonder, “Did she know what was really going on in the class?” To say that she did not would be insulting her intelligence. But she remained unperturbed, never got angry at the back benchers whispering, smiled and taught us chapters from the geography book that was impossible to forget.

She was extremely affectionate towards her students and this was something about her that I found more attractive than anything else. In a class of 60 it was not possible to arrange for return gifts when she was showered with so many on Teachers’ Day, but she at least tried. A gesture, I am sure, my classmates will always remember. She bought the entire class ice cream twice during our Class X session. Once, if I remember right, was on Teacher’s Day and the second time was on the last day of our Class X year. It was a small gesture but she was the only teacher to have thought about it. She watched us as we all devoured the popsicles and posed for photographs in our sarees (which we were allowed to wear on the last day) and obliged us as we wanted to click her too. She smiled, her dazzling smile, and looked at us lovingly, happy to have made us happy. My admiration for her grew manifold.

She continued to be my teacher in Class XI-XII. With time I realised aunty had an uncanny ability to gauge the mindset of the people setting questions during exams. If we prodded her for suggestions she would come out with it. But I often dared to take it too far. I walked into the teacher’s room during lunch hour handed her the geography text book and told her cheekily, “I will only study the parts you mark. So can you please mark it for me?” After a tiring morning session she was probably biting into her sandwich then but she would accept the book, and the boring task with a smile – her lovely smile.

I actually got into the habit of studying only what aunty marked, the rest I left out. So just prior to the geography exams during the Higher Secondary exams when I saw that my classmates were fervently going through a 20-page chapter of which I had just studied two pages, for the first time I felt a knot in my stomach. “School exams were fine. But what if aunty goes wrong this time?” I thought. I entered the examination hall nervous. There was one question from that chapter and it was from those two pages I studied. Till today I don’t know how aunty did it. But she did make my life easier by marking my fat books, a task she could have happily refused to do, because it did not come within the purview of her duties. But she always did it, with love and with a smile.

Actually Jashodhara aunty came to my rescue more than once. Although she never told me this herself, I found out. In Class X, the naïve and headstrong girl that I was, I got embroiled in something that I should have stayed away from. A female friend of mine was regularly writing love letters to a class friend of ours and he was reciprocating. But when his mother discovered the letters he washed his hands off the affair and put the entire blame on her. His father was well connected and ended up in the principal’s room with the letters and my friend was asked to leave the school. I was so upset about it that I actually confronted the guy for giving my friend so much grief. And the result? The guy went and told his father again and I couldn’t find my name on the first list of admissions in Class XI despite having the marks. Later I found out that it was Jashodhara aunty, my class teacher of Class X, who had stood up for me at the teacher’s committee meeting and ensured I got admission in Class XI. But she never for once told me about it.

After I left school I sent her a card every Teacher’s Day. But as the years passed by and I got tied up with our so-called busy lives there were years when I never realized when September 5 came and went. Till one day on a pre-puja shopping spree at a saree store I heard a familiar voice. Yes, it was Jashodhara aunty and without thinking, instead of touching her feet, I just hugged her. She hugged me back with the same child-like excitement. She was with our PT teacher Kabita aunty and both were indeed happy to see me. We exchanged numbers and I promised to call them and take them out for lunch post-puja.

A few days after puja I got a call from her daughter telling me she was no more. She had an accident on a holiday in Delhi. I had to hang up to take deep breaths and called her back. How did she get my number? “Mom had your visiting card. I found it. She always told me she really liked you.”

I hope she knew I loved her. She was one of the few teachers, who could love her students – unconditionally.

(I had clicked this photograph of Jashodhara aunty on our last day of Class X but thanks Arpita Mukherjee Mitra for scanning it and uploading it on Facebook. I have downloaded it from there.)