She smiled to herself as she looked out of the balcony experiencing the serenity of mountains and nature. This was one of the rare moments in her life where she was at peace and at ease at the same time. The surrounding mist and the greenery gave her eyes the much needed calm and serenity. The quietness of the surrounding here was natural. It will not stand jaggedly broken at the end of an hour as it had done repeatedly, for years now. Lazing around and holidaying had never really suited her; she would feel restless and want to get back to investing herself in the millions of tasks at hand. As the aroma of the freshly plucked Darjeeling tea, lovingly made by her hostess for her house guest, wafts into her nostrils and seeps into her brain, she finds herself doing another rare thing; reminiscing.
It has been a long time and she has come a long way; from a young, active, pragmatic woman to an old, anchored scholar. Throughout her life, she juggled multiple things at a time; a teacher’s job, family, PhD; broken health, broken mixer, broken dreams. Jugglers, after all, break things once in a while. But she always picked up from where she slipped. She became the principal, propelled her children on their own feet as decent human beings, completed her PhD. Now, she has been that immobile rock at the sea shore to her students for years. They come back to her in doubt, in praise and in affection. In students’ journey from classes 1st to 12th, at first, as a principal, she intimidated them, then as a teacher she commanded their respect and then as a human and a nurturer, she gained their love and admiration. They knew her by her saaree and the fragrance of sandalwood, by the smell of tea from her office, by her way of treating them like the people she wanted them to become and by the importance they held over every other serious looking adult.
Retirement has been treating her well, she thought, at least for the one month since it had started. She giggled to herself. Retirement was a joke for her; she could never just stop and be. Her next ventures and adventures had already started taking form in her head. When her children came over for celebrating her retirement and suggested her to enjoy life and take rest, she didn’t correct them. Taking rest was not the same as enjoying life for her. When they gifted her this trip in the fresh air of the mountains, she gladly accepted and let them think that they had succeeded in keeping her away from work. She had something else in mind. It would be impossible to leave teaching, she will start tuition for anyone who needs it once she is back, she might even start a school for adults. Also, she planned to squeeze out the greys of her hair onto paper; the lessons of her life. She had given multiple lessons to innumerable students who went through her school, both as a teacher and a principal. No, these won’t be the lessons that you need to know, these will be those that she had learnt herself, from the toughest of the masters, from life. They might not prove to be of any use to anyone else, but she choose to believe otherwise.
Broken relation and tea gone cold can never be the same again, no rekindling, no reheating will help.
Oh, cold tea! Again! She is jerked back to the present with the realization that after all, she did not really practice what she had learnt; that is a different ball game altogether. She chided herself and decided to do a lot more homework and soul searching before she can get to a crystallised version of her thoughts. Falling back to her old habit in the new place, she pushed aside the cup of cold tea, put on her spectacles, pulled up her diary and pen and set to work again.
- Dhriti Bhatt
