Miss Morgan

As I tread my way back through the nostalgic lanes of memory to my first school - Tyndale Biscoe School in Srinagar (India) there is only one name which comes to my mind and that is of my favorite teacher Miss Morgan..
24 years on, I have a pretty blurred image of her face but her affection and care is still fresh as ever..Here I was a young shy and nervous boy of 5 going to the school for the first time with really high levels of anxiety in Srinagar which made me feel so alienated at that point of time.
I still remember the first day I met Miss. Morgan , a lanky frail British lady in her mid forties.Her big smile spread across her whole face, lit up the room; she had big blue eyes and her forehead had two distinct lines of age.She was my class teacher and met all of us one by one and talked to me specially, since I was crying during the recess missing my mum and dad a lot. She took her hankerchief wiped all the tears from eyes and said "Ishan , from now during school time I am your mother , so don't feel bad." The words soothed me beyond my expectations and had a profound effect on me for all the time I knew her.
I did find her accent a bit funny and at that point being a 5 year old I had no clue that it was her Scottish accent which made her English sound really different to me.
Over the next couple of years Miss Morgan used to teach us English and Maths , plus she was our music teacher too.She lived a solitary and disciplined life.Having been a missionary she had travelled to India in the late Sixties and then settled down in Srinagar taking up the role of a teacher at Tyndale Biscoe, an all boys school which is 129 years old and boasts of an esteemed alumni of the likes of the first family of Kashmir - The Abdullahs.
The school had a victorian architecture and Miss Morgan was provided with a cottage of her own within the campus. I distinctly remember one my friends Omar Mallik and myself going to her cottage once to eat home made cookies and cakes just before Easter.
Miss Morgan was a woman of immense warmth and affection and was viewed by all as a person of utmost integrity and honesty.
She was very illustrative in her teachings and once had got cookies and gems for all of us to vividly read out the story of Hansel and Gretel to us. It were these small things she used to do for us which makes us remember and miss her so much till date.
Then one fine day when I was in Class II we received the news that Miss Morgan is going on leave for un-defined time and we would be having a new class teacher .....two months passed away and there was still no sign of Miss Morgan. Omar and I visited her cottage within campus every alternate day to find out whether she is back or not.
Slowly and slowly we got used to her absence but I still missed her in a sporadic manner...like a typical 8 year old.
One fine morning in the spring of 1988 all of us were asked to attend an extended assembly , none of us could understand why but we knew it would be important...and then during the assembly I heard the worst possible news I could have ever heard at that point of time.....Miss Morgan had succumbed to her long battle with terminal cancer.
I was in a state of trance and had tears rolling down my cheeks.When I wiped my eyes, I saw that I was not alone...I was one of the students picked from Primary school to read out an eulogy in the name of Miss Morgan during a special assembly .
My hands shook and my legs trembled as I read out my eulogy for her with tears in my eyes ...I felt cheated, felt as if a son had been robbed of a chance to take care of her mother when she needed her son the most.....