Today was our last unofficial Classics of World Literature class. We’re going to be off from college from Wednesday.
Our idc teacher didn’t teach us anything today, in the literal sense of the word. If someone from the admin was sitting in our class, he would have thought so at least. But the lecture he gave us was one of the most moving I’ve ever heard. He called it a confession, but I’m not quite sure what it was. It made me feel both special and insignificant at the same time. He told us about a major portion of his life, and tried to show to us what mistakes he had made and the good he had done, and the danger of exposing a child to something that he is not old enough to understand without any sort of guidance. Perhaps, because it was in urdu I didn’t understand all of it, or maybe he was just being vague about things; I can’t say. At times, I felt that it wasn’t the words themselves, but the aura around him and the rise and fall of his voice that was speaking out to me, and that made things clear. He has a very slow, steady way of speaking; never in a hurry and never having to pause between his words. This year had brought a lot of change in his life, he said. And this year he had spent teaching us. Somehow, there seemed to be a mild connection between the two. What was it though, exactly, that had brought him back to life? What had convinced him to end his seclusion of sorts?
He has a very subtle way of speaking – of glossing over things, hinting at points that perhaps he expects you to figure out for yourself. I felt at times that his conversation was too intelligent for me. It wasn’t in my league somehow. But I can say this that when he spouts poetry after every other line, it sounds good even to my unrefined ears. I know nothing about urdu shairi, and understand only the simplest of verses, but whenever he recited a shair, I could still enjoy some fraction of it just the same. He changed my outlook on shairi, that’s for sure. I can listen to it now instead of cringing from it like before. I still blank out my mind when somebody reads out a shair, but now there is an inner voice that’s listening all the same.
When before I talked about hinting at things, I was particularly thinking about when he said that he had often told us many stories and accounts, and that at times a person is telling something from his own experience but he puts someone else’s name to it. I instantly tried to recall anything which could have belonged to his life that we had never realized before. But as my friend said to me later, he was telling his own life story, but the way he said it, you could hardly tell he was talking about himself. So true!
I still can’t put a name to the feeling his lecture aroused in me. I only know that it put my mind in a frenzy and made me restless. I wouldn’t be able to breathe freely until I had put all my feelings down somewhere. But this isn’t half of it. I experienced much more at the moment, much more that has now escaped from me and buried itself in my sub-conscious. Perhaps it’ll come forward again some time in my life and I’ll remember something he said, or relive the emotions that flowed within.
How easily he said that in the past year or before that, mujhe kuch smjh nhi aya, kisi cheez ki bhi! What was that supposed to mean? He talked to us as if he was one of us, not someone who was above us on so many levels. But the best part is how he does not take us for an immature bunch of kids like other teachers normally do; it's as if he actually respects us for who we are as individuals and encourages our opinions and ideas - he never tried to impose his reasoning on us and made us think for ourselves.
I could go on talking about him, and the times we’ve spent with him in class. But the central idea is, I don’t know him at all! I know absolutely nothing about him; he is one of the most enigmatic figures I have ever come across in my life. He said that he was weak and he had made countless mistakes and bad decisions in his life. But all I know and believe about him is that he has a beautiful personality. It is the only statement about him that I can make with certainty. I am full of questions about him; I want to know about things he has seen and felt and gone through. But I am afraid that any question I put to him will be crude and uncouth. His style is not direct, you see. Perhaps my questions will make him uncomfortable. Or, more likely, his answers will be too complicated for me to understand. How can you break through to a person who is so well-guarded, who has built fortresses around himself that seem impossible to penetrate? And he is a teacher after all! Much older than I. I cannot think of him on the same plane as myself. How can I learn from him? It seems to me that he has stores of information about everything in life. How could one try to extract anything from it? I don’t know how to ask. I don’t even know if I have the right to ask. Maybe the whole point of things will be lost if I ever do.
He pointed out his flaws and his mistakes and the wrongs he had done. And yet, I idolize him. I idolize him for those mistakes and those wrongs. I idolize the man who recognized his own self and had the pluck to accept it. He’s the best teacher I’ve ever had, and I don’t think I’ll meet someone quite like him again.
