An Autumnal Moment

It is the first day at work.

The pandemic-ed years have gone by and it is two years since Komila stopped going to school.

Sitting in the employer’s house, watching over their son, nineteen-year-old Komila dreamt of the school years that she had experienced. Memories of friends, desk scribbles, new teachers and books and the inchoate musty smell of the leaky roof pervaded her consciousness on that mild, dry, autumn Indian morning.

As the employer’s two-year-old son stared at her, she gathered up crayons and mustered to draw trees and hills in her neat style on a page. Miss Rajani, her class teacher, had spoken fondly of her immaculate style of writing, though she was equally miffed with her bad grasp on mathematics.

However, today Komila failed to write proper words on paper as the boy looked on. An impotent shame gathered upon her which she tried to dismiss. Miss Rajani stared from across the window of the opposite flat checking how Komila was coping with her new task. She remembered the tear-stained faces of Komila’s parents who had come to beg for a job for their daughter. The uncertainty of the pandemic had robbed them of their livelihoods. Komila, too, had whispered “I do not want to study. I want to work and help them”. Miss Rajani with her small salary had initially supported them but she, too, had a large family to feed.

Days passed into months and Komila never saw the face of her classroom again. She had heard some of the students had managed to procure a Wi-Fi enabled smart phone and had caught up with the curriculum. Her halting journey over rational numbers, Macavity the Cat, The Revolt of 1857 and Friction lessons danced upon her eyes. She remembered the poem of large words that she had to memorise for the exam. She had stayed up for three days, pushing herself over the metaphoric poem-hill trying to reach its peak. Then news came that a lockdown had been declared.

She longed for the big words today and Miss Rajani’s classes where she would carefully explain about pollination and combustion. She yearned for the unfamiliar vocabulary and the gruelling stumbling journey of persistence. She yearned for the routine and the distaste she had often felt in entering the strict classroom of unending lessons that often conflicted with her essence of unbridled restlessness.

Today she felt sad. The sadness that comes over one who has left their old life behind. The baby grabbed the red crayon and drew haphazard lines on the page and Komila’s eyes in an instant became old and her face lighted up as she held his hand to teach him to form a word and Miss Rajani smiled from the next-door window.