Farah

"The modern day angels are rather innovative," he exclaimed with a sparkle in his eyes. There was a look of amazement and delight on his face as his eyes studied me closely. "But you don't look a total stranger," he added. "But we shall analyze that later. Right now I must take you round to see the place."

It was an ambience, and not a school in the normal sense of the word. Set inside a natural forest, the twenty acres of the campus harmonized the natural and the man-made to near perfection. There couldn't be a better place to work, I thought to myself.

He hinted about his paraplegia so that I could draw the necessary conclusions from the way he leaned almost totally on his crutches without his going into the self-pity of it all. But it didn't appear to be a serious disability in his case. He moved faster than one would expect a person at his age and with crutches to do, and it was I who was out of breath by the time we had finished going through half the campus.

"The present enrolment is around three hundred. Add the twenty teachers and other staff," he told me as we negotiated a steep climb. "I have never moved out, and have not met anybody who might remember me as a friend or relation since the day in September thirty five years ago I resigned my readership at the university and bought this little place." I liked his brief revelations.

We had walked to the southern end of the school limits by now, and had crossed over to the ridge that marked the beginning of an endless pine forest full of musty autumn fragrance. We turned back, and breakfast awaited us when we entered his cottage.

I loved the new surroundings, and started teaching a bit of English and helping the old man in administration right away. A highly cultured person, always immaculately dressed, with an air of the most distinguished melancholy, and eyes twinkling with the quiet ironies that seemed to take me ever so flatteringly into the confidence of a spirit - a deeper interest in him was inevitable. I learnt that he had been at Cambridge University, and had won a prestigious poetry award there. That explained a few things about him.

I had hardly been in the school for a month when he suffered a heart attack. Doctors assured me that it was a mild one, and advised him complete holiday from work. I nursed him as best as I could, but had to resume work at the school after a week as all his responsibilities now devolved on me.

It was on two occasions just before the winter vacations that I returned to my cottage in the evening to find my photo albums and some of my books of modern poetry out of the shelf. The first time I thought the maid had taken them out of curiosity and forgotten to replace them. When it happened the second time, the maid informed that the old man had come in during the day and was looking at the pictures. I knew he needed something to amuse himself during his convalescence. The doctors had advised him rest, and I placed my albums along with some of my poetry books by his bedside so that he could have ready access to the diversion and entertainment he seemed to need.

He was, of course, surprised. "So you have found out," he said in a voice made feeble by illness. "How terribly uncivil of me to have intruded into your privacy. But I am indeed curious to know about your family, and the kind of books you read, and I have been thinking of speaking with you for some time."

I assured him that it was all right, and that anything he wanted to read or leaf through would be made available in his bed, and that he was free to ask me anything that he wished to know about my family. But I had a presentiment that he would soon die. I cried bitterly in my pillow that night, and wondered if god had placed me in the midst of the most sardonic situation he had ever conceived.