Forty years at the ashrama: the custodian who became family

For alumni scattered across Sydney boardrooms, Melbourne tram routes, and Perth mine sites, the BRKM Reunion is more than a gathering. It is a place where the names and faces from those childhood corridors come flooding back. Among the most vivid memories are the classrooms, the chapel bells, and the steady figure of Nirmal-da, the custodian who spent four decades on the same veranda. He passed away last winter, and several batches have asked us to record his stories before they fade.

This profile brings together oral histories from the 1972, 1985, and 1998 batches, along with notes from the current headmaster's office. The aim is not to romanticise a humble profession but to honour the kind of presence that quietly shapes a school. For readers based in Adelaide or Brisbane who have not walked those corridors in decades, this is also an invitation to sit with a memory that may have gathered dust, much like the veranda steps he swept every morning.

The quiet guardian who kept the veranda spotless

His name was Nirmal Chandra Dey, though to generations of students he was simply Nirmal-da, the suffix of respect that West Bengal reserves for an elder brother. He joined Baranagore Ramakrishna Mission Ashrama High School in the summer of 1983 as a temporary handyman. The post was meant to last six months, covering a transfer period for the previous custodian. Six months quietly became four decades.

Nirmal-da lived in a single rented room behind the staff quarters, ten minutes' walk from the gate. He rose at four-thirty every morning, lit his small clay stove, and reached the school compound before the bell rang at six. He would first sweep the long front veranda, then the corridors connecting the lower school to the chapel, then the steps leading up to the assembly ground. He did this in the dark, often by the light of a single yellow bulb near the gate, because the school believed in starting the day before sunrise.

His equipment was almost comically modest. A jute broom, a wicker basket for garden leaves, and a dented aluminium bucket that he had welded twice. There were no leaf blowers, no imported polish, no mechanised scrubbers. He mixed his own floor solution from crushed tamarind seeds and a little washing soda, a recipe his mother had taught him in his village near Burdwan. Many alumni who now work in cities like Sydney and Melbourne often laugh that the floors in their harbour-view offices never look as clean as the corridors of BRKM.

From the gates to the chapel: tracing his daily walk

A typical morning for Nirmal-da had the predictability of a timetable. He began at the main iron gate, sweeping leaves that had drifted in from the eucalyptus planted along the boundary wall. He then moved to the bicycle shed, where students from the nearby villages parked their cycles in neat rows. By six-fifteen he would be at the drinking water stand near the assembly ground, filling three large earthen pots from the hand pump so that children arriving on bicycles could drink before the prayer.

After assembly, he moved indoors. He swept the classrooms on a rotation, never the same two days in a row, because he believed that students would notice patterns and start scattering paper to test him. He mopped the wooden staircase near the headmaster's office with a damp cloth wrapped around his broom handle, an old trick he said his father had used on the bamboo floors of their village home.

Lunch break was his only extended pause. He sat under the neem tree near the cycle shed, sharing his tiffin with whichever student had forgotten theirs. Alumni from the late 1990s still talk about the taste of his cold rice and fried potato, eaten out of a small steel bowl. When afternoon school resumed, he returned to his rounds, this time emptying dustbins, cleaning blackboard chalk trays, and polishing the long brass handles of the main corridor. He locked up at sunset, after personally checking that every classroom window was latched and every stray football was back in the store.

Lessons hidden in the dust and the door frames

What set Nirmal-da apart from any other caretaker was his quiet moral instruction. He never raised his voice, but he had an uncanny way of correcting students without ever lecturing them. If a boy ran through the corridor during class change, Nirmal-da would simply be standing at the end of the passage, broom in hand, watching. The boy would slow down on his own. There was no need for a word.

He taught generations of students how to greet elders. Any student returning from a long absence would find Nirmal-da waiting at the gate, and the first thing he would do was remind them to fold their hands and say pranam to the swamis in the prayer hall. To the Anglo-Indian students whose families had converted during the colonial period, he was equally respectful, always asking after their parents by name.

