‘With a Grateful Heart’
Day 2 — Like an oasis in the desert: a true friend.
Sometimes, all it takes, to drive away your blues, is one gesture of love and caring.
April 2018, was a bitter-sweet month for me. It was my last month in College. I was retiring after teaching for 29 years, in that academic institution. The tears were very close to the surface. I was the head of the English Department, and the men in the Department had a problem with ‘taking orders’, as they termed it, from a woman. They had also persuaded some of the women and girls that I was getting too big for my boots, and there was simmering resentment about my ‘domination’. Apparently, they found it intolerable to be told that if I call a meeting at 12, noon, they needed to be there on time. (How does a delay of 5, or 10 minutes matter, they would ask sympathetic people in the staffroom.) They also didn’t like to be told that they needed to read books and that what they had ‘studied’ when they were doing their post-graduation wasn’t enough. I picked up books from the College library for them. I also gave them my own books sometimes. They kept them all safe. At home. Unopened.
Result: mutiny. I saw it developing, and I spoke to all of them, in private and public, in a group and individually, over the phone and directly, so that matters could be settled. But there was no way I was going to tolerate tardiness and un punctuality. So: deadlock.
Consequently, it required a lot of effort and a lot of acting to keep my smile in place, in public. Music helped me: so did other colleagues. The irony was that colleagues from every other department rallied behind me. But not my own. That caused such a deep wound, that it has yet to heal, and I can feel my breath become shallow even now, three years later, when I remember.
On one such dismal day, my friend, Selina Shah, who is a Botany Professor, came into the staff room, and after signing the muster, she walked straight up to where I was sitting.
I paused in my answer paper assessment, with genuine thankfulness, capped my pen, and prepared to welcome her; she is always a breath of fresh air. She came to me and opened up a small plastic container. Nestling within it, was a breath of Eden itself. She had picked and collected fresh flowers of different kinds and filled the container with them. With a smile as beautiful as the flowers themselves, she extended them to me.
"Take whichever you want, Suma," she said.
I picked the two that I loved. One of them is called the Kaurava Pandava flower, because the violet filaments number approximately a hundred (Kauravas), the cream ones, are five(Pandavas), and the inside one, which is usually a single entity, is supposed to be Lord Krishna’s peacock-feathered headgear. It is the Passion Fruit flower.
The other flower called the Corupita, or the cannon-ball tree flower, or the Nagachampa, is also just as exotic. She knows that I like flowers and that I like knowing about them, so she always came with her arms full of them, whenever she knew our paths might cross.
My day felt blessed with the fragrance of love that Selina had filled it with. My life feels blessed because of the many wonderful people in it. The warmth and light that they bring into my life are so much more than the casual indifference that I see all around me.
Their presence and the love they impart with so much generosity make my life richer and more blessed.
©️ Suma Narayan
This is a response to one of the light-filled prompts of Ravyne Hawke’s publication, ‘Promptly Written’, for the month of November. Today is Day 2. Stay grateful. Stay blessed.
