When the Queen came calling

Queen Elizabeth’s quiet death and the impressive spectacle of her funeral transported me back to my college and professional days. I was a blatant anglophile back then, determined to study English literature and teach English poetry to college students.

Soon after my post-graduation, I took up a job as an English lecturer at City College. I found it an uphill task to encourage and inspire the young boys to read Wordsworth and Blake. It was a frustrating experience.

Since the college was close to Poor House Block, we got students mainly from the underprivileged class. Teachers are supposed to inspire young minds to think and produce ideas. I realised I was not an exemplary teacher. Yet my colleague had indeed found a way out of this dilemma. He used to teach the English poets within a framework of the vernacular ethos, in this case, Kannada, and he had made this work. The smile that he wore meant he was a success while I was a woeful failure. Let that be.

Read | Queen in Bengaluru: A 1961 memory reel

The story here is that Queen Elizabeth, and Prince Philip were scheduled to visit Bangalore, where they were to be honoured guests at the IISc. A few alumni of the institute were invited, among whom my father was one, having studied dye chemistry under an English professor in the 1920s. My sister and I were to accompany him to the function, and my first move was to apply for casual leave, mentioning the reason for the leave. It was to see the Queen, I said in my leave note addressed to the principal.

My sister and I were on cloud seven; we enjoyed the pandal, the flowers, and the regal guests.

The next day the principal summoned me, by which time I had come down to terra firma. He waved my leave note and asked, “What is this? This is dereliction of duty, madam. You go to see the queen, leaving your students in the lurch. They were roaming the corridors while you were off to see the Queen, eh?” Of course, the principal was justified in thinking that the boys had been deprived of a precious lecture by my ‘dereliction of duty.’ What if I were to tell him that my absence might have offered the boys reprieve from a boring lecture on Wordsworth, and wouldn’t they have had fun ‘roaming the corridors’ for a change?

‘I was at the IISc, sir’ I said lamely.

“I too had an invitation, to the same function. But my duty came first, madam, which I expected would be with you too. Let it not happen again,” he warned. I walked out of his room, not totally convinced by his argument. I still believed that going to see the Queen on a breezy spring morning in 1961 was not a bad idea at all.

A nice memory from the past is worth a dozen dry commitments to duty.