An Ode To My Father, The Most Loved Teacher

Before I learned what learning was supposed to mean, I learned what it looked like in practice. It looked like my father sitting at a table that was never entirely his, surrounded by other people’s children, repeating the same sentence until it settled. It looked like time being spent without calculation, effort without guarantee. He never used the word “access”. He would have found it unnecessary. For him, education was not something to be given. It was something you refused to withhold. It came from his formative years of village and Calcutta life, where each step towards higher education was met with precarity, gatekeeping and a general idea that in the 60s, you needed to find work and not read Shakespeare. 

What I did not know then was that I was being trained in a form of attention that no institution would later be able to formalise. 

He was a tuition teacher, which meant our house was never entirely ours. It belonged, in shifts, to other people’s children. They arrived in the evenings carrying registers, anxieties, and the faint smell of ambition. They sat cross-legged on the floor or leaned against walls that had begun to remember their backs. They left with just enough clarity to return the next day. The table was never fully cleared. Even after they left, something lingered. The echo of repetition, the residue of effort, as if learning itself had weight. 

Before any of this, there had been a decision. When I was born, a relative warned him against leaving the village for Calcutta. He was told he would not survive there. He left anyway. He did not arrive with a plan that would satisfy anyone now. What he carried was a refusal to remain where he had been placed. Over time, he built something that did not look like success in the usual sense, but was recognised all the same. A name, quietly held, in a neighbourhood that began to depend on him. English ‘sir’ somewhere glorously erased Amal, his name. 

He was known in that neighbourhood for a very specific kind of work. The students who came to him were rarely the ones already doing well. They were the ones described, with casual cruelty, as weak, slow and irredeemable. In colloquial terms, still present today, students with ‘backs’ in their English subject in class 10 and high school. Parents brought them not with hope exactly, but with a final attempt He took them all in. 

He had no system in the way people now understand the word. No standardised tests, no progress charts, no presentations, absolutely zero course material of practice. He did not believe in measuring learning before it had time to settle. He sat with them, often repeating the same thing in different ways, adjusting not the content but himself. He would slow down where needed, circle back without irritation, insist on basics long after others had given up. He did not correct them into competence. He stayed with them until competence became possible. 

And somehow, they passed. Not spectacularly, but enough. Enough to move forward, enough to not be left behind. They became Police officers, educationists and even few successful ministers, that switched parties very successfully in their careers. 

There was a book he kept carefully, though he never spoke about it. A 1950 edition of the complete works of Shakespeare, bound in red. It sat slightly apart from everything else, not displayed, not hidden, just present. I did not understand its significance then. It was only later that I understood what it meant for a man like him to own it. To have carried it from a childhood shaped by scarcity, from a household of seven siblings, from a life that did not naturally lead to such objects. It was not just a book. It was evidence of an aspiration he had chosen to sustain. 

He was, in the way people say without quite understanding, old school. He addressed his students as maa or son, the words carrying both affection and expectation. He corrected them mid-sentence, mid-thought, not just in what they said but how they carried themselves. Sit properly. Speak clearly. Wear things appropriately. It was never about discipline as display. It came from a knowledge that the world outside would not be kind, and so he had to prepare them for it. 

There was a protectiveness to him that rarely announced itself, but never needed to. I knew, without it ever being demonstrated, that if anyone misbehaved with his female students, he would not hesitate. Whether rhetorically or otherwise, there would be consequences. He would have broken their legs, or at least made them believe he could. It was not violence as impulse. It was protection as certainty. 

Money moved slowly, irregularly, sometimes not at all. Knowledge, on the other hand, was everywhere. My father gave it away with a generosity that would have been admirable if it were not so economically inconvenient. He was not good at saving money. If he had vices like alcohol, gambling or any other ones, this would make sense, but he was a teetotaler who had given up smoking when I was five, this was baffling. I remember a parent once apologising for delayed fees, holding out a crumpled note. My father unfolded it, smoothed it, and handed it back. Next month, he said, already turning to the notebook. 

