Roles I live

A husband at home, a teacher at school and a writer at the hobby desk: these are the major roles I play in my life.  Switching from one to another is a seamless task for me.  The easiest and the most interesting among them is being a writer.  That’s a role which doesn’t involve any other individual.

Being a husband is pretty easy too since only one other individual is involved and she understands my eccentricities and insanities too well.  The other day a colleague of mine mentioned to me rather facetiously the counsel she gave to another person.  If a couple can’t get along happily together they should either separate or accept the destiny stoically.  I think Maggie possesses enough stoicism to make the getting along as happy as humanly possible.     

Image from wallbee

At school, I am a professional performer.  A couple of weeks back, a student asked me in the class why I never smile outside the class though I do it all the time inside.  That was an epiphany for me.  I used to think that I smiled a lot outside the class too.  “You look too serious outside,” the boy insisted on butting it in. 

I imagined myself looking like the biblical Yahweh with a grey head and a grey beard rounded off with an executioner’s demeanour, outside the class.  The thought amused me enough to smile at the student who brought home an epiphany for me. 

“Maybe the smile is part of my job here,” I said to the class.  “Professional smile.”  I grinned.  “A year more and we will say goodbye to each other.  You will go your way and forget me.  I will carry on smiling at the new faces that will come in.”

I ignored the murmurs that rose in a corner like the sound of the dry leaves falling from the teak tree on to the gravelled yard of my home in the dead of the night.  The real epiphany came the next morning.  A student confronted me with the question, “How could you make such a statement?”

“Which statement?”

“That you will forget us after we leave school.” 

“Isn’t that the natural course?” I smiled.  “We all get on with our lives shelving the past into some cosy recess of our memory.”

“There was a big argument after school yesterday.  Some students were upset to think that you are a mere professional.  Your smile is a pretension, they said.  You love teaching but not the students, they argued.”

I smiled again.  Am I merely playing a role in the class?  I put the question to the student. 

“I think you didn’t mean what you said,” the student looked into my eyes probingly.

“I remember a lot of students whom I taught in 1980s, the beginning of my career as a teacher,” I said. “Can we really forget people?  Don’t they leave indelible marks in our being?”

The student’s eyes sparkled.  “I knew it,” she said as she turned to the door like a child who had got a new gift.

I was left feeling staggered.  No, I’m not playing a role, I realised.

Written for Indispire edition 207: The roles you have played in your real life so far. How easy has it been to switch/transit from one role to another? How many more do you wish to play? #rolespeopleplay