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Moved by Perumal Murugan's new book, Students Etched in Memory, actor Avantika Vandanapu chats with the beloved author about how school made one of them and unmade the other.

- By KANIKA SHARMA

Perumal Murugan, 58, is the teacher everyone dreams of having. Like John Keating in Dead Poets Society (1989) and Miss Honey in Matilda (1996), the award-winning author is also a college professor of the most unusual kind. So much so that some students still ring him up to this day, reminiscing about staying with him under thatched roofs when they had nowhere else to go.

When actor Avantika Vandanapu, 20, read Murugan’s latest book, an emotional dedication to the pupils he loved and is loved by in return, she felt wistful for the mentors she wasn’t lucky enough to have. Growing up in California, she had her share of aloof teachers and bullying classmates who made her time at school worth forgetting.

In Students Etched in Memory (published by Penguin Random House India and translated from Tamil by V Iswarya), readers walk into Murugan's past, greeting sons and daughters of farmhands and daily wage earners who were the first from their families to get an education. For Vandanapu, who breezed through the 220-pager in under two hours, the literary scholar's honest and succinct narrative style was evocative of “the kind of stories my grandfather, who was also a teacher, told me about the kids he taught”. Afterwards, on a Zoom call patched through by Vogue India, the actor and author discussed the beauty of having mentors who become the wind beneath their students’ wings.

Vogue India: Perumal, this is a very different book from your other works available in English. What made you pen an homage to your students?

Perumal Murugan: Back in 2015, when there was controversy surrounding my novel