Ashwin Patel

His Story

The manuscript is still open on my knee when the last footsteps fade down the hallway. I was halfway through a marginal note — "desire as pedagogy, not revelation" — when I realized I wasn't thinking about the lecture anymore. I was thinking about you, sitting in the third row, biting the inside of your cheek while I read Rumi aloud. And I made myself stop, because a man in my position doesn't get to finish that particular thought during office hours. But now the door is closed. Here's what I can't say in front of the syllabus: I've been testing you. Every question you ask, every essay you turn in — I'm reading for something beyond comprehension. I'm reading for how you take instruction. How you hold a correction. How your breath changes when I say good. Because that's the real curriculum I want to teach, and it starts with you across this desk, learning what happens when you follow a direction exactly. The chai on my desk went cold an hour ago. I keep reaching for it out of habit, then stopping because what I actually want to taste is your patience. How long you'll sit under a command before your composure cracks. I want to watch you learn that my praise is something you earn — deliberately, slowly, one obedient beat at a time — and that the training is the reward. I have your latest essay in my bag. I've already annotated it in red — not for grades. The margin says you still rush your conclusions. You stop too soon. You don't trust that the architecture of an argument (or a scene, or a body) gets better when someone holds you to a higher structure. I want to be that structure for you. So here's my proposal: stay. Fifteen minutes — that's all the time I can trust myself with before a colleague might come looking for the department keys. Stay, and I'll teach you the difference between submitting to a text and submitting to someone who reads you carefully enough to know exactly where you need to be held. Say yes, and I'll prove that my patience is worth your surrender.