A SEASON OF TRAGEDIES               A PASSION FOR TEACHING

The suburban train from Borivli to Churchgate was a moving oven. Heat enveloped the overcrowded compartment like a tent that had crumpled up on people sheltering under it. Smell of sweat, dust and filth filled the air. In Nasik, four hours drive from Mumbai, people were dying from the heat. Mahahrashtra was burning.

In the compartment, two middle-aged men sitting opposite to me, their faces shiny with sweat, their teeth stained with betel juice, kept on arguing about Pokhran, Clinton and Vajpayee. On my left, a woman, her face over-made-up and the backside of her yellow blouse sodden with perspiration, and a lean man, constantly wiping his face with a stained hanky, talked in whispers as if they were hatching a conspiracy. They looked around suspiciously every now and then.

My eyes took in the surroundings automatically, as a force of habit. I was a video recorder set on record mode. The mind was recording, not registering. The oppressive heat made my body, deprived of sleep for several nights and
weakened by constant travelling, felt like a heavy appendage that I was forced to carry but really wanted to discard somewhere. My mind was like a festering wound, a throbbing pain wracking through it endlessly.

A death in the family had brought me to Mumbai from Doha and I was still in shock days after the funeral.Death, for some strange reason, has been picking summer to visit our family for the last few years. As the mercury goes up every summer, our anxiety level increases. Whose turn is it this year? But summer was always not so calamitous.

There was a time when it was like any other season. A normal time. Hot and uncomfortable but still a normal time, free of major disasters, personally speaking at least. But once summer turned deadly, so to speak, it became a habit with it. Tragedies attract other tragedies.

The curse of the summer began with the death of Veramma, the grand old lady of the family. Her end, though not unexpected because of her age and ailments, still came as a shock. But then it is so with every death. Every summer season has been bringing with it its own tragedies. The other seasons pass off quickly every year as if they were hurrying for an already late appointment. An appointment with death. With disasters.

Immediately after Veramma even before that year's summer was over came the turn of an uncle whose passions were Shakespearean tragedies and old Hindi film songs of Talat Mehamood and Mukesh. In some gloomy evenings at our sprawling Parli home, if one listens carefully, one could still hear him singing, the haunting notes echoing within the four walls of the house. The next summer, disaster struck us in Doha itself.

On an especially sultry evening, death, in the form of a speeding four-wheel drive vehicle, paid us a fleeting visit just to frighten us but not taking anybody back with it. It was just a reminder. A terror tactic. 'Don't relax, I'm still watching you' was its message. Our car was a wreck. So were we- but more mental than physical.

Yet another year, yet another summer. The scene once again shifted back to Parli and this time the 'dreaded visitor' didn't leave empty-handed. The victim now was the family's pride, a man who had made a name for himself in
his illustrious career. Now that the family had been dealt a body blow would the cycle of the summer curse be broken?

The answer came last month. And it came from Mumbai…

The train to Churchgate was going very slow now, as if the heat had sapped its energy. The engine seemed to have lost all its power. The compartment was unbearably stuffy. My throat was parched. My eyelids seemed so heavy.
Was it all a nightmare? Or was it the heat?

Weekly Gulf Times, June 1998

A passion for teaching
By C P Ravindran

IT was the farewell function for the final-year students of the girls' high school. And the students were all trying very hard to look cheerful, their voices louder than usual, their gestures more pronounced, often with a touch
of theatricality. It was to cover up the pain of parting welling up inside them, to forget there will never be a union like this in their lives.

And then this student got up and began to recite a poem written by her. It was about her favourite teacher, in fact everyone's favourite teacher in the Government Girls High School in Alappuzha, a Kerala coastal town which is
called the Venice of the East because of its canal network. The poem was about D Vijayalakshmi, a physics teacher then and now the headmistress of the school.

"You showed us the way, taking us by our hands…… you are like a sweet mother to us now," as the student read on, the sentimental words began to take on a meaning beyond their literary ones. There were tears in everyone's eyes and it was a moving experience for Vijayalakshmi, an experience that will always remain with her.

"It was one of the unforgettable moments in my life and I value that poem more than any other honour I have received," says Vijayalakshmi, an award-winning teacher, who is in Doha on a private visit.

She won the Kerala State Award for the Best Teacher in 1998 and the National Award for the Best Teacher from the Indian government in 1999.

"Students' appreciation and regard are more important to a teacher than awards," says Vijayalakshmi whose other achievements in her 25-year career as a teacher include the first prize in a teaching competition conducted by
the Kerala government in 1998, the Best Teacher Guide award and participation in several national-level project presentations in India.

She had always wanted to be a teacher. "It was my only ambition in my childhood. Maybe it was because of my father who himself was a great teacher."

She laments that very few people choose teaching as a vocation these days. "For most people now it is just a job, but it isn't. Teaching needs involvement and passion and it is extremely fulfilling."

It helps that she is married to a person who himself is a teacher. Her husband, S Gopinathan Nair, is a retired professor of S D College, Alappuzha. A first-rank holder in chemistry from the Jabalpur University, Nair is also committed to the profession of teaching. "A couple working in the same field have several advantages; their common interests make their bonds stronger," says Vijayalakshmi who is accompanied by her husband.

She feels career guidance is vital for senior students in schools. It is a field she specialises in. As the district career guidance officer, she counsels students and organises lectures for them regularly.

"It is so satisfying to a teacher when her former students come to tell her that how useful and rewarding the advises she had given. I'm so fortunate on that count."

But fortune is a word that has lost all its meaning in their personal lives now. The couple's only son, Hari Mohan, died in a car accident a few metres from their home on the night of July 2, 2000. He was 27. "Mohan was our
centre of existence," Vijayalakshmi says with tears in her eyes. It is a tragedy from which there is no release.

"Terms like luck and fortune no longer make sense to us," says Nair. "We can never come to terms with our son's death but somehow we have to accept reality."

Gulf Times, March, 2001