They say that the best days of our life are the ones you spend in school. Timidly sharing secrets, giving each other a hand, learning to laugh at ourselves we don’t realise when we grow up into adulthood, unrecognisable from the scrawny kids we had been. When we recall our school days,  a hazy blur of toothless grins, broken toys, vicious teachers and a melange of bright colours comes to our mind. But for me, school meant just one word,  ”Sir”.

His name was Paresh Mehta but we didn’t know it at that time. He taught us Geography. To all of us second grade kids, he was our wisdom, our learning, our school, our Sir. He always wore a crisp cotton shirt with rolled up sleeves with blue or black trousers. His hair was neatly combed and he wore sophisticated black rimmed spectacles that everyone admired. His teaching was never limited to the subject he was technically paid to teach. He taught us how to walk with a straight back chin pointing upwards, to make little boats, rockets, animals and birds from paper strips and how to run downhill with air sucked in, putting a lot more pressure on your toes than the sole.

He was my friend, my most trusted confidante. I’d often tell him things that I’d never say aloud to myself even. His smile comforted, his patience bolstered and his unspoken words encouraged me.  He was my teacher, undoubtedly, but he was also something more than the ambit of the seven letter word.

Once, I failed in Geography, and with that so did my courage to face him. I took a break from school and spent the days playing hide and seek and marbles. A couple of days later, I was whooping with joy for having won a game of toss when I looked up to find the breath being whooshed out of me like I had been sucker punched. Sir just smiled down at me, calm as always.

I don’t really remember what happened after that but Mom told me that I had fainted and Sir had carried me inside my house, with loving hands and a worried face. On feeling better, he came to see me and told me something that I can never forget. “I’m happy you failed today child. No don’t look at me like that. Now I know you will succeed in whatever you do because you’ve climbed the hardest step to success. Failure.”

I returned to school happily the next day to a welcoming class and a secret smile from Sir. Years later, after getting a distinction in my tenth standard, I left the city to go to a college far off. I never heard from Sir after that since I had no occasion to return. But every year, an enormous bouquet of white roses, his favourite, find their way to his doorstep on Teacher’s Day to a man who probably understood the power, the magic of that word. A small note tucked into the flowers reads “To Sir, with Love”.

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