Way back in the seventies, I was put in boarding school by my parents. I was in the crucial in tenth grade and the schools where father was posted at the time weren’t good enough.
I took to life away from home as duck to water. It wasn’t anything like Mallory Towers or St. Clare’s from the wonderful world of Enid Blyton, but one could, with a couple of sacks full of imagination believe it very well was. Anyway, who missed home? Not me. The novelty of life in a dingy old building, brightly lit nevertheless, with other students for company, was excitement enough.
One of the major drawbacks was, unlike in the schools in the Enid Blyton books, the nuns thought very poorly of playtime. Study, study and study some more was the motto. But of course, we got around it by doing our own thing in the study room when the nun-in-charge wasn’t looking, harmless (and useless) things like making songbooks with carefully copied lyrics of favorite songs, in beautiful handwriting too, while pretending we were making notes, even writing stories and passing the pages on to friends who would be eagerly waiting to read the next installment. Well, obviously not all of us. Some of us were too good to be true and took studying rather seriously.
There’s an interesting story that the nuns there told us every so often. You see were asked to speak to each other only in English to gain fluency in the language. But since it wasn’t the language that came to us naturally we lapsed into our mother tongue Malayalam frequently and in turn were roundly chastised by the nuns. How would we learn if we didn’t try? Don’t worry about mistakes, use the language! What would follow next would be the story of the little girl from kindergarten who unlike us had the desire to better herself and so was willing to venture bravely where we dared not.
When the little girl joined the school at three years of age, the story goes, she hardly knew any English. In spite, the desire to speak fluently in the language was so intense that she tried her best always to communicate only in English, even if it be ‘broken’ English.
One day one of the nuns asked her, ‘What is your father?’ The girl was in a quandary on hearing the question. Of course, she got what it meant. The nun wanted to know what her dad did for a living. The answer was that he was a vakeel in the court. But that was a Malayalam word. The English equivalent, advocate, escaped her. Did that stop her from trying? Of course not. This is the point in the story where we of the not-trying-enough lot got reproachful looks. The little girl thought for only a moment before very confidently replying, “My father is Coat-Putting.”
© Shail Mohan 2019
Shail's Nest 
Isn’t it odd how educationists used to believe you had to put your mother tongue aside and converse artificially in (in your case English) with each other. What could be more unnatural! At the opposite end of the spectrum, I was the only English-speaking child at my primary school when I began in Grade 1, so was immersed in an Afrikaans-speaking environment in which I understood not a word. The necessity to communicate is a powerful force and I learned to make myself understood very quickly.
Your comment reminds me of the time when my father was transferred to a different state and how necessity forced 5 year old me to pick up a new language. I’ll write about it one day 🙂
In a way English is the language that lets us communicate with people from the different states. India has so many languages!
To be a boarder was one of the longest nurtured wishes while in school. I did get to spend one night in the boarding school dormitory when I was almost at the end of the tenth standard. A trip to Bangalore was being organised and my father didn’t give me permission. My class teacher , in whose good books I was, being a very diligent student and all that, came home to persuade him and he did relent. That was on the evening before we were to set off . She wanted to make sure that he wouldn’t change his mind and so whisked me off then and there with a quickly packed bag. I got to stay in the boarding school that night 🙂
What a wonderful teacher! 🙂 You must have been so happy!