My Students, My Teachers — Forty years of stories from a teacher who believed that every lesson worth remembering began with a human being, not a textbook.
House spirit, in our school, was not a polite affair. It was loud, secretive, occasionally theatrical, and entirely serious. Each house burned to outshine the others — in sports, in assemblies, in the particular annual gladiatorial contest of the school skit. When the Deepavalli season rolled around, allegiances sharpened, rehearsal rooms filled with conspiratorial whispers, and teachers and students alike threw themselves into the business of winning with a fervour that would have impressed a minor general.
I was the teacher in charge of Green House. And I had, I was certain, a brilliant idea.
Madurai on the eve of Deepavalli is a spectacle unto itself — the streets blazing with light and colour, the markets overrun until midnight, the haggling cheerful and inexhaustible. We would weave a comedy around Deepavalli shopping. It was topical, it was local, it was warm. We worked on the script in conditions of near-perfect secrecy, polished the props until they gleamed, sourced costumes with the dedication of a small theatre company, and rehearsed with a thoroughness that left no line unpolished and no gesture unplanned.
Then came the intelligence report from our agents in the field: Rajan, the head boy of Yellow House, was working on a similar theme.
Similar theme. Our theme. The audacity.
Outrage, suspicion, and a certain electric excitement coursed through Green House in equal measure. Had they borrowed our idea? Spied on our rehearsals? We whispered. We speculated. We redoubled our efforts. Our agents, performing their duties with admirable commitment, returned with further news: Yellow House had barely rehearsed. Rajan had too many responsibilities as head boy and no teacher guiding the production. Their chances, our sources assured us, were bleak.
I, the experienced teacher with superior ideas and a fully costumed cast, permitted myself a quiet confidence. First impressions are more lasting, I reminded my group. We were performing first. The advantage was ours.
On the day of the competition, Green House took the stage first. The actors delivered their lines faithfully. The props were handsome. The costumes were exactly right. The skit was, by every objective measure, competent, well-prepared, and thoroughly decent.
The laughter it drew was also, I must confess, thoroughly decent. Not the helpless, auditorium-wide eruption we had anticipated. Decent.
Then Rajan walked on.
No makeup. No costumes. No props to speak of. Just a simple roadside scene: a vendor selling lungis on the eve of Deepavalli, and a customer determined to buy one for a third of the price quoted. What followed was a masterclass in comic timing — the vendor’s protests, the customer’s theatrical indignation, the endless, glorious haggling that every person in that auditorium had witnessed at some point on a Madurai street and recognised with a jolt of pure delight.
The climax arrived when the satisfied customer — lungi purchased, bargain secured, pride intact — turned to find another customer who had bought the same lungi the previous year. And to demonstrate its present condition, that customer produced from his pocket what had once been a lungi, and was now, after a single wash, a handkerchief.
The auditorium split. Rajan had won — not with resources, not with preparation, not with any of the things we had worked so hard to accumulate — but with a single, perfectly observed truth about human nature and the optimism of the Madurai shopper.
Yellow House lifted the trophy. I had the unenviable task of consoling my house, which I attempted with what grace I could manage, while privately, helplessly, admiring the boy who had beaten us with nothing but creativity and nerve.
Twenty years passed. I had grown — as a teacher, as a director of school productions, as someone who had acted, faltered, learned, and tried again. I was now working with a new generation of students, sharing what I had gathered over the years about the art of the skit, the craft of comic timing, the difference between a scene that works on paper and one that lands in a room full of people.
One afternoon we sat together watching television. An advertisement caught our eye — sharp, warm, rooted in the particular texture of everyday Indian life, funny in the way that only things deeply observed can be funny.
It was from Rajan’s company.
I knew his touch the moment I saw it. That same instinct — find the truth in the ordinary moment, trust the audience to recognise themselves — was right there on the screen, scaled up into a pan-India campaign but unmistakably his. My heart swelled. I told the students that Rajan had been my student.
What I did not tell them — what I am only now willing to admit in print — is that I had taken tips from him. That the boy who walked onto that stage with no costume and no props and a handkerchief punchline taught me more about creativity that afternoon than I had taught him in a year of English classes.
There is a thin line between a teacher and a student — and the wise teacher never forgets which side she is sometimes on.