Way back in the seventies, I was put in boarding school by my parents. The reason? I was in the crucial year of tenth grade, and the schools where father was posted at the time weren’t good enough.

I took to life away from home like a duck to water. True, the boarding house 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 exciting.

One of the major drawbacks was that, unlike in the boarding schools in the Enid Blyton books, the nuns in mine thought very poorly of playtime. Study, study and study some more, was the motto.

We, of course, got around it by doing our own thing during study time 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, pretending we were making notes, sometimes writing stories—that was mostly me—and passing the pages on to friends who would be eagerly waiting to read the next installment.

Well, obviously not all of us were slackers. Some were the too good to be true kind, and took studying rather seriously to our dismay, and at times, envy too,

There’s an interesting story that the nuns narrated every so often to us. You see, their instructions to us were 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 obviously lapsed into our mother tongue Malayalam frequently. For this we were roundly chastised by them.

How were we to learn if we didn’t at least try speaking the language? Stop worrying about making mistakes, use the language!

This was the cue for the story of the little girl to be told. A tiny tot who went to kindergarten, and who, unlike us, had the intense desire to better herself and hence was willing to venture bravely where we dared not.

When this little girl joined the school at three years of age, she hardly knew any English. In spite of that, the desire to speak fluently in the language was so deep that she tried her best to always communicate only in English, even if it were ‘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 —the one she knew—was that he was a ‘vakeel’ and went to the court. But that was a Malayalam word, and what she needed was the English equivalent.

Unfortunately, the word advocate had not yet been introduced into her vocabulary. 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 and were expected to hang our heads in shame.)

The little girl had only to think for a moment to find her way around her problem. She, with every confidence, replied,

“My father is Coat-Putting.”

© Shail Mohan 2019