 Summary of this article
- My father was a tuition teacher. 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.
- For him, education was not something to be given. It was something you refused to withhold.
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.
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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.
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