Jamshed Kulkarni
I retired as a teacher from Montgomery High school, Bangalore, three years ago. In the early years, I taught discipline along with English. Discipline was not a subject offered at the school. It was a way of life. And it used to be very important to me - right and wrong, good and bad, the correctness and the incorrectness of things. I believed that as a teacher it was my duty to teach my students this
Then sometime in 1995, I set my grade 9 children an essay. It was a routine class exercise, and was titled 'An Important Lesson'. Five days later, twenty sheets of paper neatly written out were piled up on my desk. One of them did not have a name on it. Neither did it have a conclusion, the "important …show more content…
They rarely raise their voices at Seema and me. Seema is gutsy. Much more than I am. But even so, she's never been irritating or particularly naughty. Most brothers will die before they admit it, but I like my sister. We're good friends, for all there is five years between us. I remember, when we came back to Bangalore and she was born,even then my parents never let me feel neglected. For some reason at that time I went through a phase of being terribly shy. I don't know why.
I was friendly enough in Delhi I think, my friends and teachers really liked me. But for a while, right after we returned, I used to be scared a lot of the time. Of people and places and things. I couldn't understand why then. I can now. I'd tell you, but you'll figure it out for yourself soon enough.
My parents didn't laugh at me or make me feel stupid when I became afraid of my new school or of the dark or of strange people. They were nice about it. Terribly nice. They didn't give all their attention to Seema even though she was a baby. They told her she was mine and I was allowed to pick her up(in the topsy turvy way that a five year old could) and play with her. My parents never screamed "You're going to drop her!" Or "Stop coughing all over the baby!". Maybe that's why I like Seema. I never had a reason not …show more content…
Manpreet. She's Indian but lived in Geneva before her family moved here. She has beautiful hair. Thats the first thing I noticed about her. Its really long. The other day as we were all leaving school and laughing and shoving each other to get on the his, there was a lit of honkingband traffic on the road. That's always the case when school gets over. Suddenly, I happened to catch a glimpse of Manpreet on the other side of the road. She was holding a little boy's hand and peering anxiously into the traffic. The boy was wearing the school uniform too and had a little tomato of hair on top of his head, tied up in a navy blue cloth to match the colour of his shorts. It was only a glimpse, but I could see she was being protective of him, so careful. You could see it in her whole body, in the way she held his hand.
Then a van drove past and blocked them from my view. Just then someone pushed me on to the bus. I made my to the other side of the bus so I could see Manpreet and the little boy again. They were gone. But another image flashed in my head. An image of a boy with a tomato-on-his-head and a woman who held his hand