Fiction & Nonfiction

Realizing a Dream

Realizing A Dream


The six-year old first grader, with wide spaced and innocent eyes stared at her English teacher in awe. She loved the lesson on the varieties of trees, being read and explained by Miss. Suguna. She drank up the details of the story which took her to forests, deserts and small hamlets all over the world.
“Jaya, what are the two major kinds of trees?”
The girl scrambled to her feet, and answered the teacher with all the zest her little heart was capable of.
“The two kinds of trees are the evergreen trees and, the trees that change with seasons.”
Miss. Suguna smiled, filling Jaya’s world with joy. She loved English and her English teacher as well.

Languages, be it English, Telugu

The regional language of Andhra Pradesh, a South Indian province

or Sanskrit

A classical language of India

worked magic on her, and the respective teachers continued to be her favorites through high school to college. The tensions of math and science vanished during the periods of poetry, drama or essay writing.

A world of wonder opened before her mental eye, as the little girl joined her grandma and siblings listening to the serialized stories of the timeless epics, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana

The two famous epics of India

, as one of her aunts read from the special Sunday edition of the Telugu newspaper. The voice took her to the ancient times of heroes and heroines who fought and conquered the wrong doers and reestablished peace and harmony among men of this earth. Themes involving good versus bad thrilled her.
She too wanted to read and explain things to others; a dream started taking root in her heart of hearts, a tender ten-year-old.

The weekly library period at school had been enticing. During the impressionable teen years, Jaya spent numerous hours on reading translated stories of Greek and Sanskrit classics which took her to unknown regions of mystery and awe. She burnt midnight oil much to her father’s concern  reading old and modern writers of her mother tongue, Telugu

Telugu is known as the Italian of the East due to its similarity in word endings with Latin of which, the closest descendant is Italian

and later, of English.

Excitement coursed through her when she won First place in recitation held during the school Annual day celebrations. Stage fear disappeared the moment she started on the first line of the famous ballad, The Highwayman.
“The wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees,
The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas,”
Her teacher congratulated her on her perfect intonation which, besides reflecting emotions like surprise, joy and sadness, took the audience to the moors with the handsome man atop the steed as “he galloped away to the west.”

Jaya’s mom wanted her to be a doctor. However, it didn’t take much time to realize that laboratory practicals, be it Biology or Chemistry had little appeal to her.
After having scored high percentage in her school final board exams, she got admission into one of the most popular colleges in Hyderabad.

The capital of Andhra Pradesh

That was the turning point in her life. College opened doors to a new freedom, rational thinking, and a brand new romance with the book world.

Jaya observed that her teachers of English Language and Literature in college, no longer spoon-fed lessons and notes to the students as the practice was in high school. She loved their method of “speaking” to the class rather than “lecturing”. Her favorite teachers Mrs. Walters and Mrs. Jaffrey, nurtured her dream, strengthening her wish to stand in their shoes sometime, some place in future.
If she were to become a college teacher, she decided she too would bring Heathcliff, the central character of Emile Bronte’s Wuthering Heights or Christabel, an unfinished poem of Coleridge, Milton’s Satan or dozens of other literary characters to life, the way her two ideal teachers did. 

Grammar and composition were like a delightful game. Whenever, she was asked to explain the tense pattern on the black board, Jaya went for it like there was no tomorrow. Each tense with its four subdivisions along with examples appeared with quickness in the tree diagram she learnt to understand intricacies of tense. Comprehension and vocabulary exercises were fun. By the end of her college years, her dream took a definite shape. She realized no other career could be as pleasing or fulfilling as teaching in a college.

During her post graduation classes of English at the University, Jaya watched her professors dealing with Chaucer, Spencer, Shakespeare, and Marlowe with enthusiasm and devotion. The musical quality of Marlowe’s poetry remained etched out on her mind.
“Was this the face that launch'd a thousand ships,
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium--
Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss.—“(Dr. Faustus)
The beauty and love spread in Marlowe’s Hero and Leander captured her young imagination. She had spent number of hours on reading and remembering the charm and philosophy of English, American, Indian English and African English writers.

And when she had finally landed a teaching job in a college, Jaya was happy that it kept her love of reading alive. Referencing and writing were part and parcel of this unique profession. She felt humble when she realized that the young students looked up to the teacher for guidance and inspiration. There is something spiritually captivating about the teacher who has the power to mould young minds into thinkers and writers and most of all into good citizens.
Jaya feels grateful that her career choice was of her free will and based on her aptitude. It was a natural choice and no one put it there.

Word Count: 925.

Note- I wrote this true story from the third person point of view. It allowed me to study my own self with detachment.