My first memory of school is of walking to my classroom on the ground floor, holding on to Mrs Gilbert’s hand for dear life one chilly January morning, after our first ‘assembly’. My friend said that he too had the exact same memory. There were 40 boys in our section. Surely Mrs Gilbert couldn’t have escorted each of us separately. We must have marched behind her single file. But what she gave us was the sense of safety, that she had all of us by the hand.
This is what good teachers do, apart from teaching you to read, write, add and subtract, they impart to you the illusion that whatever dreams you may have are attainable. They have got your back. However meager your talents, in their eyes you are always a winner. With that sentiment, I think today I will celebrate a few of the special teachers in my life.
Lima Kanungo passed away last August after a brief illness, way, way before her time. And then there was Anuradha Marwah. These were the two teachers in college who mentored me and taught me the rudiments of writing fiction for the next three years, as I completed my BA in English Honours. In the intervening quarter of a century since I graduated, I had, more or less, lost touch, with both of them. I had never told Lima how important an influence she was on my formative years as a writer. I always thought there would be time.
I would show both Lima and Anuradha my stories and they would take out time from their busy schedules to critique them, and go over them para by para. Once in a while, they would compliment me on a sentence and I would be happy. In fact, Lima was the first person who told me that I was actually a writer and would never stop being one.
Anuradha Marwah’s first novel The Higher Education of Geetika Mehendiratta had come out around that time, and I would read it several times. One of the first Indian campus novels in English, it is now a cult classic. From her, I learnt how social commentary in fiction plays as large a role as plot and character development to make it memorable.
Even today when I read a story by a young writer, a shy but ambitious 20-21-year-old from Patna, Pune or Kottayam, I think of myself 30 years back, and of Lima and Anuradha, and I pass on the wisdom I acquired from them, mostly about structure and tone. Also mentored by these two were Arnab, a batchmate, and Najeeb, a year senior to us. The three of us, for a while, became co-editors for our college magazine. All three of us got an education in the art of writing – for which nowadays students studying creative writing and journalism in private universities pay good money – absolutely gratis. We got it all for free in ‘socialist India’.
So many of us from the towns of Bihar, UP, Haryana, Rajasthan and Punjab who had come to Delhi with dreams of becoming a writer one day, must have our own Limas and Anuradhas. This must hold true not just for us and Delhi University, but for others and Bombay University, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Patna University, Allahabad University, Bangalore University, Banaras Hindu University, Jadavpur University… with one or two teachers in all these institutions who first told them that they could write.
And for a writer that is enough. The heartbreak, they can manage on their own.
The writer is author of A Patna
Manual of Style: Stories
