I remember being, almost always, a front-bencher in college. The whirl of tests, seminar presentations, results announcements, horror gasps and sighs of relief as a collective class…

After a few years, the view changed 180 degrees, and I became teacher instead of taught.

Those were balmy days of late summer. One somnolent afternoon, my restive class of literature undergraduates didn’t want to hear of Chaucer or Middle English, especially from a new staff member. Talking of knights, I wasn’t making much headway and you could have called me the ‘lady in distress.’

Just then, a naughty youngster piped up: “Too many late (k)nights, ma’am?”

That made everyone sit up, for sure. Humour broke the ice between ages, literally!

(Mythili was a student of Stella Maris College, Chennai, back in the early 1980s.)

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