The Teacher - An Excerpt from a Book

A remarkable school teacher

Some times of an evening you might chance to see a frail-looking man, short and short sighted, in a black coat and with a prodigious head, walking along the oval pathway. He is a nation builder,- he has helped to educate two generations. He must still be coming back into the memories of thousands who have forgotten all that they set out to learn at school.

Life has not given Nusserwanji P. Pavri his meed of reward, but that has not dulled the edge of his cheerful debonair spirit. He evidently believes that Dante was right in condemning to Stygian marsh those who had been sad under the blessed sunlight. With all his sure and enormous erudition, he is Modesty in person. He has not produced any book. The result of his labour is not so many hundred pages but himself. The issue of his sustained mental effort is not a volume but a man; it could not be embodied in print, it consists in the living word.

Nusserwanji is a quiet man, not to be easily ruffled or rattled. Patience is an instinct with him. He has the simplicity of the man in Dostoevsky’s Brother’s Karamazov who used to ask the birds to forgive him.

He brought the human touch in the lessons; - it was always a lesson never a lecture. When Nusserwanji taught history facts were brought to life, the dry bones of history stirred, the ages began to masquerade. He conjured up before you the fog at Lutzen and the snow at Towton, the shower of rain that led to the American revolution, and the severe winter of 1788 that produced the famine of 1789 and thereby the French upheaval. You saw Brutus, the norm of republican virtue, extorting 48% interest from a wretched Cypriote community; you saw the lights burning low in the skies and the stage darkens in the middle ages; you heard the din of toppling thrones and the crashing of empires during the first world conflagration.

And never did his vision dim, his grasp weaken or his memory fail.

His learning does not consist merely in the stock of facts – the merit of a dictionary – but the discerning spirit, the power of appreciation and that of comparative criticism. Knowledge is to Nusserwanji the bread of life. He reads as if he were to live forever, even as if he were to die the next day. He inoculated his students with his own thirst for knowledge. He was a precision and a martinet in discipline. To him knowledge could no more be aquired without high seriousness than a symphony could be rendered upon the flute.

Punctuality was with him a passion. You could set your watch, correct to half a minute, by the time he came into the class. His private library was at the disposal of all his pupils, and so were his time and learning. There never was a man more generous in encouragement or gentler in reproach. By personal contact with him you not only learnt something, you became something. Contact with him moulded your character and taught you, in the most impressionable years of your life, to beware of ideas half-hatched and convictions reared by accidents. Only thoroughly good man could be so great a teacher as Nusserwanji indubitably was.

He was unerring in his acumen to scent the latent ability in a student. In that great tempest of terror which swept over France in 1973, a certain man who was every hour expecting to be led off to the guillotine, uttered this memorable sentiment:

“Even at this incomprehensible moment, when morality, enlightenment, love of country, all of them only make death at the prison door or on the scaffold more certain, - yes, on the fatal tumbril itself, with nothing free but my voice, I could still cry Take care to a child that should come too near to the wheel; perhaps I may save his life, perhaps he may one day save his country.” Nusserwanji had this large and inspiring belief in the potentialities of a Kid. He was personally and vitally interested in the progress and career of all his pupils.

Many other things could be related about Nusserwanji from the wide leaved book of memories. The associations of travel fade the incidents of life press so closely one upon another that each in turn is trampled under foot, but one’s associations with a teacher like Nusserwanji remain forever unchanged. He has now retired but the energy of his educational service remains. This soothing thought must have opened a larger meaning and a higher purpose to his daily work. His personal influence has not fallen silent. His pupils will long feel the presence of his character about them, making them ashamed of what is indolent or selfish and encouraging them to all disinterested labour both in trying to do good and in trying to find out what the good is.