Representative image.
Credit: DH Photo/B K Janardhan
In Oft in the Stilly Night, the poet Thomas Moore sadly recalls ‘the eyes that shone, now dimmed and gone.’ At this stage in life, having lost many loved ones myself, those words strike me as particularly poignant.
I would like to believe that my teachers are well and happy, but it seems improbable, as they would now be a hundred or more. Indeed, several have passed away. However, they live on in my memory.
So movingly did Mrs Franklin explain Moore’s aforementioned poem that it is still a favourite. Mrs Dutta made Shakespeare’s As You Like It (no easy play to teach) interesting, and Mrs Singh worked wonders with A Midsummer Night’s Dream. If I have taught English with even a modicum of success these past many years, it is because those extraordinary educators gave me a head start.
Equally passionate about her area of expertise was our history teacher. Mrs Ishwariah had participated in the Quit India Movement, and would dramatically describe how she and her friends rode atop buses, yelling at the British to go home. Listening to her made us wish that we had been involved in the freedom struggle.
Mrs Gupta’s patriotism was evident in her praise of Kabir. I admired that saint, but as a persistent procrastinator, I was unable to practice or appreciate his couplet about doing today what could be done tomorrow and tackling immediately what there was a whole day to complete. At my request, Mrs Gupta told my parents that my Hindi would improve if I watched movies. The result was that I enjoyed Rajesh Khanna’s films to my heart’s content.
Talking of my matinée idol, our chemistry teacher was always ready to sing songs from the 1969 Hindi hit, Aradhana, especially on our excursions to places like Agra, Gwalior, Dehradun, and Mussoorie. Mr Mathur’s namesake, on the other hand, believed that fun and physics were incompatible.
If I was bad at physics and chemistry, I was worse at math. Mrs Nafde tried to get me to grasp it. I owe her a debt of gratitude. When I entered class 10, she urged me to leave the science stream (where I had struggled all through class 9) and encouraged me to begin afresh with the arts stream. I had some catching up to do, but since I was studying subjects that suited me, the rest of my time at school proved to be the best of my time at school!