Doors of Possibilities

Andrew Potok is a blind man who lives in Vermont. Once he was a gifted painter. Then an inherited eye disease slowly corroded his vision. He was devastated. He thought it was the end of the world for him. In his own words, "I thought I'd go down and hit rock bottom and get stuck in the mud."

When one door closes, another opens. In fact, many doors may open. Life isn't too cruel. Potok realised that he could write as well as he painted. He says he had a dream in which colours metamorphosed into words. He awoke from the dream with the realisation that something new was possible. He began to write and people liked what he wrote. "I saw myself as a newly empowered person," Potok wrote in his autobiographical book, Ordinary Daylight: Portrait of an Artist Going Blind.

Potok paints with words now and he is a happy person in spite of his blindness which undoubtedly is a debilitating handicap. Blindness slows down everything, he says. The blind person will feel the world whizzing by him when he is forced to go slow. He has to pay attention to too many details in order to move on. Eventually, however, he learnt that slowness isn't bad, that paying attention to details has its rewards. Maybe one day he will write a book titled In Praise of Slowness, he says.

Potok sent me into contemplation. Just before I read about him, I was complaining to Maggie about how I have come to detest the teaching job now. "I must stop this job soon before I start hating the profession which was my greatest passion for nearly four decades," I said. 

Something is not clicking between my present students and me. The other day, a student gave a short speech in my class on music, as part of a speaking skills assessment. When she finished her speech, I asked her whether the present-day songs are more noise than music. The question was part of the assessment too. Her prompt reply was, "For old people it may sound like noise. It depends on age."

"Are you suggesting that I'm too old for the present generation?" I persisted with a resigned smile.

She smiled with a condescension that wasn't quite veiled. 

My colleagues told me that they all faced similar problems in classes. The present generation's attitudes have undergone drastic mutations, they feel. I tend to agree with my colleagues. I'm not happy in the classroom anymore. The saddest reality is that the classroom was the only place that filled my soul with excitement. Should I leave that place with frustration? I shouldn't. That's why I have to quit as soon as possible. The earlier the better. Before the job becomes a pain in all the wrong places. 

"What will you do the whole day?" Maggie asks. 

Another door will open. Potok tells me. 

I remember how Maggie and I left Shillong. I was teaching in a college which was paying the central government scale. An enormous pay package for relatively little work. But I had to chuck that job due to certain personal reasons. At the age of 41. Maggie cried bitterly. What would be our future? What kind of a job was I going to get at that age in a country like India where better-qualified young people loitered without jobs? 

Life isn't so cruel. Delhi opened a door for Maggie and me. A very good door too. Both of us got teaching jobs in the same residential school which was paying central government salary too. 

A decade and a half passed. It was the best period in our life: Maggie's and mine. And then that door closed. Narendra Modi became the Prime Minister of India and a fake godman forced his entry into our school campus. He bought the school and converted the 20-acre campus into a parking lot for his devotees who came four times a year to listen to his blahblah and throw wads of currency notes into his donation boxes. 

I was 55 when we left Delhi without any hope of finding a job in a state like Kerala where we decided to build a house just because my hopeless depression made me feel a sense of belonging there. We really hadn't expected the going to be smooth in Kerala, a state where good jobs invariably go to the relatives of people with either political or religious connections. We were too old for such jobs anyway. So why bother? 

But a door opened here too. A good one. Maggie and I taught in a good school all these years.

Now that door is closing. 

Another will open, I tell myself. I am sure of that. My life has been closing and opening of doors. 

What will you do? Maggie repeats the question. 

I'll discover a new passion. Maybe I'll go to Tahiti and search for the ghost of Paul Gauguin. Or write a book about the delights of retired life. Or visit all those relatives and friends who have always thought of me as a useless fellow and give them some more entertainment. Well, many doors are waiting to open - I'm sure. I'm journeying now with more light in my heart than ever.