This Teachers’ Day, look past the stage and the bouquets to the men and women who hold Kashmir’s classrooms together through snow, silence and shutdowns.
Tomorrow the halls will fill. A chief guest will speak about nation building, a student will recite a poem about the guru, and a few teachers will walk up to receive a shawl and a framed certificate. It is a good ritual, and a small one. The teachers who most deserve it will be somewhere else, doing what they do every other day of the year.
One of them is in Tulail, where the school year is measured not in terms but in the number of weeks before the pass closes. She teaches three classes in one room because the second room lost its roof two winters ago and the file for repairs is still moving between offices. When the snow comes she stays, because a village without its teacher quietly gives up on its children.
Another is in a hamlet above Kishtwar, a former Rehbar-e-Taleem who spent the best years of his life on a stipend that would not cover a family’s rice and mutton. He never told his students how thin the month was. He told them that a boy from that hillside could sit for the civil services, and one of them did.
Kashmir has asked more of its teachers than most places would dare. They have run classes in living rooms and shrine courtyards when the schools were locked for months. They dried flood-soaked registers on rooftops in 2014 and reopened before the water left the lanes. When the pandemic sent learning onto phones, they discovered that half their pupils had no phone and the other half had no signal, so they went back to walking, one home at a time, one lesson at a time.
They do all this while being told to keep the world outside the classroom, in a place where the world does not wait for permission. They cover for missing textbooks and a mid-day meal that is sometimes the only certainty on the timetable. And out of these rooms still come the doctors from Uri, the engineers from Doda, the first graduates from families that never owned a book.
There are teachers beyond the school gate too. The walnut-wood carver who will not let an apprentice touch a good plank for a year. The grandmother who teaches the Quran and, without saying so, teaches patience. The boatman who teaches his son the moods of the Dal before the boy can spell its name. In this Valley, learning has never belonged to chalk alone.
So say thank you tomorrow, and mean it. But then ask the harder question. What does this teacher actually need? Almost always the answer is not a shawl. It is a roof that holds, a road that opens, a salary that arrives on time, and a society that remembers them on the days when there is no stage.
