Yet Untitled 048 - Ray of Influence
A tribute to someone who I helped quit smoking
Dearest Yet Untitler
I received this message from my high school English teacher the other day in response to a photo of my daughters I’d posted on their birthday:
I had given Mr. Ray a Happy Teacher’s Day card on September 5th, 1993. He had become very emotional and spent our class talking about how he’d been a rowdy youth who had “fought with a bicycle chain wrapped around his fist”. Choking up, he promised me that he’s strive to be a better man. He also promised to give up smoking.
Needless to say, my 13 year old self was pretty shell-shocked on hearing such and outpouring of emotion from a man of a similar age as my father. Back then, all I could make of someone’s memory of having fought with bicycle parts appended to their fists was a video-game rendition of the same - with digital 8-bit blood if at all. Today, my imagination could take me to a much more gorey verisimilitude of the scenario Mr. Ray found himself guilty for. I guess - years ago - an iron-fortified punch must have landed and done some considerable damage to someone’s face. Regrets.
23 years later, Mr. Ray gave up smoking. The cigarettes outweighed his guilt’s emotional reaction with my awkward though sincere gesture for two decades. But nonetheless…
…I won. Ultimately.
Ultimately, Mr. Ray is smoke free. Not having had a puff since 2016. It’s a big one. We’re talking about a man who exuded the smell of a thousand fags at 7am.
If I exerted an influence on Mr. Ray’s life, the opposite was also true. Because of him, I know two poems very well -
The Highwayman by Alfred Noyes
I know large tracts of this poem by heart. The gonzo image of a musket shattering a beautiful woman’s breast at the end haunted me for years. The Highwayman’s style-quotient has never failed to impress me. And one night, after consuming a dollop of edible cannabis in college, I recited The Highwayman at hyper speed on repeat until I got the munchies and ate half a loaf of bread after dousing it with chocolate powder.
Years later, The Highwayman came back into my life in the form of The Highway Rat, a children’s book that I read over and over again to my kids Ananya and Aahana, secretly savoring the references to Noyes’ original that it mirrored.
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Mr Ray took his time with this extended cautionary tale of mystic retribution invariably catching up with an arrogant man who kills an innocent albatross in cold blood. The many months we spent on this poem allowed me to experience Coleridge’s psychedelia - the horror the mariner experienced when other-worldly forces conspired to inflict a spectacular, painful and extremely frightening revenge against him for his cruelty.
Can you imagine the feelings that passed through me when I learned that an albatross was a real bird?
Micchil
Mr Ray was also given free rein by our principal - Mr. John Mason - in introducing to us the theatre of Badal Sircar. Our school was more used to standard Shakespearean stuff. Badal Sircar was revolutionary. The play we did - Micchil - had politics. Mere participation influenced you. For life.
Mr. John Mason, the Principal who gave Mr. Ray free rein to do Badal Sircar in school died last week.
By giving cycle-chain fighting, extremely political Mr. Ray free rein to direct Badal Sircar in school, Mr. Mason had also touched one end of the raw nerve I had touched with my Teachers’ Day card. Bengali to Bengali (Mr. Mason was Anglo-Indian), he had brought an aspect of Mr. Ray to full expression by stoking his fire for another Bengali - Badal Sircar. Mr. Ray did not hold back. He pushed us to show the school a theatrical spectacle it had never seen before.
In Michhil - a play from the ‘physical’ theatre - a very hefty co-actor student sat on my back every day through rehearsals and performances. I hid the pain. A year later, my L4/L5 vertebrae gave way to a slipped disc. Nobody knew where this came from. It likely came from Michhil which came from Mr. Ray as encouraged by Mr. Mason.
My slipped disc kept me immobile and away from extra curricular activities for 4 months in my final year of school, a time I filled with concentrated study - which allowed me to score high and meet the cutoff for a college of my choice in Delhi University.
BTW: I referenced this journey with my slip-disc in YU007:
Where the mind is without fear
Mr. Ray was passionate about another Bengali - Rabindranath Tagore.
Being a schoolteacher seemed to give him free rein to be passionate before us students. Tagore had written a poem which was recited at our assembly every once in awhile. This poem got Mr. Ray talking about God, and how! On one of his passionate lectures, he said before us that he believed that God wasn’t a person but a principle. My little 13-year-old mind was blown. I had been given a perspective I had never entertained before.
23 years later - in the same year that Mr. Ray took his last puff after I had encouraged him to do so without actually saying it - I encountered Buddhism. Mr. Ray’s statement about God being a principle laid the ground for my intense engagement with Buddhist philosophy which in turn had a profound effect on my life. Would Buddhism have made sense had he not seeded that perspective in me? I don’t know. Would Mr. Ray have quit smoking in 2016 had I not given him a Teacher’s Day card in 1993? I don’t know.
All I know is this - I’m glad Mr Ray doesn’t smoke anymore, and I’m glad I played a part in this. Thinking about all the influence he had on me, it feels like the very least I could do!
Thanks for listening!
V
Lovely Vasant.