'Are you in love? You're on such a high!' my friend remarked as I rushed into Flury's to keep my rendezvous with him. 'No', I said, sinking into one of those dear old chairs, 'I've been teaching this morning.' 'Teaching what?' he asked, inquisitiveness being his chief charm. 'O, just a little poem - Blake's 'Sick Rose'. I'm ravenous.' We then went on to have - with real fish glimmering in the aquarium above us - a rambling conversation about the links, physical and metaphysical, between teaching poetry, feeling ravenous, and, of course, love: why I always feel acutely hungry after teaching a very good poem to a very bright student; why nothing else that I have gone on to do has given me quite that kind of pleasure, and where all this goes back to in my past. Conversations often turn elegiac at Flury's. And we soon found ourselves talking about two unforgettable women, both teachers, who seemed to have quietly vanished from our lives in this city. My music teacher, Fauzia Marikar, and my professor at university, Kitty Scoular Datta, are still very much alive. Yet it felt oddly natural to talk about them in the past tense. Both now live elsewhere -Kitty in Oxford and Fauzia nobody here seems to know where. But both of them, in their own very different ways, were vital presences in our student lives. Fauzia was like a musical Mata Hari. She lived brilliantly on the edge, perpetually in debt and incurably extravagant, utterly robust and utterly unable to manage her own life, irresistible and exasperating. Yet she inspired an entire generation of young people to look beyond risk-averse mediocrity towards a certain excellence and adventurousness of spirit. Making good music was only a part of this excellence; good conversation (informed by genuine amorality and a rollercoaster-like articulacy) and other forms of creative hedonism almost equally so. I can now understand how these qualities could both rejuvenate and wreak havoc with the structure of formal educational institutions. But Fauzia liberated the learning of music from the drudgery of the Trinity College or Royal School examinations, and made it part of an entire way of living, thinking and listening. When we were growing up in Calcutta in the late Seventies and Eighties, it was still possible to carry this off. The city would regularly be host to musicians of the calibre of Lorin Maazel, Rosalyn Tureck, Mstislav Rostropovich and the Oistrakhs. Herr Nagel would screen avant garde Bayreuth productions of the Ring at Max Mueller Bhavan, serving little German sausages between the Ride of the Valkyries and Brünhilde's Immolation. Aruna Pasricha would play the Emperor, and the Maya Dases the Mozart Two Pianos. Father Mathieson of the Oxford Mission, an irrepressible cellist, would tilt and joust his way through a Haydn trio like a cassocked Quixote. It was still possible then to put together a magnificent Mozart Requiem at St Paul's, with a full choir and soloists, and to listen to all the Bach cello suites at St John's, however rugged the rendering. Fauzia mediated all this to us through her inexhaustible personality. She was an excellent pianist and a somewhat less excellent cellist. The rich muddle of her education went back to the cosmopolitan convent schools of Sri Lanka and south India, and to a charmingly neglectful mother who played the cello all day long and made up ensembles with Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears in her house by the sea. So around Fauzia's musical prowess grew a medley of peculiar skills - baking perfect meringues, doing all sorts of mannish repair work, throwing delightful parties that would inevitably turn into Proustian soirées. Yet, she was a gruelling music teacher - without ever terrifying her students. I realize now that her technique would never have been up to producing a world-class pianist. But what she gave us was a musical sense that turned music-making into something considerably more than a genteel accomplishment. Her musical intelligence and sensitivity transcended piano-playing and took on, with no misgivings, other difficult instruments like the violin and the viola. Fauzia's gusto and versatility made her a one-woman music academy, and her eclecticism took in everything from Beethoven to Scott Joplin. I remember a rainy evening with no electricity in her Wood Street flat, listening to Fauzia playing the Für Elise. 'You mustn't try to play this before you're at least fifty-five,' she had said to me. In her hands, Romanticism's cheapest tune had turned again into something sublimely disenchanted. This was in the late Eighties, just before I went away. I visited Calcutta two summers later to find that she had disappeared. Kitty existed in our lives in a completely different key. She was my first tutor at Jadavpur University, where I started reading English. We began with those mysterious love lyrics to dead children, Wordsworth's Lucy poems. I still recall the thrill, and a deeper sense, beyond thrill, of larger possibilities of labour and contemplation, as the skies seemed to open all at once in the course of a single tutorial. Kitty's fine, close readings of these poems not only opened up for me the entire historical vista of European Romanticism, but she also took me, with the utmost humility, to the threshold of the ineffable, and left me there to ponder the great, stark silences of love and death. In her rich tremolo, rolling her Scottish r's, and with a distant smile and little headshakes, she simply read out to me Wordsworth's lines, 'No motion has she now, no force;/ She neither hears nor sees;/ Rolled round in earth's diurnal course,/ With rocks, and stones, and trees.' But the essence of Kitty's teaching and personality was most luminously expressed in her classes on the Metaphysical poets and on Marlowe's Dr Faustus. In these, she embodied much more than a critical or pedagogic tradition. Faustus in his last terror quoting Ovid's Roman elegy, with an extra lente, before being dragged into a Christian hell - 'O lente, lente currite noctis equi' (Run softly, softly horses of the night); Herbert trying to define prayer through a series of metaphors which ends with, simply, 'something understood'; Donne compressing the infinite into the minute, making 'one little roome, an every where'. Kitty's explications of these moments in Western literature placed her at the end of both a humanistic and a spiritual, even a meditative, tradition - a tradition of learning as well as, in the truest sense, a devotio moderna. For me, this humanism, at once sacred and profane, will remain mirrored in such disparate things as Holbein's sketches of Erasmus' hands, the biblical Song of Songs, Martin Buber's I and Thou, and in some of the Gitanjali lyrics, all of which came alive for us in Kitty's lectures and tutorials. One understands one's best teachers only much later. It was in Oxford in the mid-Nineties - Kitty had returned to England after more than three decades in India - that the import of Kitty's life and its journeys began to dawn on me. This was largely through a few reticent encounters - in the Bodleian, in the St Mary's coffee-shop, in her flat (bare of all the books left behind in Calcutta) and once, memorably, in the Holywell Music Room, where we had gone to listen to Schubert together. I began to understand how Kitty - and Fauzia too, in her own way - had reached and looked into the very heart of loss, and made of that experience a peculiar gift, turned it into something rich and strange. In these two women, an achieved and necessary solitude, a kind of disappearance, has become the fount of an extraordinary generosity of spirit.