Di Idli, Da Dosa

At one time, Koodali High School was the only high school within a 15-kilometer radius of my home. It had humble beginnings, having been upgraded from a kalari, where, more than a hundred years ago, a gurukkal [teacher] taught the Malayalam alphabet to local children. Upon the gurukkal’s death, it was taken over by a visionary kaaranavar [oldest male member] of our matriarchal family, who set up an elementary school in its place. A couple of decades later, when my mother was still a student, it was elevated to a middle school. It became a reputed high school by the 1940s and has been Alma Mater to thousands of higher secondary students. Koodali High School was once adjudged the best school in Kerala. The school belonged to my own tarawad [family] and was run by our kaaranavars. The teachers, mostly men, were often my relatives. One noted exception – on both counts – was Yashoda Teacher, my First Form class teacher.

Yashoda Teacher, who also taught us English, was a very stern woman. While most of the other teachers treated the children “from the family” with kid gloves, she would have none of it. For her, all her pupils were equal. And none dared complain (against not being given preferential treatment)!

Compared to my classmates, I had a sort of disadvantage: a reputation to live up to! My mother, too, had once been her student and evidently a good one. Whenever I made a mistake, Yashoda Teacher would say, “I never expected this from Devi’s son” or “Devi was a quick learner.”

Yashoda Teacher was herself possibly taught by British teachers, as her clipped accent revealed. Till she taught me how to, I used to pronounce words like shirt and skirt with a marked stress on the R, as most Keralites do.

And, today, when I hear or see a question tag, I am often reminded of Yashoda Teacher. In Malayalam, tag questions end mostly with negatives – alle? ille? [no?] – and, so, we tend to carry that legacy into English and ask, for instance, “You haven’t brought your pencil, no? She was the one who drilled it into our heads that the better form of the tag question is to end with a positive instead: “You haven’t brought your pencil, have you?”

Malayalis are the butt of several jokes on the way we pronounce words like simply, loan, gold or gulf. They often become “zimbly”, “lawn”, “gauld” and “gelf”. If I do not get railed for such transgressions, the credit should go to Yashoda Teacher. There was a time when I could, for the life of me, never tell between the two pronunciations of “the”. Although I had been taught that we should use the short “da” before a consonant and the long “di” before a vowel sound, my addled young brain was confused even between consonants and vowels.

Yashoda Teacher removed the doubt once and for all by saying: “Di idli, da dosa; da three idlis, di eight dosas.” I have never forgotten her idli-dosa formula.

Some my classmates were my cousins. Traditionally, even if a cousin was older by a day, one had to respect them with the honorific suffix ettan for boys and echi for girls.

One day, Yashoda Teacher asked me to read aloud a passage from the textbook. I fidgeted. My book was with Mohanettan (Rear Admiral K. Mohanan in later life). I had kept a beautifully dried fern leaf between its pages and given it to him. He had agreed give me a matchbox label featuring a tiger and a goat in exchange.

I leaned towards Mohanettan seated in the next row to take my book. Yashoda Teacher’s eagle eye did not miss that surreptitious move. “Rajan, where’s your book?” she asked.

“With Mohanettan.”

Yashoda Teacher frowned: “He may be your ettan at home. In school, he is just Mohanan, okay?”

I nodded.

Another life lesson: Never carry personal relationships into one’s professional life – a credo I’ve lived by. It’s my greatest tribute to Yashoda Teacher.