Mamata Goon in the north Calcutta flat she shares with “friend, philosopher and guide” Mamata Dey Sarkar. Picture by Sanat Kr Sinha

One Mamata gave her shelter and lifelong friendship, Mamata Goon is hoping another Mamata will give her justice.

The bespectacled former schoolteacher has spent 35 of her 64 years teaching in a government-aided institution without pay and 25 years fighting a heartless administration that wouldn’t recognise her services. Money doesn’t matter as much to Goon now as does her dignity.

“Amar aparadh ki? Shram-er marjada ki pabo na? Aami amar adhikar-er jonno lorchi (What is my fault? Won’t the dignity of my labour be recognised? I am fighting for my right),” Goon, forced into retirement by illness in 2009, told Metro.

Arts graduate Goon started her career with Mata Monomohini Prathamik Vidyalaya in Bonhooghly, off BT Road, in 1974 as a temporary assistant teacher appointed by the institution’s managing committee for a monthly stipend of Rs 35. Between her appointment in November that year and her joining duty on December 2, the school received government recognition and the services of almost the entire staff were regularised. Goon remained a temporary teacher.

“For the first four years, I survived on the stipend of Rs 35 per month. After the demise of the secretary of the school, the managing committee was dissolved and I stopped receiving even the stipend,” Goon recalled.

Help came from the then headmistress, who convened a meeting of guardians to say how good a teacher Goon was and request them to contribute small amounts to pay her a stipend. “I used to get around Rs 75 at first, then the amount was increased to Rs 100. The highest amount I received was Rs 300. I was grateful to the guardians for whatever they contributed, but what about the government? The guardians never owed me anything, the government does,” she said, sitting in the living room of a two-room flat off BT Road that she shares with “friend, philosopher and guide” Mamata Dey Sarkar.

Private tuitions have been Goon’s sustenance in all these years that she has spent doing the rounds of government offices and the court. For every petition that was turned down by the school education bureaucracy, her resolve to get justice grew stronger.

In early 1991, Goon moved Calcutta High Court against the government and received a verdict in her favour from Justice Mahitosh Majumdar on July 8.

“As the school is already recognised, the petitioner shall file an application for employment in the prescribed manner….The primary school council shall consider the case of the petitioner on the factual background that she had served the school for more than a decade,” the judge ruled.

The then district inspector of schools of North 24-Parganas gave Goon a hearing on October 11 that year, but not the decision she thought she deserved. “I was devastated. I wasn’t expecting the bureaucracy to oppose the court’s directive,” she recalled.

Goon soon filed a fresh petition. On May 4, 1992, Justice K.M. Yusuf of the high court issued an order that mentioned how the schoolteacher had been treated unfairly. “The petitioner undoubtedly deserves protection from the court and I direct that there will be an order of status quo as of today with regard to her service,” Justice Yusuf said.

For the second time in less than a year, the school education department declined to formally appoint Goon as a teacher despite the court’s directive to do so.

In January 1994, Goon moved court for the third time. Like the previous two judges, Justice Paritosh Mukherjee ruled in her favour, asking the school education department to create a “supernumerary” or extra post to regularise her services. The authorities refused to do so on the ground that Goon didn’t possess a service confirmation letter from the school and hadn’t undergone training as a teacher.

“We had little choice but to file a contempt case against the inspector of schools and the district primary school council, but that case is still pending a verdict. In 2009, my client retired from service and is now battling serious ailments apart from the administration,” Goon’s lawyer Subrata Mukherjee said.

All through her travails Goon’s strength has been her namesake friend, who had joined Mata Monomohini Prathamik Vidyalaya as a teacher along with her but left for another institution later. “I don’t know what I would have done without her. She has given me a home, supported me and paid Rs 2 lakh in legal expenses,” she said.

Dey Sarkar is worried about who will look after her friend — they are both single — if something happens to her. “I hope she doesn’t have to beg in my absence,” said the retired teacher, Goon’s senior by five years.

Dey Sarkar’s pension of around Rs 4,500 is the duo’s only confirmed earnings per month. Had her services been regularised in the seventies, Goon would have been drawing a monthly salary of around Rs 23,000 at the time of her retirement. That would have also ensured her a monthly pension in excess of Rs 10,000.

“I remember her being very upset when her father was in hospital and she could not buy him fruits,” Dey Sarkar recounted.

Goon raised her head to say how difficult it was for her to leave all family responsibilities to her siblings.

“My mother is sick, but I have not been able to do anything for her,” she said, tears welling up.

If there is hope for her, it is because the woman at the helm is another namesake who knows what it is to struggle for decades and come out victorious.

“There has been a change of guard in Bengal after 34 years. That’s almost as long a period as I have spent fighting injustice. I hope Mamata Banerjee will hear my plea,” Goon said.

Her tale is similar to that of schoolteacher Pranab Kumar Sengupta, who had taught in a north Calcutta school for 36 years for a paltry pay of Rs 21.75 a month.

A report in The Telegraph highlighting Sengupta’s plight culminated in the Left Front government paying him his dues in March 2009.

Do you know of anyone like Mamata Goon? Tell ttmetro@abpmail.com