Full circle

Two years ago, at admission time, when I am literally swamped with frantic parents and work like a machine, hardly looking up from my papers as I go through the formalities, one woman, who had sat down in front of me with her daughter beside her said, ‘Suvroda, whom are you calling apni (vous in French)? Look up – it’s me, X, from the 1992 batch!’ The wheel had turned, and an old girl had brought her daughter in her turn to me. Isn’t this what is called the fullness of time?

Indeed, so many old boys and girls, now raising families but living far away, tell me their one big regret is that their children are missing the Suvroda experience that they still savour nostalgically, over and over in their minds. And I often say it is my great sorrow that Durgapur has never provided jobs to reasonably educated and ambitious young people, so 95 per cent of them go away – else my classes would have been full of the children of older pupils by now.

This morning an old boy from the 1990 batch came over with wife in tow. She told me that she has heard so much about me and so often that she sometimes feels she has attended my classes in person, and both husband and wife were absolutely determined their son just had to have a taste of the same. I am not often at a loss for words, but the kind of pleasure that this sort of thing fills me with – especially when juxtaposed with all the inhumanity and injustice that I have also suffered at the hands of so many old boys and girls who once averred that I mattered to them – that it is beyond my power to express. Thank you, whoever up there decides that this man sometimes deserves a bit of happiness too, and a reaffirmation that he has not worked in vain all his life after all.