My almost-memories of Miss Padmini
My first memory of Miss Padmini, as I came to call her later, was when I saw her leaning against our classroom window, chuckling, and nodding her head. Perhaps it was something about the new students like us, or the latest episode of some television series she took a liking to, or the papery bougainvillea scattered about the sunbaked playground; I will never know. I did know that she did not depend on anyone else for those laughs at odd moments, so, perhaps it was just another day of effortlessly confirming her tangible existence. Doing the self, if I may? I did not know back then that she could also do a fake Russian accent, and shuffle effortlessly between Alexander and Puru, happily distorting the story from our third grade English lesson, which she used to take, although this memory is borrowed from my mother. In class, we were deprived of the elaborate theatrics, but that did not make them any less ordinary. My second memory of her was when we were sitting in her class, and I was teaching a bunch of local slangs I picked up at my village home to the few friends I had at the convent school, when I heard her voice ring across the room to tell a student to stop digging her nose for gold. For us, fingers belonged inside the nose back then, a part of our very beings, but only a few of us were unfortunate enough to have been caught by Miss Padmini, who instead of dusting the cane on our calves or buttocks, would utter something which was cheeky and funny at the same time. I did not know that it was called sarcasm then, but lapped up her wonderful mockery of our banal habits, and laughed louder than the rest of the class as long as I was not one of her victims.
She carried with her a heavily freckled face, wore starched cotton sarees, and spectacles which settled on her nose, and had the most unusual responses to our mischiefs. I learnt later from my mother that she had been a diabetic patient her whole life, but was generously accommodating of the same while stuffing her face with sweets. I thought that it was really brave, to not give a damn about what the body needs, and give it what it wants instead. It was oddly liberating for a hypochondriac child like me, and made me question my own loyalties to modern medicine which I had by then declared to be my gods, while still wishing I had a pill to become just like her. I couldn't. It was impossible to even have a trace of her recycled, no matter how hard I tried to bring her back from the dead, or even have a part of that fake Russian accent dragged to the tip of my stubborn tongue. I often imagine accidentally bumping into her on some ordinary day, and remind her of the time when she gifted me my first dictionary on my birthday. Not that I became a writer or anything, but I do occasionally get into arguments with strangers on social media where knowing an extra word or two always helps. She might have looked at me, squinting her eyes, trying to remember me, and then I would have conveniently added about how my mother and her were once friends, and pause to stare at her face for that surprised look. We would then have wandered down some street with the best view of a sunset, while still talking about how big I had grown, and how she had stayed the same.
I have around forty pseudo-memories of her arranged clumsily inside my head, where I mostly get inside to mess with timelines, and have things go my way. That is where we run into each other most of the time, sometimes inside the familiar whitewashed classroom with a big door at the back, where she is narrating some story, and from where the little stone church by the school gates could be seen, or sometimes a memory modelled on the day she came to our house, and admired the orchard some twenty years ago which would be edited to suit twenty years later, where I am an adult, and quite knowledgeable when it came to mangoes. On Thursdays, I, clad in a plaided dungaree skirt, and she in a blue handloom saree, or a pink one, depending on my mood, always walked up the cobblestone road, to her home jutting from the far end of the slope. Irina Tokmakova would then pop up, after exactly five minutes of our walk, as I would drag the remnants of her book which I had read as a child, and remembered more as a grown-up, to fit comfortably inside our speech bubbles (sometimes, we were characters from a comic book inside my head) silhouetted against the skyline, as I pointed out to myself the winding road with wildflowers dotting the sides in their haphazard glory as the same one from Tokmakova’s book. One of these days, I will have to let Miss Padmini in on this private revelation, about why I prefer that particular road, when we can be anywhere in the city I wanted. On Saturdays, we would always be found seated by the large window of Hotel Ming, admiring the ashen tincture of the wooden frame, pretending to part the dust on the neat table with our restless fingers. The air inside by then would have become remarkably heavy, with the smell of biriyani gently devouring the vacant tables, coiling around our nostrils, as we would eat in silence, listening to the sounds of a chimerical afternoon. Or there’s my favourite one where she simply existed.
My third memory of her was when I had my mouth opened without any particular reason, and she promptly warned me to stop sheltering flies in there. I have had that habit of spacing out, but it was more than my mind being flung across the edge of the universe, as my mouth would betray me every single time. I was oblivious to the fact that it was so obvious, until I got to experience that familiar tone first hand. It was at my expense, and hence my laughter remained lodged in my throat, and I swear I wanted to instead swallow a fly that day. It was indeed sarcastic, come to think about it now. There was something strangely satisfying hearing her throw words around like she owned them, and just be whatever she was. You could make out that she was this grand sassy being, an oddity in a place where we were taught that perfect little boxes were all that we needed, and then she would come to our class and smash those boxes right there. I wanted to have a fourth or fifth memory of her outside my head, unalloyed, untouched, and a series of events where things were indeed as they were, without my own constructions to make up for the things which never happened. We do strange things to write obituaries sometimes, which ought to have been written a long back. Sometimes we need a few years to recollect, and another few years to struggle to come up with those (im)perfect adjectives. I once had a teacher, who used to teach us English, and I can count the number of memories I have of her. Twenty years later I struggle to piece them together, so I constructed some half-truths for the both of us. Miss Padmini, as I came to call her later, comes by every now and then when I go back inside my head, and we walk towards the sunset, and talk about how our discourses under the sky are too good to be true.