conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide a description for a book titled The English Teacher about Indian, Academy, DIV><B>the with the genre: Literature & Fiction.
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conversations.value: <DIV><B>the author</B> (1906&ndash;2001) was one of the most prominent Indian novelists of the twentieth century. Most of his stories are set in the fictional South Indian town of Malgudi, a place that the author populated with numerous characters. He was the recipient of&#160;many awards for his work including the National Prize of the Indian Literary Academy, India's highest literary honor. In 1980 he was awarded the AC Benson Medal by the Royal Society of Literature, of which he was an honorary member and in 1982 he was elected an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.</DIV>
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conversations.value: Swap the first and the last sentence.
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conversations.value: </DIV>. Most of his stories are set in the fictional South Indian town of Malgudi, a place that the author populated with numerous characters. He was the recipient of&#160;many awards for his work including the National Prize of the Indian Literary Academy, India's highest literary honor. In 1980 he was awarded the AC Benson Medal by the Royal Society of Literature, of which he was an honorary member and in 1982 he was elected an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.<DIV><B>the author</B> (1906&ndash;2001) was one of the most prominent Indian novelists of the twentieth century.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide a plot for a book titled The English Teacher about Indian, Academy, DIV><B>the with the genre: Literature & Fiction.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The English Teacher: As an English teacher and lecturer at Albert Mission College, Krishna has led a mundane and monotonous lifestyle comparable to that of a cow, but this life of his took a turn when his wife, Susila, and their child, Leela, come to live with him.\nWith their welfare on his hands, Krishna learns to be a proper husband and learns how to accept the responsibility of taking care of his family.\nHe felt that his life had comparatively improved, as he understood that there's more meaning to life than to just teaching in the college.\nHowever, on the day when they went in search of a new house, Susila contracts typhoid after visiting a dirty lavatory, keeping her in bed for weeks.\nThroughout the entire course of her illness, Krishna constantly tries to keep an optimistic view about Susila's illness, keeping his hopes up by thinking that her illness would soon be cured.\nHowever, Susila eventually succumbs and passes away.\nKrishna, destroyed by her loss, has suicidal thoughts but gives them up for the sake of his daughter, Leela.\nHe leads his life as a lost and miserable person after her death, but after he receives a letter from a stranger who indicates that Susila has been in contact with him and that she wants to communicate with Krishna, he becomes more collected and cheerful.\nThis leads to Krishna's journey in search of enlightenment, with the stranger acting as a medium to Susila in the spiritual world.\nLeela, on the other hand, goes to a preschool where Krishna gets to meet the headmaster, a profound man who cared for the students in his school and teaches them moral values through his own methods.\nThe Headmaster puts his students as his top priority but he doesn't care for his own family and children, eventually leaving them on the day predicted by an astrologer as to be when he was going to die, which did not come true.\nKrishna gets to learn through the headmaster on the journey to enlightenment; eventually learning to communicate to Susila on his own, thus concluding the entire story itself, with the quote that he felt 'a moment of rare immutable joy'.
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conversations.value: Provide the first five paragraphs for this book.. Start with the sentence 'The English Teacher
  I stood at the bathroom doorway and grimly waited'.
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conversations.value: The English Teacher
  I stood at the bathroom doorway and grimly waited. She finished the child's business and came out bearing her on her arm. While passing me she seized the child's hand and tapped me under the chin with it and passed on without a word to her room. She later met me in my room as I sat gloomily gazing at the table.
  I was not interested in this. Her name enraged me. I snapped: 'All right, all right, put up my leaf and serve me. I only wanted to know if the child had eaten.' This was to clear any misconception anyone might entertain that I was interested in Susila.
  I ate in silence. I heard steps approaching, and told myself: 'Oh, she is coming.' I trembled with anxiety, lest she should be going away elsewhere. I caught a glimpse of her as she came into the dining-room. I bowed my head, and went on with my dinner unconcerned, though fully aware that she was standing before me, dutifully as ever, to see that I was served correctly. She moved off to the kitchen, spoke some words to the old lady, and came out, and softly moved back to her own room. I felt angry: 'Doesn't even care to wait and see me served. She doesn't care. If she cared, would she sell my clock? I must teach her a lesson.'
  I felt furious at the sight of it. I took the coins and went over to her room. The light was out there. I stood in the doorway and muttered: 'Who cares for this money? I can do without it.' I flung it on her bed and returned to my room.
  Later, as I sat in my room working, I heard the silent night punctuated by sobs. I went to her room and saw her lying with her face to the wall, sobbing. I was completely shaken. I didn't bargain for this. I watched her silently for a moment, and collected myself sufficiently to say: 'What is the use of crying, after committing a serious blunder?' Through her sobs, she sputtered: 'What do you care, what use is it or not. If I had known you cared more for a dilapidated clock.' She didn't finish her sentence, but broke down and wept bitterly. I was baffled. I was in an anguish myself. I wanted to take her in my arms and comfort her. But there was a most forbidding pride within me. I merely said: 'If you are going to talk and behave like a normal human being, I can talk to you. I can't stand all this nonsense.'
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conversations.value: Provide five more paragraphs.
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conversations.value: Four days later, she stole into my room one evening, and whispered, with hardly suppressed glee: 'Father, say what I have done?'
  The first thing that woke me in the morning was the cold hands of my daughter placed on my forehead and the shout 'Appa' (father), or sometimes she just sat, with her elbows on the ground and her chin between her palms, gazing into my face as I lay asleep. Whenever I opened my eyes in the morning, I saw her face close to mine, and her eyes scrutinizing my face. I do not know what she found so fascinating there. Her eyes looked like a pair of dark butterflies dancing with independent life, at such close quarters.
