Sangeetha Amarnath Kamath brings a Singaporean School to our doorstep with a sentimental recount of her experience at relief teaching

It was pre-dawn and still dark. The shrill alarm jolted me from the depths of a death-like sleep even as I tried to cling on to the fading vestiges of a sweet dream. I was just within reach of seeing its mysterious ending but it was gone. Like a wisp of smoke! I tried to slowly blink away the remnants of sleep from my eyes—heavily lidded and which just refused to open even a crack at a grim time as this.

The alarm was ringing incessantly.

“Could it be a mistake that I set it to go off so early? At this bleak hour?!

Uh! Hold on, it wasn’t the alarm but a phone call for crying out loud!”

At this unearthly time, when most of this side of the…