Messages from long lost friends are as scarce as friends themselves. My nonchalant ways with social networking sites doesn’t help either. Given the way people talk about social networking sites these days, I do feel ashamed to admit that I have an account each with two of the big players. I am a moderately active member of one of them and a sleeping partner (not exactly literally) of the other one which was a favour that I had bestowed upon someone, but I don’t remember exactly on whom; it must be some acquaintance or the social networking site itself whom I help generate large amounts of revenue from such an insignificant act of mine as clicking on the site's url.

Well, amidst profusion of no messages, when the mailbox suddenly shouted of a mail from a known acquaintance and an unknown friend, yours truly had no option but to be a little bemused. The insouciant state of being happy without a known friend was suddenly turned into an uncontrollable urge that practically compelled me to follow the link to the site and read what ever was on offer. The “Hi”, was almost bittersweet but the prospect of a reunion party for secondary school leaving batch of 1996 sounded very alluring. The date of-course was not. It was strategically chosen to be somewhere in the next month, which is an extremely busy month for a guy who works for Strategic Planning. Of-course, I accept that it’s more to do with my bad luck than their good fortunes of not seeing me there but then the invitation did set the wheels of school memories rolling. My courteous ‘Hi’ to his message was followed by an enquiry of certain teachers whom I have admired and adored through out my life. One such teacher has been Ms Koyeli Ghosh.

Koyeli Ghosh joined us in the summer of 1994 as our class teacher. She was a phenomenon. She was nothing like what we had seen in all these years. Teachers to us had a very ‘different’ personality. They were like the big wall clock of ebony in front of the main doorway, whose pendulum would swing with a purpose of defining time in a loud, dull and monotonous way. She was different. She had an outlandish air about her, not with her clothes, but with her entire persona that was so “non-teacher” like. She was assigned the task of teaching English Literature. She still teaches English there.

She must have been in her early thirties when she joined us. Graduated from Oxford, we thought she had no business teaching at such a small school as ours. For many months after she had joined, we were still debating (read more as gossiping) as to why she decided to teach us rather than at a college level and do far better for herself. Money was of-course not a criterion because she was presumably a millionaire in those days. We finally gave up but only after having gone through rounds of unfruitful but necessary discussions and debates. Talking in hindsight the job gave her enough flexibility to be occupied, to teach and as well as spend considerable amount of time with her seven year old son, especially when her husband had a job that required extensive traveling.

It was then no surprise that my predilection for her teaching or otherwise would put no restrain on ensuring that I get enough sun tan in a class already filled with luminous stars quite near to the earth than those in the galaxy. The positive vibrations were extremely important if I were to do well in the subject matter of her choice but my preference now. The only danger lay in her liking someone else and any effort was required to ensure that she looked straight at me rather than beveled through the edges of her table. But after sometime it simply didn’t seem to matter.

Her extensive taste in good books, life and music was something extremely endearing and enriching for the students. Her anecdotes, references, allusions, interpretation and descriptions were collected diligently and cherished by yours truly almost like a philatelist. I still remember the first poem that she taught us was D.H.Lawrence’s “Snake”. A life long journey of love for reading, understanding and interpreting poetry had worn its Adidas boots that day. I remember her telling me once, reading poetry is an art, different from writing; one who reads poetry well doesn’t necessarily write good poetry and vice versa. Well she was responsible for making Shakespeare fun and ensuing that we read and discussed him without notes. She explained the importance of translations in one of the most outstanding ways that I remember, by making us translate Rabindranath Tagore’s Bengali poems into English and then reading to us his own translations from "Geetanjali". 'Translation is not translating one word from one language to another verbatim; understand the meaning and translate the meaning to achieve the desired effect, if that is to be ever achieved'. We of-course kicked ourselves in our endeavours and realised why he was the Nobel Laureate and we were studying him. The best aspect of her teaching was going beyond what was written as texts in the books. This might sound clichéd but believe me you must, that this is the most difficult thing to achieve as a teacher.

I was able to build across a sense of camaraderie with her but then that was not as exclusive as I would have liked it to be. She had grown to be one of the favourite teachers of all students irrespective of how they fared in the subject. And that didn’t bother me anymore. She knew exactly how to divide attention to each and everyone of us equally. No more careful walking on stilettos was required because there didn’t exist a desire to have her full attention anymore (or for that matter the fear of falling out of her graces one day) and yet be quaintly happy everytime she called out in her charmingly brusque tone -“Jha”. Yes, “Jha” is what she used to call me instead of “Alok”. The archipelago of memories is what binds me to her even today and I am grateful to that message for letting me remember her in the recesses of a Sunday morning.