Silk Shroud

The day ended on a sour note. I was at school. The school that I had retired from a few months back had called me back when my successor had to leave without notice for his own valid reasons. I was filling a vacuum, in short. I could sense something alien from the moment I stepped into the school. I felt like an unwanted guest. You shouldn’t return to a place from where you retired and got a grand farewell. Was that the feeling in the air? I think so. You should never return to your own vacuum.

Retirement is like death. The farewell is the funeral. You shouldn’t challenge death. Least of all, your funeral. Last life’s words belong to last life’s language, if I may paraphrase T S Eliot. You need to invent the words for your new life that’s a potential threat to many who were trying to create a new lingo that has no word for you in its lexicon. You shouldn’t return to certain places ever.

The classrooms weren’t as bad, however. The students are ready to try you out. Old wine can be more intoxicating, some of them know. Those who are ready for such intoxications know that unless you risk going beyond the conventional borderlines you won’t ever find out how far you can really go. And so my classes were going quite smoothly. In fact, I was beginning to enjoy them and relegate my sense of alienness to the adult corridors.

Then something went flip-flop-ding-dong in a class.

This boy seems to swing like a pendulum between the classroom and the adult corridors. On my very first day in his class he questioned me, “Are you sure?” I had just said that plain vine and vine in vineyard are pronounced differently. His question stunned me a bit because of the hostility on his face. I requested a student to get my mobile phone from the staffroom and asked the questioner whether he trusted Google. When he said Yes, I played Google’s pronunciation of vineyard to him. His hostility turned to arrogant indifference.

Today, a fortnight later, he chose to question the scores I had given him in the recent test. I had been more generous with the assessment of his answers than those of his classmates precisely because I knew I was going to face some question like ‘Are you sure you’re fair?’ from him. In spite of my generosity, the question did come in slightly different words.

I explained as gently as any teacher possibly could how assessment is done in the CBSE system which gives equal weightage to the content of the answers as to their linguistic accuracy and fluency. He decided he knew better than me. About everything including what I was doing in the classroom. But he chose to make his comments to his classmate by his side which I objected to. “All comments to me, please, or to the class,” I insisted. He was belligerently recalcitrant. Rather unusual in my class. The bell for the end of the class saved me from him.

I returned to the staffroom and chose to divert myself with a little reading as I normally do on such occasions. I opened a Malayalam magazine on my Magzter App and the very first page carolled to me the analgesic of a silken song.

I am a silk worm whom they will fatten with mulberry leaves and lull into a cocoon. I will weave the cocoon with the gossamer threads of my very being. The cocoon is my shrine, built by me, built for my redemption from wormhood to the sublime flights of a butterfly. But the day my shrine is built fully, they will throw me with my shrine into boiling water. The threads of my cocoon will weave their silk fabrics while I burn to death in steaming water. The silk that I weave becomes my shroud halfway through my life’s adventure. What should have been my wings is now my shroud.  

I closed Magzter and then shut my eyes before leaning back on my chair in the staffroom, and I dreamt of a butterfly’s wings.