The Mystery Debt Of Gratitude

I Was Super-Nice To Her, But Why?

I had a patient’s mom in my clinic last month who teaches at my daughter’s school — Mrs. Priya Mehta. I distinctly felt I owed her something: I felt she was someone who had helped me in the past.

Her sixteen-year old son was a nice boy, who allowed me to do his root canal perfectly well, but even as I worked on him, I couldn’t shake off the “Debt of Gratitude” feeling.

Mrs. Priya Mehta must have got my daughter out of some scrape or the other, most likely? However, however hard I tried to remember, I couldn’t recall the exact incident. It was like a feeling of fullness, of satiety after hunger, but being absolutely unable to recall what you ate or more importantly, who cooked for you.

I was embarrassed to ask her outright. How would that conversation go?

“Hey, Mrs. Mehta, did my daughter mess up big time in your class and did you save her skin? Why do I feel I owe you something? I ask because, for the life of me, I can’t remember.”

Besides, there wasn’t any time for any chit-chat after her son’s root canal case as the next patient was already waiting.

I got home and asked my daughter, “what was it that this teacher: Priya Mehta, did for you? Even six years after you left class 2, I feel I owe her something.”

My daughter pushed her spectacles high up on her nose and said, “I’ve never had a teacher called Priya Mehta!”

I wondered how I had felt indebted even without having crossed paths with the lady and how my memory could have failed me so badly.

Then I recalled it.

My daughter was fast friends with the daughter of our neighbor, Saniya, who studied in the same school and class, but not in the same section. Saniya left India for Canada a year or two before COVID, and I sort of forgot about her for a while…

Back when they were in India, Saniya’s dad would drop both the girls to school and I would go and pick up them up. It used to be fun. They would tell me the day’s war-stories and tell us what escapades the class rebel, Lucas Hewitt, had gotten up to that day.*

Mrs. Priya Mehta was Saniya’s Class 2 class teacher — not my daughter’s. She had called out to me after school, saying that there was something about my daughter which she wanted to tell me.

I hastened to tell her that I was just Saniya’s neighbor, and not Saniya’s mom. I didn’t want to be privy to any information that was intended for my neighbor’s ears alone.

However, Mrs. Mehta was insistent on talking to me. She said that Saniya very likely needed glasses, because she would copy gibberish off the blackboard if she was seated at the back, but was able to copy letter-perfect information from the smart board which was right behind her.

Whenever the children had a Smart Class, they would reverse their desks. The blackboard still reigned supreme at the head of the class, while the SmartBoard slunk at the back, waiting for the tech-savvier teachers to come and use it.

She said that if Saniya had been unable to copy from both boards, she would have doubted her reading abilities, but it was abundantly clear to her that Saniya needed an eye check up — today.

Saniya was moved back and forth for blackboard and Smart Board classes — three or four times a day.

Mrs. Mehta didn’t want to go the formal route by writing a letter to Saniya’s parents. This was urgent, she said, and I should use my influence with the parents of the child I was taking home to get the test done the same day, and report success to Mrs. Mehta the next day.

I didn’t need to speak to Saniya’s mom and dad because Saniya herself buttonholed her parents into taking her to the eye guy the same day.

Mrs. Mehta had asked Saniya to produce a receipt from the eye doctor or else she wouldn’t let Saniya into class. She hadn’t counted on just the child taking up the cause, she wanted an adult (me) on the job as well, so that Saniya’s eye checkup job would get done.

It wasn’t until three years later that I realized that my own daughter needed spectacles too, and rather badly.

I had completely missed the way my daughter was squinting at the television, which she didn’t watch much of (surprise, surprise.)

The person who caught my daughter’s eye problem was my nephew, who was visiting from Delhi. He was watching a movie with subtitles. When my daughter couldn’t read the subtitles, he alerted us to the fact that our baby girl needed spectacles.

Only, our baby girl wasn’t a baby at all! We discovered her eye problem only in grade 6— when she was already eleven.

When my daughter couldn’t read off the blackboard, her friends would help her copy the information, and she passed for being a slow writer, not someone with poor vision.

So I recalled Mrs. Mishra as a conscientious teacher who did her job well. I carried around the guilt of never having taken my daughter for a routine eye exam. Even worse, I had had the older daughter checked out, and when she turned out to have 20/20 vision, I felt the younger one didn’t need a checkup. I think we went out for pizza or something after that…(oh, the shame!)

When I encountered Mrs. Mishra in my clinic six years later, I felt grateful towards her for having prevented a late diagnosis of eyeglasses for Saniya, who I loved very much, and I had deeply wished that she had been my daughter’s class teacher as well. The school used to promote the class teacher along with the class, and the children would have the same class teacher for three years.

Mrs. Mishra gives and cares a lot for her students. So did my daughter’s class teacher in grade 2 through 5, but she didn’t catch the eye problem. Neither did I, to my everlasting shame.

My nephew did, and he was a chance visitor.

• Usually, Lucas (not his real name) would get suspended for using “slang” or cheating in class. I wonder what this kid is doing now with all that energy, sitting at home with online classes for over two years now.