My Students, My Teachers — Forty years of stories from a teacher who believed that every lesson worth remembering began with a human being, not a textbook.
I met Mini in Grade 6, two months after school had reopened. She arrived the way some children do — without fanfare, without the anxious hovering that new students sometimes carry like a second schoolbag. Curly-haired, bright-eyed, and possessed of a friendliness that needed no introduction, she settled into my class as though she had always belonged there.
My first instinct, as it often is with a child who has missed the opening weeks, was quiet concern. Two months is not nothing. There are rhythms established in a classroom by October — unspoken understandings, a shared vocabulary of jokes and references, the particular tempo of a teacher’s expectations. I wondered, without saying so, whether Mini would struggle to find her footing.
She had not struggled at all. She had, in fact, already found her footing — from a distance. While she was away, she had stayed in touch with her classmates, completed every pending assignment, and arrived not as someone catching up but as someone who had simply taken a different road to the same destination. I was astonished. And then, knowing Mini, I was not astonished at all.
It became an annual ritual. Mini would visit the United States for a month each year, and the school — blessed with a flexibility that trusted the child over the calendar — made no fuss about the absences. Nor did her classmates or her teachers. The truth was plain enough: Mini was quietly, unassumingly ahead. Not in the way that announces itself, not with the sharp elbows of competition, but with the easy sureness of a child who had simply read more, thought more, and retained more than most.
She was, in the best sense, a happy blend of intelligence and humility — two qualities that rarely keep each other company.
Years passed. Mini returned to my class, this time for Shakespeare.
Julius Caesar has a way of dividing a classroom. For some students, the Elizabethan syntax is a wall they never quite scale; the allusions land like stones in still water, making only small, puzzling rings. But in that class, something different happened. The play won their hearts — as it had long since won mine — and no one complained about the language or the weight of history behind it. They leaned in. They argued about Brutus. They felt the tragedy of it.
Then came Mini’s annual absence. She left for the United States, and the play moved on without her.
When she returned that summer, still warm from wherever she had been, she came to me with a request I have never quite forgotten. She wanted to be taught the parts of Julius Caesar she had missed. Not a summary. Not the notes a classmate might have shared. She wanted the lessons themselves.
I was honoured. I was also unprepared for what followed.
She came to my two-bedroom apartment on several weekends that season. She was always on time — not the punctuality of obligation, but the punctuality of someone who genuinely does not want to miss a moment. Madurai summers are not gentle; the heat pressed against the windows, and the noise of the city found every gap it could. Mini noticed none of it, or if she did, she gave it no importance. She listened with the kind of attention that a teacher spends a career hoping to encounter — not passive, not merely polite, but alive.
We read Caesar together in those rooms. We spoke of honour and ambition, of words as weapons, of the speech that turns a crowd. She asked good questions. I gave my best answers.
It was only much later — long after those weekends had passed into the comfortable fog of memory — that I learned who her father was. He was one of the most prominent industrialists in our city. A man of considerable means and standing. And his daughter had sat on a simple chair in my modest home, in the heat of a Madurai summer, for the love of Shakespeare.
I have thought about that many times since. It tells you something about the child. It tells you something, perhaps, about what books can do.
But Mini’s heart was never only for literature. It belonged equally — and fiercely — to the living world around her.
Our school campus was home to a colony of cranes. Beautiful, improbable creatures, they had nested in the trees for as long as anyone could remember, and over the years they had multiplied beyond all reasonable expectation. Walking beneath those trees became an exercise in faith and agility; the canopy above was generous in ways one did not always welcome. The administration grew desperate. Measures were discussed, debated, and eventually taken.
In the end, the cranes were shot.
Mini was not a child given to helpless grief. She channelled what she felt into words — wrote an article, swift and sorrowing, that made the adults around her go quiet. There is a particular power in being shown your own failure through a child’s clear eyes. She offered no melodrama, no accusations she could not support. Only the plain, devastating fact of what had been lost, and the question of whether it had been necessary.
The adults, to their credit, hung their heads.
Today, Mini is an industrialist and an environmentalist — two identities that might seem to pull against each other, but which she holds together with the same quiet conviction she brought to everything as a child. Her books and articles are read and respected. She does not merely write about the world she wants; she builds it, one considered decision at a time.
She continues to inspire me.
The child is father of the man — Wordsworth knew something, when he wrote that line, about the way certain children arrive in our lives already formed, already pointing toward who they will become. Mini was never a work in progress. She was always, in some essential way, herself.
I was simply fortunate enough to be in the room.
Some children do not need to be shaped by school. They need only to be witnessed — and trusted to become who they already are.