A couple of years later, Mrs Verghese would again deploy her gift of oratory to make us appreciate the visuals in “The Highwayman”.

“When the road was a gypsy’s ribbon, looping the purple moor,” her voice quivered.

This time we nodded even more vigorously, our neck muscles now conditioned by years of bobbing in the classroom. We did not pause to wonder what gypsies were. Or what they did with ribbons. Or what a “moor” was and why it was purple.

School wasn’t the only place we unthinkingly accepted characters and stories that weren’t for us, about us, or relatable to us.

Every Cartoon Network memory I have is American. So desperate was our appetite that we never paused to wonder how strange these TV shows were. Could an Indian kid grow up to be a Centurion? What the hell was a jawbreaker and why did Ed, Edd, and Eddy love them so much? What kind of Indian was Hadji supposed to be? I had never seen anyone like him.