SHYAMALI MITRA

Beloved Bengali teacher at Bethune Collegiate School and quiet poet of the monsoon

Shyamali Mitra taught three generations of Kolkata girls that a comma is a breath and a full stop is a decision. Born in Bhowanipore in the winter of 1938, she grew up in a house of books and borrowed harmoniums, and took her M.A. in Bengali at the University of Calcutta, where she discovered that she preferred poetry to the examinations it was supposed to prepare her for.

In 1962 she joined Bethune Collegiate School, the city's oldest girls' school, and stayed for thirty-six years. She taught the syllabus faithfully, but her pupils remember the Friday afternoons when she closed the textbook and read them Jibanananda or Tagore, letting the monsoon outside the windows do the rest. She published three slim collections of poems in the little magazines of College Street, the most loved of them Brishtir Pore (After the Rain), and she was the first reader of every poem her students dared to write, marking them in pencil, never in red.

Her house in Bhowanipore filled at Durga Puja with relatives, neighbours and former students. She sang Rabindrasangeet badly and with total conviction, set her own mishti doi in earthen pots, and could not pass a bookstall on College Street without losing an hour. She cheered Mohun Bagan with the same fierceness she brought to grammar. Her husband, Subrata, a bank officer, died in 2012. Shyamali passed away peacefully in her sleep on 29 June 2023, as the first monsoon rains reached the city. She leaves her son Arindam, her daughter Tuhina, and grandchildren who still recite her poems.

“A poem is just an ordinary day that someone paid attention to.”