My literature teacher: my fondest memory of school

Every school has one of those–a teacher so old, so wonderful, that a kind of mythical folklore  springs up around them. Everyone wants to be in their class, anyone who isn’t feels cheated,  and every year their lucky students discover that the hype around them is real. For me, that  teacher was Ma’am Chattopadhyay, an elderly Bengali lady who taught English literature in  my high school in Calcutta. Everyone called her ‘Chatto’. She wore simple cotton sarees, big  bindis and rolled her greying hair into a bun. She had been around longer than anyone could  remember–several of my classmates’ mums and aunts had also been taught by Ma’am  Chatto!

Literature teachers have been romanticised in popular culture as eccentric but deeply  empathetic guides for their students–think Robin Williams’ beloved Mr John Keating in the  1989 film Dead Poets Society. And with good reason, too. In the confusing and chaotic high  school years, a passionate literature teacher can provide an oasis of comfort for overworked,  overwhelmed and overanxious adolescents. Like Mr Keating, they remind their students that  there is life beyond marks, exams and college applications. They help us find ourselves in the  stories of others and we come into our own in the worlds we explore in literature class.  Ma’am Chatto was the OG Mr Keating. Decades before the film was made, Chatto was  teaching impressionable teens about the power of stories and showing us how, to paraphrase  Mr Keating, words and ideas have changed the world.

Though Bengali, Ma’am Chatto would conduct class like a snooty 18th century British  aristocrat lording over his estate. We had to follow a very specific and admittedly peculiar  decorum in her class. We got brownie points for alliterating while speaking and an extra mark  for spelling it correctly in tests. We had to refrain from using abbreviations, referring to  ‘SparkNotes’ when writing our assignments, and above all, slouching. This was the law  according to Ma’am Chattopadhyay. And we followed it. Her ridiculous energy and stern  attitude made us sit straighter, think harder and critique smarter. When she’d snap her fingers  and say, “We will now stop daydreaming about Bold Sir Lancelot and focus instead on  Tennyson’s description of the countryside in The Lady of Shalott”, nineteen girls would  actually wake from their reveries and belatedly try to recall said description of the countryside.

She gave us juicy details about their lives to show us that these celebrated literary figures were actually quite like us; flawed, quirky and remarkably human.

My favourite were Chatto’s poetry classes. Our ICSE syllabus featured works at least a  century old and written by dead white men, but Ma’am Chatto always brought their words to  life. Perched precariously on the edge of her desk, she’d sit ramrod-straight, one hand  clutching the book and the other tracing elaborate circles à la Porphyria. She wouldn’t just read the poems aloud; she’d recite them and perform them. That’s how we learned about the  nuances of rhyme, rhythm and meter – from hearing Ma’am Chatto recite poetry. Years later,

while watching Dead Poets Society for the first time, I had goosebumps during the scene in  which Mr Keating explains the importance of poetry to his disinterested students. He says,  “We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are  members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion.” These may well  have been Chatto’s words.

Ma’am Chatto didn’t know this, but I’d always dreamed of being a writer. The problem was,  as a teenager, I put my literary idols on pedestals. The stories and poems I read in books  seemed perfect and my half-baked first drafts paled in comparison. Most times, I didn’t even  try working on them. Chatto was the first person to tell me about famous writers’ struggles,  self-doubt and failures. She gave us juicy details about their lives to show us that these  celebrated literary figures were actually quite like us; flawed, quirky and remarkably human. I came to see them as mortals who had lived lives filled with love, pain, wonder, longing,  loneliness and hope, and who created beautiful art out of these emotions and experiences. I  learned that to write, one must first experience life. I was a shy, introverted bookworm who  preferred reading over talking to people. Believe it or not, my literature teacher helped me  realise the importance of putting the book down and actually paying attention to life  unfolding around me. Without this, I may well have never become a writer.

One of our early classes was devoted to dissecting ‘Asterix and Obelix’, which she believed was as literary as anything in our syllabus.

Chatto did more than just lecture us about Romantic poetry in the afternoons. She made  literature accessible and relevant to a generation that was swiftly getting addicted to  BlackBerry messenger, online multiplayer games and social media. She’d effortlessly draw  parallels between the East and West, the Classic and the Modern, serving up the world’s  greatest writing and best ideas to us in a delectable mix. One of our early classes was devoted  to dissecting ‘Asterix and Obelix’, which she believed was as literary as anything in our  syllabus. She encouraged lively debates in class: Who was the better detective, Poirot or  Feluda? Did the Sonam Kapoor-starrer Aisha do justice to Austen’s brilliance? Did  Shakespeare really write all the works attributed to him?

Chatto taught us how to think for ourselves– she was our only school teacher who beamed  with joy when we disagreed with her interpretation of a line or a verse. In Dead Poets  Society, Mr Keating tells his students “When you read, don’t just consider what the author  thinks, consider what you think.” Over two years with Chatto, I learned to develop my own  perspective on art and on life. It’s been over a decade since I was in Chatto’s class, but every  year on Teacher’s Day, every time I read a new piece of poetry or an old favourite, every  time I see Robin Williams’ smiling face in a still from Dead Poets Society, I fondly think of  her.