“Don’t sit like puddings in my class,” Eunice Ma’am would say gently and sharply at the same time, causing your sleepy brains to feel like half-baked jiggly puddings. She would or would not wait for the shock of her remark to subside and anything half-decent to spout from your mouth. But pudding and cabbage is something you didn’t take much to, ever.
Once she did not allow me to enter the class because I was late. I wasn’t late ever after that I think. Partly, because I was scared, but largely because why would you miss out on a class that went from 2nd century BC Tamil poetry to Theatre of the Absurd and World War II. I loved her to bits. Somehow the world of English and American Literature seemed accessible from the second last bench of St Xavier’s College in her class. We had to hide from her if worked for Malhar, our college festival. We couldn’t tell her if we were pursuing Honours of another subject. We couldn’t squeal in her class. And yet you knew she cared you were a student or even a pudding at times. “Go learn Chinese cooking or help your mother in the kitchen” That was common but then if you had to understand the love song of J Alfred Prufrock by TS Eliot, there was no one quite like her. I can still hear Eunice recite, “Let us go then, You and I, When the evening is spread against the sky, Like a patient etherized on a table…” or “Things fall apart, Centre cannot hold..” or Owen’s Pity of War or my absolute favourite,
Man said to the universe:
“Sir I exist,”
“However,” replied the universe
“The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation.”
- Stephen Crane
No, it wasn’t always depressing stuff – though most of it was about Fitzgerald, Sartre, Camus, Beckett and Plath… There was also absolutely delightful “Thought Fox” and “Crows” by Ted Hughes and utterly delicious “Wendy Cope.” Remember Penelope Waiting …
While studying literature and just about trying to hold up in front of her, I had unknowingly learnt about history, revolutions, economic depression, capitalism, feminism, ancient Indian culture and even literary criticism for God’s sake. My friends remember that I had stopped smiling at one point because of reading too much of these post-modern writers. I had nightmares of Castle and Outsider. Who knows, may be that’s why I took to Shah Rukh Khan with such vengeance.
I kept in touch with her vaguely. She, of course, always remembered sharply. I loved her poems, her novellas, her dark-ish house in Diamond Park, her parrots, her jibes, her columns, her sarees, her cigarette smoke rings. I am not just a fan. I am a student, whose world view opened because of her, because she was willing to take me seriously despite my Dombivli pronunciations and hesitations in a crowd full of uber-cool townies. Once in our college corridor she stopped and said to me, “you have written a good paper.” I had a halo around my head for days after that.
She wrote me recommendation letter for my university application on her typewriter, she gifted me a maheshwari dupatta once, she told me to go see her after our meeting last year. At best the association was erratic and yet so full of love.
We read her novella, Dangerlok and felt the twitch, we read her poems – always precise and poignant, we read her columns in Mumbai Mirror and wondered how she found these gems.
I will miss you, of course. But I will always always be grateful for having you in my life when it was turning and changing … So there, something I never said to you while you were alive, but I am sure you knew. Thank you and I love you.
