Every morning, he stopped under the banyan tree before the school gates and drew the cloak around him. It had no sheen, no swirling theatrics; from a distance, it looked like a drab raincoat—something a mischievous uncle might wear to a funeral. But once it was on, he vanished, as neat as a coin dropped into a magician’s fist. He walked the corridors this way, brushing past bulletin boards with their half-detached staples, the wilted posters promising spirit and teamwork. He floated down the stairs like a rumor. In the cafeteria, he slipped unnoticed between the clatter of trays, the smell of oil too long reheated, and the official smiles of administrators rehearsing the day’s slogans. Pilfering a few pieces of pastry under his cloak, he entered the lift and stood in the corner like a dried mushroom—shrunk, inconspicuous, not to be felt by anyone.
It was not fear that drove him under the cloak, but practicality. If they saw him, they would remember. The summonses would follow: the subcommittee on extracurriculars, the emergency task force on vertical alignment, and strategic roundtables with a mission but no vision. All so solemn, all so hollow. Minutes were taken and distributed as though they were scripture - no one reads them, but everyone knows they are important! Meetings for the sake of meetings, to solve the problems that did not exist before the meeting, to justify the big words “collaboration”, “cooperation”, “measurable”, “success” … He had sat through enough to know that the most urgent conclusions usually collapsed under the weight of their own vagueness. So, he chose absence, a small vanishing act, his one rebellion against the screws and bolts of the education factory.
At the classroom door, he shed the cloak and folded it into his bag. The students looked up, their chatter thinning into a hush that was alive, not dutiful. Here he was visible again, and happily so. He asked a question; hands rose, some like arrows, others half-afraid, half-hopeful. A wrong answer gave him a chance to talk about persistence. A halting attempt let him speak of kindness, which he always slipped in as though it were another principle of mathematics. They leaned toward him, not in reverence—thank God—but in the bright impatience of desiring to know more.
Time inside the classroom was its own animal: brisk, tender, fully alert. He could pause for silence, let it grow, watch them searching. An equation was solved, and suddenly the room tilted toward understanding, the way sunlight shifts across a desk in midafternoon. He almost laughed sometimes at the thought of explaining this to a committee —what box would they tick for joy? for the glimmer of a moral compass? The very notion of turning it into a “learning outcome” seemed like a private joke he shared with himself. Here, though, nothing was wasted. Not a question, not a mistake, not even the nervous laugh of a student caught unprepared. He saw in them the one kind of record worth keeping: the steady, imperfect progress of minds and hearts.
And then the day was done. He slipped the cloak back over his shoulders before stepping into the corridor again. Invisible once more, he moved past the lockers, the stairwell, the cafeteria with its after-lunch silence. Yet something in him glowed so brightly, so freely, that he felt almost visible — joy radiating through the seams of the fabric. He walked out of the gates quietly, the hidden man who had, for a few hours, been seen exactly as he wished.
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* Idea is mine, plot is mine, most of the metaphors are mine, but I let Chat-GPT write the story, and then I edited certain parts. It is just a fun way of exploring things. I don't claim ownership of the story. In fact, I am pretty sure I would do a better job with the tone and the rhythm. I just don't want to waste my time on an English text that I will never publish.
