A Morning Tamil Lesson

‘Nan - dri, rom - ba nan - dri’

Nalini, my tutor, was Luthramary’s six year old daughter. She sat directly opposite me, quietly sniggering over my inability to learn her language. After all, it was my third Tamil lesson and I’d only gotten to ‘thank you very much’.

‘Romba nandri’ I repeated, taking especial care to pronounce every roll of the ‘r’, every detail she might pick me up on. Luckily this time, my hard work paid off. Nalini cocked her head to one side and grinned ‘good, good, good’.

Springing up, she hastily grabbed my pen and began scratching out the Tamil alphabet on the A3 piece of card between us. I leant back, closed my eyes and exhaled. The air was heavy, saturated from the previous night’s monsoon showers. The heat from the rising sun prickled my arms, as the first morning rays unveiled the majesty of my surroundings.

My classroom consisted of a patch of cracked concrete outside Nalini’s front door. Her house stood at the top of the village, a short uphill walk from my lodgings. From up here, an ocean of tea plantations flooded my vision, coated by a rich, plush emerald green. Kotapadi, a tiny community in India’s mountainous Nilgiri district, was rousing.

Suckling, chewing, spitting, giggling, shouting; my ears were alive with the sounds of Kotapadi. My eyes danced over two mongrels scrabbling in the dust, a new mother nourishing her baby son and the village rascal throwing stones in the well (I didn’t tell his grandmother).

Wrapped in a film of orange and yellow, Nalini’s mother entered our ‘classroom’, ‘Chai Aimeee?’ Nalini frowned, scolding her mother for interrupting our lesson. ‘No thanks Luthramary, I’m ok’ I smiled, quietly chuckling at her daughter’s impassioned expression.

Nudging me, Nalini pointed to her work; straightaway, I noticed that it wasn’t the alphabet at all. Instead, scrawled in broken English, she had written ‘Aimy – my bestest frend from Ingland’.

I looked up. In that moment, Nalini’s familiar, dark brown eyes pierced me with their smile.

‘Romba nandri, Nalini’.