  It was as a matter of fact my chief occupation in life. I cared for little else. I felt a thrill of pride whenever I had to work and look after the child. It seemed a noble and exciting occupation – the sole responsibility for a growing creature.
  Into this pandemonium the most welcome sound impinged – the college bell. It was the end of the hour and of the day. I felt like a schoolboy, genuinely happy that I could go home now to the child waiting for me there, all ready and bubbling with joy; ready to be taken out and ready with a hundred questions on her lips...
  He had given his name and address. I opened the other large sheet. The handwriting on it seemed to be different. It began:
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide the last three paragraphs.. Start with the sentence 'I had been thinking of the day's activities and meetings and associations'.
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conversations.value: I had been thinking of the day's activities and meetings and associations. But they seemed to have no place now. I checked my mind. Bits of memory came floating – a gesture of Brown's, the toy house in the dentist's front room, Rangappa with a garland, and the ring of many speeches and voices – all this was gently overwhelmed and swept aside, till one's mind became clean and bare and a mere chamber of fragrance. It was a superb, noble intoxication. And I had no choice but to let my mind and memories drown in it. I softly called, 'Susila! Susila, my wife...' with all my being. It sounded as if it were a hypnotic melody. 'My wife... my wife, my wife...' My mind trembled with this rhythm, I forgot myself and my own existence. I fell into a drowse, whispering, 'My wife, wife.' How long? How could I say? When I opened my eyes again she was sitting on my bed looking at me with an extraordinary smile in her eyes.
  A cock crew. The first purple of the dawn came through our window, and faintly touched the walls of our room. 'Dawn!' she whispered and rose to her feet.
  We stood at the window, gazing on a slender, red streak over the eastern rim of the earth. A cool breeze lapped our faces. The boundaries of our personalities suddenly dissolved. It was a moment of rare, immutable joy – a moment for which one feels grateful to Life and Death.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide the first four paragraphs for this book.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The English Teacher
  She thought of all those wary smiles at the wedding reception, some guests not even bothering to hide their astonishment. How did this Vida Avery, boyfriendless as far back as anyone could go, how did she receive this stroke of luck? A mere high school English teacher who wore old moccasins and drank too much at parties—who had suddenly aligned her stars? The same surge of victory collided with the same certainty she would fail.
  For lunch Vida had to descend the two flights, then cross the length of the mansion and the two added wings to reach the cafeteria. Because there was not the room or the staff to feed the entire school at once, lunch was spread out over the three middle periods, and fifth-period classes had already begun in many of the rooms she passed. Through the window of Sally Haynes's history class, three juniors stood before a homemade map, tracing what looked like the Silk Road. Next door, Roger Graver sat in the middle of his psychology elective, mouth open, eyes closed, while his students walked around him in a circle. In ninth-grade English, Yeats himself read "Innesfree" from a tape recorder: "... shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow, dropping from..." His voice was old and Irish and lovely.
  Students past and present hollered out hellos in the hallway as they passed, some sticking to her old name, some trying out the new.
  At last she reached the theater, her favorite place to spy. She wedged the door open a crack to hear the two actors on stage beside a kitchen table. To her surprise, the girl was Helen from her sophomore class. It was impossible to reconcile the private, contained Helen with the Helen now hollering at her stage husband, slamming cabinets, hurling a pot against a wall. Within seconds, however, the incongruity was gone, for the Helen on stage obliterated any memory of any other Helen, obliterated the stage itself, forcing you to believe that this was the only reality, right here beneath these lights, these acts, this pain.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide five more paragraphs.
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conversations.value: Behind her Patrick Watkins cleared his throat. He'd let his raised arm fall unbent into the crook of his other hand just to let her know how long he'd been trying to get her attention.
  When she was beside him he asked, "Is it okay if I call Seymour Glass Morie? I mean, just sometimes? My father's best friend from college is named Seymour but we call him Morie so I've kind of gotten used to calling Seymour Glass Morie in my head."
  As she weaved through the desks back to the perimeter of the room, she saw that Mandy Hughs was dotting all of her i's with daisies. She'd only written half a page for all the time it took to make the petals. "No flowers," Vida said as she passed. "Just letters." How did those middle school English teachers sleep at night?
  Finally the bell shook the floor. Her students dashed off their last thoughts and tossed their pages onto the pile on her desk. Everyone was suddenly free.
  A wild yelp came out of her as she spun toward the voice. It was Tom. Fuck him for sneaking up on her like that.
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conversations.value: Provide the last four paragraphs.
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conversations.value: SHE WAITED FOR HIM OUTSIDE. IT WAS POINTLESS TO TRY AND BE ANYWHERE else. At first she sat in the orchard, as Gena called it, which consisted of the four fruit trees they'd planted last spring: a lemon, a lime, and two avocados. For her birthday, Peter and Gena had given her a wrought iron table and chair and she'd placed it between the avocados. She'd written to Carol at that table finally—without notes or quotes, just her own small words. And all her letters to Tom.
  From the kitchen window, Peter watched his mother wander in the grass beside the driveway. Occasionally she stopped without knowing it, her mind caught on some snag. He could tell she was nervous from the way she scratched the inside of her wrists.
  A silver rental car pulled in the driveway. Vida stood in the grass in her lucky dress, barefoot, her wrists scraped red.
  I need to give a special thanks to Susan Conley who, in a true act of friendship, somehow managed to read my manuscript twice in one week despite her responsibilities as teacher, writer, and mother of two small boys. Her feedback was invaluable to me. And to my husband, Tyler, who listened, and read, and made me go on when I wanted to give up. And to my daughters, Calla and Eloise, for their love and understanding, and for the expression on their faces when they took turns holding the pile of pages that night I finished.