It was over tea at the dhaba on a stormy March afternoon that my student Kabir and I both saw God. The dhaba is a small restaurant on the west side of campus, and they have good tea, if you ask for no sugar. Kabir and I sat in the open, and great clouds were gathering above us. For a moment the wind stopped, and the sky was dark. Then, an enormous wind rose up, overwhelming and frightening. A huge wall of dust menaced us from the field like a flood and the six storeys of the administrative building seemed to wobble; and then God appeared – in the figure of a lean grey cat, paying no attention to Kabir or myself, but perhaps aware of us, in a godly way, and recognisable to us both.

We looked at each other in silence. Kabir is a talented student of both physics and philosophy and I felt like his peculiarly metaphysical mind was suited to the moment. Then the clouds above lowered themselves towards our little spot before the rain began, a massive rain. I thought of Rabindranath Tagore, his poem honouring Kalidasa’s Meghaduta – “Long-repressed tears seem to have poured down, In torrents that day.”

Kabir said, “Professor, maybe we’d better go inside?” and, as even God took cover somewhere behind the dhaba, we ran down the hill and across the field to the shelter of the mess.

...

Embarrassingly, I didn’t know about Kalidasa before coming to Ashoka. Late one afternoon on my way to the dhaba I saw my colleague Alex Watson, Professor of Indian Philosophy, immersed in a slender book. When I asked what he was reading, he introduced me to “India’s Shakespeare” (from the 5th century AD), and the character of the yaksha in Meghaduta, the demigod of wealth. While in exile, the yaksha constantly pines away when thinking of his lover, growing so thin that his gold bracelet slips off his wrist. In desperation, he calls out to the largest cloud he sees, asking it to carry a message to the lover.

“You might want to consider him for your Philosophy of Literature class next year,” Alex said, which of course I did. Some of the best papers I received in that class were based on the question of why a demigod would entrust a desperate love letter to something so unreliable as a cloud.

...

There are times, often in the evening, when it is too crowded to eat at the dhaba and I get my dinner as take-away. As I stand in the shadows waiting for my food, I get to see my students grouped at tables in combinations I didn’t know existed, or in pairs who sit far apart from each other in class but turn out to be intimates. I sometimes eavesdrop on their conversations. They are talking about their weekends, Kashmiri poetry, the protests, or some little scandal in the dorms. This is when I remember my former life as a businessman in the States, and how at lunchtime I would sneak away from my office to walk for even just half an hour across a nearby campus, to see students on the lawn holding hands or sitting in the shade of a tree reading a thick paperback by Freud.

...

A day before the semester began, on a chilly January evening, I met some students at the dhaba to talk about my Existentialism class. We talked about what went well and what could be improved. One of them suddenly asked, “Have you looked around? Do you see how gloomy it is?” It was certainly one of those dark, bad-air nights when you have to remind yourself that spring is coming, and the atmosphere and the weather will improve.

I don’t remember exactly what I told them. No doubt the usual professor’s riff – entirely true but clichéd – about the excellence of my students and my colleagues and the pleasure of teaching at a place that is creative, expanding, entrepreneurial, and alive. The trees that grow along my walk to the dhaba that were planted by people I know and teach with. The new, gorgeously coloured, weirdly enormous flowers in front of the administrative building (I think I did mention those), and the little black mouse I saw run into the construction site (I didn’t mention him). But years from now – no, not just years, but this summer, when I am back in Kansas City – I’ll be thinking about the dhaba, and how often I get to have tea and take an hour or two to sit there and talk with and listen to my students.

Clancy Martin is Professor of Philosophy. He has written for several publications including The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Vice