Becoming of a Teacher

Page 1 – Seeds of Silence

The class was a garden of voices—some thundering like trumpets, some bright like sparrows, some reckless like noon winds. And in a corner that was very far away, was Riya, the quiet one. Her seat always seemed to devour her, her words rolled into buds that would not unfold, her eyes stuck to pages like shields from the world.

She was not unhappy, she was invisible. They laughed, responded, disagreed, and even disobeyed the teacher. Riya remained silent, her book stored with prohibited words that she never spoke. Poems about raindrops falling down windowpanes, mini-stories in which shy girls felt empowered, fragments of dreams that were fragile for the class atmosphere.

Every morning she promised herself she would raise her hand—just once. Every afternoon she left with the same unwritten responses locked within her. Silence was her safeguard, as much as it was her prison.

Children, no matter how quiet, have a world within. Riya's world was vast: she read faces in clouds, conversations from trees, and lessons from the night sky's silence. While everyone memorized definitions, she merged them into metaphors. While they practiced writing numbers, she watched them dance in spirals. But all this was maintained within the safety of her pages.

Until one day, a voice said her name.
It was not the dictatorial command of power, but a gentle pull, like sunlight through curtains. “Riya,” her literature teacher, Mrs. Sharma, asked, “would you read us what you’ve been writing?”

Riya’s heart skips a beat. She aches for invisibility, for nesting inside her book. The room holds its breath. Slowly, falteringly, she gets up. Her shaking hands open the page. And for the very first time, her words escape the captivity of her silence.

A small, simple poem spilled into the world. It spoke of rivers that stopped short of reaching the sea, of birds that weren't quite bold enough to fly, of shadows that felt a longing for light. When she finished, she couldn't quite look up. Then—applause. Gentle at the outset, gathering like rain on dry ground. And Mrs. Sharma’s smile, warm and steady, as though to say: I see you. I always did.

Something shifted that day. A long-seed that had lain dormant felt spring's awakening.

Page 2 – The Spark

The poem was brief, but for Riya it was like crossing an ocean. That night, she was perched by the window, moon spilling silver over her book, and repeating to herself, They listened… They actually listened.

Something in her shifted, although she couldn't identify it at the time. It was not pride, not triumph—it was the felt warmth of being understood, the magic of her interior world reaching out and touching some other soul. She replayed her teacher's smile in her mind, repeatedly, like it was some lantern she might light and hold in her darkest passageways.

Since that day, Riya had begun writing differently. No longer for herself alone, but hoping, clandestinely, that someone else would read, feel, comprehend. Step by step, word by word, out of concealment. She was still in the last rows, was still opposed to the stir of hands up, yet her silence was no longer empty—it was filling, gradually, with courage.

Mrs. Sharma would also loiter around her desk, perusing her pages, and every now and then writing minuscule remarks in the margins: “Beautiful imagery.” “Strong voice.” “Keep writing.” They were only a few words, but for Riya, they were like drops of water for a parched shoot.

Years later, in hindsight, she would come to understand this lesson: it was not the applause of her classmates that changed her—it was one teacher's faith that decided to look at what no one else was looking at.

But at this time, she was nothing more than a girl with trembling hands and a book of dreams. She did not know yet what her future held. She was only aware that somewhere within her, a spark was lit.

Kindled sparks are not extinguished. They wait—quietly, patiently—for the day that they will burn.

Page 3 – The Crossroads

Time, like a torrentuous river, carried Riya out of the childhood class. Schooldays merged into college days, and into the adult hustle and bustle. She was not in the last row of a class anymore, yet she was always lugging her notebooks around—writing in the bus aisles, at coffee shops, under swinging hostel lamps.

But real life was not quite as nice as paper.
Jobs drifted by and went, like monsoon clouds that floated by and brought no rain. She tested working in offices—figures that went on forever in computer screens, deadlines that stank of drudgery. She once worked at a book store among words that she loved, yet there she felt trapped, watching other people’s novels fly while her own stayed trapped inside.

Night after night, she would sit at her writing table, face buried in her hands, repeating, What am I to do? Drawers overflowed with her poetry and not her heart with tranquillity. The spark planted by Mrs. Sharma fluttered but found no direction.

Then one evening, a slight mishap altered everything. Beside her on a crowded bus was a young boy carrying a worn notebook. He sat glaring at the addition questions inside, biting hard into his lip. Riya automatically bent in.
“Would you like me to demonstrate?” she asked politely.

The boy stuttered and nodded.

What once was numbers became laughter. She taught through drawings, changing multiplication into little stories. His face brightened up like a secret door ajar in his mind. When finally he had the problem figured out, he grinned and waved the solution like a piece of loot.

