If I can credit someone with changing the course of my life,
it’s Miss Lumena, my 10th Standard English teacher.
I think she barely noticed me in class during the first
term, and I too didn’t do much to attract her attention.
At the beginning of the second term, we were given our
corrected exam sheets of the previous term to inspect. We were supposed to go
through them, point out errors by the teachers like an answer marked
incorrectly, or a totalling mistake, or an answer left unmarked, and get them rectified.
As I went through my English exam sheet, I noticed a note in
the margins of the essay I had written: “This deserves to be published in the
school magazine.”
My instinctive reaction was to leave it at that; I didn’t
think it was such a great essay.
But something in me made me go up to her and ask her about
that note in the margins.
She began to notice me after that. Invariably, I would be
made to read out what I’d written in class – compositions, essays, even answers
to the questions at the end of the text.
Eventually, the term was up. The preliminary exams ended,
and before we took a month’s study leave to prepare for the Board exams, we had
an Open Day for parents and students to meet teachers and discuss our strengths
and weaknesses in their subjects.
When I went to meet Miss Lumena, our conversation turned to
what I planned to do after school. “Engineering,” was my pat reply. Till then, if you asked me what I wanted to
do in life, the reply was always engineering. I loved Maths, and my role models
– my maternal uncle and an older cousin – were both engineers.
“But you should do journalism,” she said. “You write so
well.”
The idea appealed to me. I broached it to my parents.
“Nothing doing,” said my mother, “journalists get killed.” I was given a choice
of four streams to make a career in – Medicine, Engineering, Chartered
Accountancy and Law. I chose Engineering.
But the thought that I could make writing a career had been
planted in my head.
Happy Teacher’s Day, Miss Lumena, wherever you are.
(Illustration of Miss Lumena by a fellow student of hers –
Anil Damodaran)
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