Missing Souls - Blog 2

Continued from Series:  Missing Souls

There are times when we have some grand plans for our life. We plan our desired outcome to the tee and are super excited for the future.

Boom! Things just didn't turn out the way we wanted it to. Why? We have no answer to that.

In times like these, I take refuge in the cliché, 'Whatever happens, happens for the best!'. And I have got proof. Read on!

She was my favourite Maths teacher. She did the unimaginable. She made me love calculus, integration and derivatives! I didn't like maths till I met her. 

She did her Bachelors of Engineering in Computer Science, with the plan to join an MNC during the IT boom. But fate had different plans. While she passed out with flying colours, the IT recession hit the same time around when she graduated. There were no jobs on the offing. She was crushed. The grand plan to join the IT workforce was not to be. Now what?

On her father's insistence, she started her Maths tuition for junior college students. My elder sister was in one of her early batches, when she had just started. In her living room. My sister liked her teaching style and did very well in maths.

By the time I took admission to junior college, she was the most successful Maths teacher in the town. Running 8-9 batches a day, teaching almost 500 students a year. That was massive success! She was her own boss and doing much better than she would have, if she took up an IT job!

I still remember being part of her classes, there was this massive big white board with a speaker and mike system so her voice could reach till the last benches. My beloved teacher was a petite one, so she also had to use a platform to stand on and to write on the massive board.

She used to start her day at 4 am. Her first batch would start at 5 am, followed by others which would go till almost 10 am. After some break, she would again start at 5 pm and would teach upto 8 pm.

So I was really touched, when she offered me and a fellow student to take extra classes for only the 2 of us. We were from a different stream of study than all others (basic maths syllabus was same but we had a few extra stats topics in our studies). Having such a hectic schedule, she didn't have to go the extra mile for only 2 people. But she did.

This was my main motivator to do well in Maths during junior college. Come on, this lady had put in extra efforts on me and I could not let that go waste. I let go of my math inhibition and really practiced hard. When I took my report card to show her my marks (96/100), she seemed genuinely happy for me. Her big smile and best wishes for me were the things I remember from our last meet.

Then I took admission to senior college and changed my city. Life went on.

One morning, I got up to a flood of messages. Multiple friends from junior college had messaged me that she is no more! What, how, when? This can't happen. She was in her early thirties.

I was shell shocked! I felt some pain in my chest. I just could not stop my tears, my town had lost a real good soul.

The local newspaper covered the story of the car crash which costed her life along with her husband's.

This was many years back. But I still think of her. . She was survived by her young son. How is he? Is he ok? These questions fail to leave me. But then, I remind myself of the biggest life lesson she taught me through her life, Whatever happens, happens for a reason!

She didn't get a job she wanted but instead was destined to touch hundreds of lives by driving away the fear of Maths from young kids. Likewise, I am sure her son too must be excelling at something, touching many more lives with his special gift. And she is watching over him, rooting for him to succeed from the heaven above! Peace!