Colours Beneath The Earth
It was a green snake; sunlit, and curled like a question mark across the tarmac—neither hurrying nor hiding. I had just returned from school, my bag still heavy with lesson plans and half-corrected notebooks, when I saw it. The snake seemed to have arrived from another chapter of the day—a quiet, cryptic sentence in the middle of an otherwise ordinary paragraph.
Within minutes, a few elderly men had gathered. Their pherans rustled in the breeze like dry pages. Their eyes, clouded with age and caution, watched this creature. They stood in a circle—not of power, but of unknowing. Despite the presence of government employees nearby—men from the irrigation and forest departments, men paid and trained and qualified—it was me, a teacher, they turned to.
“Master Ji, yiman kyah che naav? Is it dangerous?”
Their question came not out of curiosity, but out of trust. That old, inherited trust Kashmiri society bestows upon a teacher. Not the mechanical kind—of homework and exams—but the deeper kind, carved from years of being the first person a child meets outside family. The kind built in silence, over decades, in chalk dust and whispered advice, in loaned books and sleepless nights.
I knelt beside the snake—not close, just enough to observe its glistening green body. A harmless vine snake, I said, lifting the words gently like you’d lift a newborn. Non-venomous. It hunts frogs and lizards. Useful for the ecosystem. A teacher must know such things. Or at least appear to know. They listened—not just to the facts, but to the calm. The way a patient listens not to the medicine, but to the doctor’s eyes.
That small moment, on an ordinary village road, reminded me of something I often forget: a teacher doesn’t just teach children. He teaches a village. The parent, the passerby, the elder who has long stopped believing in books—they all believe in the teacher.
In Kashmir, a teacher is a lighthouse. Even if his coat is old and his shoes wear thin at the heels. In the storm of confusion, people turn their faces toward him. He becomes a compass—not always right, not always sure—but always looked at.
A child rushes to a teacher with a bruised knee. A mother with a question about her son’s silence. A father with an application he cannot read. A shopkeeper wondering about a form he needs to fill. A stranger asking for a road. Even a green snake, slithering out of the underbrush, finds a way to the teacher’s feet. As if testing the depth of his wisdom.
We do not choose this role. We are placed in it—sometimes with joy, often with weight. And slowly, we learn that teaching is not about classrooms at all. It’s about being a door that never shuts. About borrowing knowledge from everywhere—from science and soil, from sky and story, from forest and fear. A teacher must learn from the wind and speak like the river. Because the questions come from every corner of life.
That day, standing under the sky with a green snake disappearing into the grass, I realized: the parent of my society, too, is my student. He may not attend my class. He may not call me “sir” or “ma’am.” But he looks at me when something in the world doesn’t make sense.
And if I look away, I fail him.
Sometimes I think, a teacher walking through a village is like a pen moving across paper. He records the problems that others forget to see. A broken road. A lonely grandmother. A dropout child. A field drying without water. He doesn’t always fix things—but he bears witness. And sometimes, that is enough.
That snake, that strange little teacher in green, reminded me that teaching is not a profession. It is a pact. Between a mind and its world. Between silence and voice. Between the known and the unknowable.
And we, the teachers, must carry that pact with humility. For we are trusted. Not because we are perfect—but because we are present.
And sometimes, presence is more powerful than knowledge.
The author is a regular GK contributor.