In that moment, Riya felt something she had not felt in all her drifting years—a deep, muted joy, not in succeeding, but in watching someone else prosper.

The bus jolted along, yet in Riya a new idea was awakened, gentle yet persistent: Maybe my place is not in seeking out my own limelight, but in lighting lanterns for other people.

But doubts plagued her. Could she handle a room of children? Could that girl once fearful of the way her own name was uttered potentially dominate a room of words? The questions weighed down upon her, yet the memory of the boy’s beaming face lingered the longest.

Life had brought her to a crossroads. The one toward the comfort of quotidian work. The other—that fearful, unsure, yet strangely glowing one—murmured of classrooms, of pencils, of unread words.

It is that subtlest whisper that changed a lifetime.

Page 4 – The Return

Once, a very long time later than that bus ride, Riya was walking past her childhood school. The building stood there as it always did—warm red bricks in the light, children’s laughter spilling out the gates like music. Something tightened in her chest. She stopped and looked at the windows where she once would hide from talking.

By one of those windows, she saw it—Mrs. Sharma, old, her hair streaked silver, still holding a book in her hands, still teaching in the same unwavering gentleness. The scene struck Riya like an old song remembered after long years of forgetfulness. She was paralyzed, tears straining at her eyes.

She couldn't sleep. The memory of the class, of her poem, of the spark, was inundating her mind. She felt her younger self was reminding her, in a quiet voice: This is where you belong.

She returned. This time not as a learner, but as a teacher.

It was nothing like her maiden arrival. The class buzzed like a bazaar—children laughing, snickering, investigating the newcomer in front of her. Riya stuttered while she tried to rein them in, her chalk cracking into pieces while she wrote at the blackboard. Some children snickered, some whispered. Self-questioning took hold of her: I don’t belong. I don’t know how to do this.

But there he was, in the third row, a hunched-over boy, his note pad half-filled with words, his eyelids oppressed by silence. He was like her once upon a time, the girl wanting the world not to see her.

Riya calmed down. She began teaching, not in the forbidding practiced voice, but in the gentleness of one long used to silence. She drew shapes upon the blackboard, talked between periods, interspersed laughter into her commentary. Little by little, the turbulence became intrigued. And in the quiet boy’s eyes, a spark was kindled—a feeling, perhaps, that she understood his world.

Every day was a battle. Some days she exited the class feeling worn out, questioning her choice. Some days a student’s query or a smile gave her the fortitude to return. She also began to understand that teaching was not perfection—it was persistence, getting up when your voice shakes.

And in the very process of her defiance, she felt something strange—her once-own seed was no longer solely her own. It was sprouting in every bold hand that went up, in every skeptical voice that was spoken because there was room for it that she had left.

The girl once cowering in silence was emerging as the woman speaking for silence.

Page 5 – The Becoming

It was one afternoon that the monsoon clouds stood against the windows. The quiet boy remained after class. He was carrying a crumpled sheet, his face flushed by indecision.

“Ma'am,” he whispered, hardly any louder than the sounds of the rain, “I… I wrote something. Will you read it?”

Riya's heart missed a beat. She unfolded the sheet carefully. The writing was simple, awkwardly typed, yet essential. It was a story of a small lamp that believed that its flame was not powerful enough to create any impact until it discovered that even the smallest light could chase away darkness.

Riya looked at him—this boy who once kept his head lowered—and saw herself in him, bearing her own secret words, trembling in front of Mrs. Sharma.

She grinned. “This is nice,” she told him, and she actually did mean that from the heart. “Would you like to share it at class tomorrow?”

His eyes widened, his breath stopped, but she saw a spark there—a spark that she knew all too well. He nodded, barely.

The next day, when his shaking yet bold voice resonated through the class, Riya felt stinging tears at the corners of her eyelashes. The children clapped, as once they had for her. In that clapping, she heard the cycle of life come to a close gently, elegantly.

Then she understood: teaching wasn't about books or chalk or points for planned lessons. Teaching was about courage passed from one trembling voice to the next, about planting seeds of faith in soil that once was comfortable with skepticism.

That evening, while walking home through a rain-washed sky, Riya said to herself, “I have become.”

But even while the words left her lips, she felt it couldn't be over. Because a teacher is always in the process of becoming—each child a new morning, each class a new beginning.

She smiled, carrying not just her own light, but hundreds of tiny sparks that fluttered into flame.

In the quiet of her heart, she thanked Mrs. Sharma—who had seen her, who had initiated the chain, who had informed everyone that every now and then, one’s smile can change the world.