The Most Cheerful Kid
During his first winter at Northfield Mount Hermon, Yash Mehta liked to go sledding down the snowy hill by Memorial Chapel after every Monday-morning all-school meeting. In just a T-shirt and jeans. No jacket. No gloves. “It was the first time I ever saw snow, and I was just loving it so much,” Mehta says, grinning. “Sometimes I even rolled down the hill!”
Many NMH students make a name for themselves in one way or another. Mehta, who’s from Mumbai, India, has earned a reputation as the most cheerful kid on campus. There he goes, whizzing down the road on a mountain bike, waving madly. There he is again, leading a conga line of giggling ice skaters on Shadow Lake in January. When he described the dining hall’s burrito bar at a storytelling event, he threw his arms open with joy, as if offering a giant hug. Ask him what he thinks of his courses, and he marvels, “Every day, I walk out of my Genetics and Ethics class and think, ‘Oh my God, what just happened?’ DNA is so cool!” His fellow seniors selected Mehta as the senior “Most Likely to Brighten Your Day.” Not so, he insists. “It’s the other way around. Everyone else here makes my day.”
Mehta says his upbeat outlook comes from his father. When Mehta was about 12, he was in a restaurant with his dad, eating a cheese sandwich. “If you’re in a restaurant in India, there is always someone asking you for food, and it happened that day,” Mehta recalls. “I didn’t give the person my sandwich, and my dad asked me, ‘Are you happy?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ He said, ‘Go buy five sandwiches and give them to those people over there.’” Mehta protested, but his father was firm. After Mehta handed out the sandwiches, his father asked him again if he was happy. “I said, ‘Dad, what did you do? I’ve never felt this way before.’ Ever since then, I have understood that eating a sandwich will make you happy, but when you give the sandwich to someone else, that’s true happiness.”
Mehta comes from a large, close, extended family, and when he calls his parents in India, he’s often on the line for a couple of hours as the phone gets passed from one relative to another. Yet he does not get homesick, he says. The transition to NMH was only hard for about 10 minutes. “I’m pretty sure there was no time that I was actually sad,” he says. “Everyone was so friendly and nice. It felt right away like I had a new family.”
At NMH, Mehta has launched himself on a busy, I’ll-try-anything trajectory. He ice-skated for the first time. Read crime fiction. He’d never paddled a canoe or ridden a mountain bike, but as a member of the NMH Outdoor Team, he competed in, and eventually won, boat-bike-run triathlons in western Massachusetts. When his affection for those NMH burritos led to extra pounds, he asked his best friend in the dorm, Will Desautels, a varsity soccer goalkeeper and a pole-vaulter, for help. “Will taught me to pick out foods that were good for me, like spinach instead of dessert,” Mehta says. “This year, Will said, ‘Let’s work harder,’ and he started training me. He’ll say, ‘This is the last sprint,’ and we do the sprint, and then he says, ‘Just kidding, let’s do 10 more.’”
That’s got to be annoying, even for the most cheerful kid on campus, right? “Oh no,” Mehta says, surprised. “I love it!”
This story was published in NMH Magazine in 2016. Photo by Glenn Minshall.