Being far away from the madding crowd of the city, my village Nadapuram in Kozhikode District remains an unspoiled scenic beauty. The raging Mayyazhi River touches the deeper self of every living being-fishes, birds, animals, coconut trees, laburnum, students, teachers…rejoicing with the gift of its vibrant life. It is on the Malabar land where Aromal Chekavar, Unniyarcha, Kunhali Marakkar and Thacholi Othenan showed their martial art of Kalari.
In the class rooms students are sitting before me, prim in their white and grey uniforms. How lovely it is to teach in a school where we can look out the window and view the flowing river. The students and teachers wash their hands and faces in the gushing water during their lunch time. When the flow of the crystal feathered liquid cools the inner souls I recollect often the lines of Boris Chichibabin, “I would have gone away, not arguing with anyone/ so as rather than listening to drunken talk/ to sit by the shore with a wire book and hug you/ so that the trees would rear up and rustle/ and the stream sing joyfully to its echo,/ and Tolstoy and Dickens would whisper together/ like brothers with plenty of time/ I am not seeking to take part any way,/ I need nothing from the stars,/ I just ask fate for a little while/for some silence and harmony.”
In the literary periods, students sit on the pebbles of the shore to discuss the works which are available in our library. M.T.Vasudevan Nair, O.V.Vijayan, and Guru Nitya Chaitanya Yati from Malayalam and Arundhati Roy, Kamala Suraiya, J.T.Jayasingh, Kiran Desai, Khushwant Singh, Aravind Adiga, T.P.Rajeevan, Sandhya S.N., Annie George and R.K.Narayan from Indian English are more popular among my students and we enjoy them much with world classics to ignite the imagination, insight of life, knowledge and wisdom. Reading of these works keeps our education as the incessant flow of the river and it merges in the ocean.
My days as a teacher in MIM Higher Secondary School on this bank of the river Mayyazhi tells me the meaning of the verses, “Where the world has not been broken up into narrow domestic walls, where the words are coming out from the depth of the truth…”. Near the students I feel it. They have no barriers to make friendship with each other without considering their religion, caste, ethnicity…This innocence is divine which the elders often lose and fight in between for nothing.
Great piece of writing…simple and touching….an image of a world at peace
Thank you so much for this aritlce, it saved me time!