I remember being angry. We needed that money. It took me years to understand that what I saw as irresponsibility was, for him, a refusal to let money interrupt learning. 

Whenever he scolded me, truly scolded me, the kind that left a silence in the room after he was done, he would return later with a Tintin comic. Not immediately and definitely not as an apology. Just placed quietly next to me. In the 1990s, those books were very expensive for a lot of us. Punishment followed by a gift. It took me years to understand that this was instruction. You are allowed to be corrected, but you are also allowed to aspire. 

He also believed, stubbornly, that dignity had to be defended. When a teacher slapped me, he did not confront him in anger. He wrote a letter to the principal. It was formal and precise, in an English shaped by another era. There was no theatrics. Just insistence. 

Every Saturday, he took me to the old theatres in Esplanade. Only I now I realise the taste of good things that arrived later came from these exposures. We could not afford it. By Sunday, the week had already tightened. Once, I asked if we could eat outside. He paused, then said we would eat at home. We did. 

Some choices were fixed. Others adjusted themselves around them. 

Whenever we travelled by bus through Calcutta, he would point out landmarks as we passed them. Not grand monuments, but buildings, crossings, small details that seemed unnecessary to notice. I remember feeling embarrassed. No one else’s father did this. He did it every time. Years later, without realising when it happened, I found that I knew the city. Not in the way of maps, but in the way of memory. What felt excessive then had become inheritance. 

I went to a school that believed it was teaching me something important. It was not. Teachers read from guidebooks. When I asked a question outside it, I was told it would not come in the exam. I learned quickly how to pass without understanding, and more importantly, how systems reward that performance without noticing its absence. 

By the time I reached Scottish Church College, I had already begun to detach. I bunked classes often, just enough to create space for something else. 

Once, I was caught. The vice principal called me in, and I admitted it without strategy. He called home. My father picked up. Woe be me, my father who has never present in the afternoon, happened to be there that day, and picked up the phone. 

When I returned, there was no shouting. Just a silence that settled into the room. That silence asked for understanding, not performance. That was the first and last time I wrote an apology letter. 

Getting into Presidency College felt less like achievement and more like something he had already decided was possible. Presidency was sharp, often unforgiving. I struggled. But I stayed. The day I wemt for the entrance test, it was like he could foresee that I would get in. His eyes glimmered and considering I did horribly in my high school exam, he exclaimed, “you will get it”, ekhanei pabi. 

Later, at Jawaharlal Nehru University, I found something I recognised before I could name it. A space where you could wander, fail, change direction.But what felt new there was not new to me. I had already been taught that learning could be uneven, that it could look like waste before it became meaning. 

JNU did not give me that. It gave me permission to recognise it. It also made visible how rare such permission is. 

By then, I had already learned how to drift without being lost. 

He was proud when I got into a PhD program in Germany. Every time I came home, he would press a hundred-rupee note into my hand when I stepped out. I took it every time. 

Once, I came home drunk and injured. He opened the door ready to scold me. But it disappeared when he saw I was in pain. The next two days were spent in care. 

And then there was the waiting. Every time I returned, he would be outside the house, pacing. 

He died in 2012. 

For a while, I thought the mourning was ours. But people kept coming. Months later. Parents asking if English sir was home. There was always that same pause when they were told. 

It was only then that I understood what he had been holding together. 

He left behind twelve hundred rupees in his bank account. 

For a long time, that embarrassed  and enraged me. 

But that was never where his investment was. 

It was in me. Not as achievement, but as continuation. 

Aspiration, for him, was never uncomplicated. It carried hesitation, even reluctance. But he held onto it anyway, as something practiced daily. 

I spent years being angry at that. 

I do not feel that anger anymore. 

What we are building now has no place for men like him. 

And perhaps that is what I am really mourning. 

Not just him, but the disappearance of a way of teaching that refused to give up. 

Anirban Ghosh is assistant professor and director, Centre for Writing, Shiv Nadar Institution of Eminence, Gautam Buddha Nagar, Uttar Pradesh.