What the Black Board Saw

Anirban was a schoolteacher. He taught English to children in grades one to four, the years when a child either falls in love with a sentence or learns to fear it. He was married to Sohini, a nurse : vivacious, curly haired, large eyed, a face that seemed permanently on the verge of a smile. Anirban himself was reserved, almost severe in his stillness, but when he smiled his eyes gave the whole performance away, kindness and warmth arriving all at once as if a door had been left open somewhere behind his face. Together they made the kind of couple you wanted to sit near at a wedding, not because they performed happiness but because they seemed to have stopped needing to.

They lived modestly and called it a life of choice rather than a life of limits, which between two people who loved their work and each other in roughly equal measure may amount to the same thing.

In his youth, before Sohini, before the classroom, Anirban had written something extraordinary. He submitted it to one of those well known international competitions and was shortlisted, and in the weeks before the awards night his name kept surfacing in the way names surface when critics have run out of caution : the style, the prose, the turns of the story, the metaphors placed exactly where a lesser writer would have reached and missed. Magic realism, they called it, and meant it as high praise.

Anirban watched the frenzy build around his own name with the flat, appraising eye of a man who has never much liked crowds. He was in the water, as they say, but he had never cared for the wet.

The night before the ceremony, a call came : the jury had chosen him, congratulations, and he would need to publicly thank the award’s three corporate sponsors during his acceptance. He had not, until that call, thought to ask who was paying for the evening. He looked them up that night, alone, the laptop’s glow the only light in the room : a chemical manufacturer, a pharmaceutical company, a timber trader. He read for over an hour. Somewhere in that hour the award stopped being an award and became a transaction he hadn’t agreed to.

He called the organisers back and told them, without heat, that he could not thank sponsors he did not respect. There was a silence on the line that he later described as longer than anything anyone had said to him all week. His name was dropped from the list by morning.

He came home and went quiet in a way that worried the people who knew him. Not dramatic, he simply receded the way a tide goes out without announcing itself, and it was some weeks before he came back to the surface. He had, before all this, been giving evening classes in creative writing to a handful of adults at the local library, the closest thing he had to a public life outside his own manuscripts, and it was to that small room he returned first, not yet a schoolteacher, still just a writer finding his footing again. Sohini was one of the six who showed up twice a week to be told the truth about their sentences. Their romance moved the way certain things move when neither person is in a hurry, and it was well into it before Subroto told her about the phone call, the sponsors, the silence on the line.

She didn’t try to fix it, and didn’t tell him he had done the right thing, which he would have distrusted from anyone. She asked what it would have cost him to stay quiet and say the thank you. He said he didn’t know, because he’d never once considered staying quiet as an option worth weighing. That was the sentence she said she fell in love with.

The conversation never quite ended : less because either of them needed an answer than because certain questions get more interesting each time you ask them. It kept circling back to the polish of things, awards, sponsors, the whole apparatus of being thanked publicly and how it seemed to grow in exact proportion to how little anyone actually said. Sohini, who spent her days on a hospital ward watching how early a person’s habits of attention were already fixed by the time they reached her, was the one who said it first : that somewhere between six and ten a child either becomes a reader, a noticer, a person who argues with the page, or quietly decides that reading is a thing done to her rather than with her, and that almost nobody was guarding that window with any seriousness at all.

Anirban turned it over the way he turned over sentences. He had spent a year measuring himself against sponsors. She was suggesting he go measure himself against seven-year-olds instead.

He took a post at an elementary school. Grades one to four.

There is a scene from that classroom he tells more often than the others. A girl of seven, reading aloud from a story about a fox that outwits a farmer, stopped midway and announced that she didn’t think the fox was clever, she thought the fox was mean, and she didn’t like him even if the book wanted her to. The other children laughed, waiting for the correction. Subroto didn’t give one. He asked her why. She said the fox lied to the farmer’s face and smiled while he did it, and that wasn’t clever, that was just lying with good manners. Anirban wrote her sentence on the board exactly as she’d said it and asked the class to vote : clever, or lying with good manners. It split down the middle. He let it stay split. No moral was drawn, no answer key produced. He moved on to the next page as if a seven-year-old disagreeing with the author was simply what reading was for.

He began, after that, to toy with the insight the fox had handed him without meaning to.

One morning he brought the class to a blackboard with nothing written on it and left it that way for a full minute, long enough that a boy in the second row asked if he’d forgotten the lesson. Anirban said the blackboard was the lesson, and asked them to write about what they’d seen. Most of the class wrote a sentence or two about chalk dust, about a board that needed cleaning, and stopped, unsure what else there was to say about nothing. One boy, Aravind, who rarely finished anything, wrote for eleven minutes without looking up. When Anirban read it that evening he found the boy had written about the blackboard the way a man writes about a person who has left the room : what its silence was covering up, what it might say if it were allowed to, why a thing with nothing on it could still make you feel looked at. Anirban did not correct the grammar. He pinned it, uncorrected, to the board itself, under the chalk dust it had described.

Another week he blindfolded the class in pairs, tied them wrist to wrist with string, and walked them once around the school compound, past the tamarind tree and the water tank and the low wall where the gardener kept his tools, then brought them back to their seats to write what they had felt. Most children wrote about fear, about tripping, about the relief of the blindfold coming off. One girl, Meena, wrote that she had known exactly where they were the whole time, not by seeing but by the change in the ground under her feet, the sound of the water tank’s echo, the smell of cut grass near the wall, and that she had felt, for the length of that walk, less lost than she usually felt with her eyes open. Anirban read that one twice. He did not tell her what it meant. He was no longer sure, at that point in his life that meaning was his to hand out, only the walk, the blindfold, the question, and whatever a child chose to notice in the dark.

He still does not have a name for what he’s doing, and has stopped looking for one. He knows only that a boy who could not finish a sentence about a fox wrote eleven minutes about an empty blackboard, and that somewhere in that gap between the fox and the blackboard is the whole of what he walked away from the sponsors to go looking for.