Eccentricity is a mark of genius

Her nodding of the head as she walked barefoot to school made the girls snigger.

She has been lurking in my mind for so long now that I have at last decided to train the spotlight on her. Miss Rajam Saraswati was our English teacher hired by my school to teach us ‘English’ English. She and her aged mother had moved from Madras (now Chennai), where Miss Rajam had earned a degree in English literature from Presidency College. Mother and daughter lived in the meanest of outhouses on a side lane, close to the school, close to my house. 

Her standing by the blackboard with Wren and Martin in her hands is an unforgettable memory. I wanted to learn and enjoy Keats’ poetry, but I was fed on the pages of Wren and Martin and essays by Oliver Goldsmith. Her eyes lit up, as if she were encountering Goldsmith in person for the first time. Such was her passion for the writer. If I were in Goldsmith’s time, I would have married him, she quipped, making us girls smile up our sleeves. She shared with the writer, besides the English language, certain other oddities. He was no Adonis, but then she was no Cleopatra, either. ‘The dog it was that died,’ she would quote, alluding to Goldsmith’s ironic mode, which she again shared with him. She had just read the poem, An Elegy Written on a Mad Dog, to us in class, in which a good man is bitten by a mad dog, and it is the dog that dies and not the man. Catch the irony?

After school hours, she would stand at her small wooden gate to watch us girls take a short cut to fly home. At times, she stopped me to quiz me about my interests. Why didn’t you attend my last class? She shot at me amid our nice talk, making me squirm. Of course, I couldn’t tell her I found Goldsmith boring.

Miss Rajam marked my compositions in red ink with superlative praise. My friends called me chamchi, though I showed no signs of chamchagiri. I passed high school with top marks in English thanks to Miss Rajam’s unacknowledged inspiration, of course. Her nodding of the head and smiling to herself as she trudged barefoot to school and her oily tresses made us snigger.

One dull afternoon, we made her abandon her pet Goldsmith and entertain us with the song Neerajakshi, Kamakshi. Her class that day was hilarious!

After a college degree in English, I moved to Delhi for a job. My friend, Janaki, kept me posted about our eccentric teacher. Her mother had died. Miss Rajam herself had resigned from her job after a tiff with the principal to start a new school of her own for girls. When the principal called her eccentric, she quipped, with a sarcastic grin, “Eccentricity, madam, is a mark of genius,” and she left through the back gate without looking back. She was that proud.