MY TEACHER

I remember a distant late afternoon and I see him — a man who lived and read long enough by then to pluck all the flowers of knowledge and when we met him he had left the flowers for the berries. He had a melancholic and humble smile on his face and yet his fruits that he offered us were not always gray-coloured but indeed they resembled the rainbow. Some of them were golden-hued, others were rosy-cheeked and I thought that our teacher’s brain was a vast repository of tingling thoughts. His outward appearance would be more asleep than awake and yet we knew that he was more awake than all of us, awake to the pricking point.

That was ‘activity’ for him, that was his life. He never missed a word, nothing was too insignificant for his attention, too small for his contemplation. Everything seemed to fit within his brain and swirled around in a private bedlam of ideas. He seemed as assured in the midst of a wide and fertilizing inundation as he was in the depth of the narrowest of artesian walls. He seemed to hold poetry and literature in his blood, in the air he breathed, and we the ARBACHINS, the inexperienced and the unwise, would barely catch the residuum. While the best of creations found in him a fitting receptacle and sowed innumerable thought-seeds, he would attempt to sow some of them in the desert-sands of his students with the hope that even a few would germinate. He was like a star or a meteor for us and if we could ever intercept the rays of his mind, his revolving light, if we could salvage a glimpse of the gold from what appeared to us sometimes as recurring obscuration, we felt blessed.

As dusk approached and in those darkening hours in the classroom, amid the ruckus of Calcutta’s busy College Street, he was our magician creating a web of wonder for his students out of his special affinities and the bareness of the exterior would only help to bring into sharp relief the tumultuous effervescence of the fountain streams that flowed internally. When he would read Philip Sidney (Defence of Poesie) with us, he seemed to touch so tenderly and with such love the corrosion in the walls of an old monument and with his artist’s touch he would infuse new life into the dull, cold stone of an ancient relic. The beauty of the creation would gradually reveal to us then, first in obscure outlines and then in the form of lustrous prisms.

Attendance would be thin in all his classes. But the fact that the world is deaf never seemed to perturb Arun-babu at all. Never in those two years, never ever, would he ask why there were only seven souls listening to him. He never even noticed it. He was already mellowed and his delicate sensibilities would only dream of the soft ripples of the ancient world that touched him. There was never a wave, never a calm but with those tender ripples our teacher would turn thin air into concrete syllables so gracefully that it brought tears to our eyes. Almost in the manner of unconscious habit his lips will let off fluty syllables as if his fingers are sprinkling music-drops over an old piano. He made us spellbound not because of his wisdom which he had in such great measure but because of the beauty of his conceptions and understanding of literature and the arts. If Arun-babu’s spirit can be compared to fine claret, it helped to add the warmth of a crimson touch to our blood and we felt so blessed to have such a great teacher.

The bareness of his exterior and the way he infused poetry in that venerable tradition of didacticism on which Philip Sidney had so much faith, the intellectual vigour with which he almost championed the cause of one of his most favourite Renaissance Humanists belies description. I will never forget how he spoke of Tagore’s (as an ideal poet) trust and faith in the universe and for how long he dwelt on the word “coupleth” and described to us the spectacular marriage of ‘notion’ and ‘example’ in the mental space of an artist. These are those lines from Sidney’s essay…

Now doth the peerlesse Poet performe both [the work of the philosopher and the historian], for whatsoever the Philosopher saith should be done, he gives a perfect picture of it by some one, by whom he presupposeth it was done, so as he coupleth the generall notion with the particuler example.

The poet is ‘peerless’ because he stands in the middle; his domain is not the ideal like that of the philosopher, nor can he rely solely on the particular like the historian. But taking a cue from both he adds to both the colour of his own mind before giving them a local habitation and a name. Thus, the poet doesn’t explicitly deal with Truth or the Ideal, he never proclaims any of the extremes and so chances of his making a mistake are ever so thin and he never “affirms”, never “lies”. I still remember the twinkle in my teacher’s eyes when he read…

Now for the Poet, he nothing affirmeth, and therefore never lieth…

It seemed to me that this utterance was my teacher’s pillow of comfort. That he found in these words his abode of peace, his repose from the world. He knew so well that the poet’s is the dream world, for he promises nothing and gives everything. He also knew perhaps that no one will be able to take this world away from him. That is the greatest lesson that he made us learn.

[Professor Arun Kumar Das Gupta taught English at the Presidency College, Calcutta and the University of Calcutta]

© Subhamay Ray