Many alumni now living between Parramatta and Footscray recall small mercies. He once mended a torn school shirt for a student whose mother had fallen ill, using thread he carried in his pocket. He paid the school photographer for a class portrait of a student who could not afford it, then never mentioned it to the headmaster. These were not grand gestures, but they taught entire classrooms what quiet generosity looked like.

When he wore a different hat: a man of hidden talents

Few people knew that Nirmal-da could repair almost anything mechanical. He had trained briefly as a bicycle mechanic in his twenties, before the school job took over his life. Over the years, he repaired the school's hand pump three times, fixed the chapel's broken fan, and once dismantled the entire school clock to clean out a wasp nest that had lodged inside the mechanism.

He also turned out to be a self-taught folk singer. During the annual Saraswati Puja celebrations, he would play the small one-stringed ektara and lead the students in traditional Vaishnavite kirtan. The current headmaster still has a recording on his phone of Nirmal-da singing in 2017, his voice cracked with age but steady in rhythm. Alumni who now fundraise from Sydney's CBD say they play that recording at committee meetings to remind themselves of the values the school once embodied.

There was also the cricket angle. Nirmal-da was an obsessive follower of the game. He had never owned a ticket to Eden Gardens, but he had watched every Test match from a small transistor radio kept inside his broom closet. He could recite the entire Indian batting order of the 1983 World Cup win from memory. When the Australian cricket team toured India in 2001, he would quiz students about the visiting players, testing them on their fielding positions and run-up styles. Many alumni say that his cricket trivia sessions in the cycle shed were more memorable than any classroom period.

Carrying his memory across continents

When Nirmal-da passed away in November 2024, the news travelled quickly through the BRKM alumni networks. Former students in Melbourne organised a small prayer gathering at a temple in Clayton, while a batch in Sydney held a virtual condolence meet. The school itself held a memorial under the same neem tree where he had eaten his lunch for forty years.

His loss has prompted the alumni committee to think about the often-invisible members of a school community. Teachers receive tributes, headmasters receive plaques, but the man who kept the corridors clean rarely makes it into the official history. The committee has proposed a small annual award in his name, to be given to a current school student who displays quiet, consistent service to the school community without expecting recognition.

The medical camp team, which has been running free health camps for underprivileged families in the area for over a decade, has also stepped forward. Their volunteers have shared a moving piece about how early detection saved a young student from a serious heart condition, and that spirit of caring for the unseen is something they see as a direct legacy of Nirmal-da's example. You can read more about those early detection success stories on the reunion website. Alumni have been contributing to a small endowment that helps current students with school fees and uniforms, a quiet continuation of what he used to do from his own pocket.

Honouring a quiet life in 2026

Several alumni have asked how they can keep his memory alive from places as far away as Canberra, Hobart, and Darwin. The committee has put together a short list of practical suggestions for batches planning their reunion activities in the coming year. These are not grand gestures but small, sustainable ones, in the spirit of how Nirmal-da himself lived.

• Set up a small corridor fund at the school that pays for two students each year to receive shoes, books, and a warm jacket for winter. Alumni in colder Australian states will remember that this winter in West Bengal bites hard.
• Sponsor a bench under the neem tree near the cycle shed, with a small brass plate that reads "In memory of Nirmal-da, who sat here with us."
• Volunteer an hour during the next reunion to help clean the veranda alongside current staff, treating it as a moment of remembrance rather than a chore.
• Contribute to the medical camp's annual run so that families in the area continue to receive free check-ups, echoing the kind of quiet service Nirmal-da embodied.
• Share your own story of him on the reunion portal so that batches who never met him can still hear his voice through your words.

There is also a small but creative initiative that some batches have begun. Inspired by Nirmal-da's love of cricket trivia and his habit of teaching without lecturing, alumni have published a video poker strategy example on the reunion site, written in the storytelling tone he used to use. It is not about gambling but about how patience and quiet observation lead to good outcomes, the same lessons he taught in the corridor. Members of the BRKM Reunion are encouraged to send in their own contributions to this living archive.