five and six—had no concept of teacher
trainees; just the glittering fact that in
her bright-pink salwar suit and smart
little handbag, also pink, her hair
fluttering behind her, the new teacher
was a ‘Gift from the Universe’.M
rs Singh—much like our mothers
before we’d met Mrs Singh
herself—must have felt our
betrayal hard, because, overnight, we
transferred our collective adoration
to the Gift. She was cool, played fun
games with us, didn’t scold us when
our A’s bled into our B’s and when she
had to scold us—for Mrs Singh was
watching—she gave us a conspiratorial
pat or wink. As the days became weeks,
and the weeks became months, the
new teacher’s kindness became a
beacon to my scattered alphabet and
miserable spelling.
Then, soon enough, six months
were up, and along with all 39 of
my classmates, it was my turn to be
devastated. Cards were made, red roses
were coaxed out of impatient parents,
toffees were held up ceremonially in
hot-cupped palms. She hugged us all in
turn, and stopped coming to class from
the next day. The world tilted on its axis.
We were back to the two-dimensional
world of Mrs Singh.
The afternoon we realized she was
not coming back again—ever—I cried
and cried and cried on the way home.
Finally, my mother, bemused and
exhausted, if no longer threatened by
my monomania, said, “Okay fine, tellme her name and which college she is
from and maybe we can go and meet
her one day.”
Her name? Her college?
I was stumped. We’d called her
‘New Miss’: “New Miss, please may I
go to the toilet?” and “New Miss, she
has taken my pencil!” and while she
ruled our imagination, I had not, for a
second, expected a surname attached
to her, or suspected she might have
an independent life as a person, a
person who existed outside that dark
classroom which sometimes stank a
little of the loo.
The sobs subsided, but a sense of
mystification persisted through the
afternoon. Dimly aware that something
had changed forever, I went to bed that
night with an uneasy feeling in the pit
of my stomach.
Apparently, teachers were people.N
early three decades later, early one
morning, I board a shuttle from an
obscure, dusty neighbourhood of116 september 2019
NEW MISS’S
KINDNESS WAS
LIKE A BEACON
TO MY SCATTERED
ALPHABET AND
MISERABLE
SPELLING.Reader’s Digest