My School Teachers: Portraits in Miniature
(Written for The Teachers' Day, September 5, 2014) By Rajesh Sharma For days I have been rummaging my mind – its chests and cabinets, bureaus and bins, school bags, backpacks, pouches, knotted handkerchiefs, match-boxes, teeny b rass caskets, rubber-headed metal inkpots, slim little corked vials of touch-me-not glass, even flyers folded into flying machines grounded like dead butterflies among spiders’ remains and lizards’ egg shells – to pull out memories long since resting, deposited and forgotten like used postage stamps and untouched coins, to blow the dust off them. I do not really know why I am doing this. It might be for ritual gratification. Perhaps it is to propitiate guilt. Memories can be sticky, smelly things. Or they can turn into powder under the touch, like expiring bones awaiting final dissolution. But the dust that settles on memories is gold dust. Its shimmer lends them an illusory immortality. 1 He tied his beard, never tucked his s...