Today is (also) "Teachers' Day"

 

Professor Arjuna Parakrama would have been 26 or 27 of age when he completed his Masters at Pittsburgh University, Pennsylvania. I believe he submitted a collection of poems in lieu of a thesis or as part fulfilment of the thesis requirement. He dedicated it to his teachers. I have mentioned elsewhere his explanation which could be summarised as follows:

‘People don’t remember their teachers, but what they’ve given is so much of who we are.’

There are no self-made people in this world, although many make that claim or act as though their life journeys were bereft of people, (formal) teachers included.  

What made me remember Arjuna’s comment, which by the way I think of often and have inspired me to keep in touch with my teachers from kindergarten to university, is a note written by a 15 year old girl to his speech and drama teacher who, almost at the age of 88, finally decided to stop her classes.

Lakshmi Jeganathan, Aunty Lakshmi to all her students and their parents, called me recently to tell me about this letter. She sounded really happy. She called me, in particular, to tell me that not all students are terrified of her (as I was and have claimed publicly!). The reference was to an article I wrote for the Sunday Island 22 years ago titled ‘Of lessons learnt on dreaded Saturdays and unlearning the mis-learnt.’

I was scared of her as a child. I was always in awe of her, back then and now. It was when I was an undergraduate and became fascinated with theatre that I first came to realise how much I owe her. And later, I realised that I couldn’t pay the debt I owed, for she more than anyone else provided the foundation for my abiding love of literature. She knows I was terrified of her, but Aunty Lakshmi also knows I am grateful and that I love her very much.  

But this letter made me realise how stupid I was back then and how thoughtful, caring, appreciative and knowledgeable Salma is.

Dearest Aunty Lakshmi,

To be honest, Aunty, when I heard the news about you stopping classes I was devastated. I was so upset that I started replaying moments that I have had in this class because, Aunty, I started this class when I was 5 years old. Aunty, I’m 15 now. It went so fast and I wish I could replay all those memories over and over again. This class holds such a special place in my heart. Like all the times you told us stories about your life. Aunty, you built this confidence in me and it’s because of you that I have no fear of speaking in front of an audience. It’s because of you that I was confident to join my school’s debating club which is such a big deal in my life. Aunty, you taught me how to read with emotion and express myself. I could not be more grateful for how much you’ve helped me. Aunty, in my time in this class I hope I’ve made you proud. I hope I am [one of] those students you remember. Mondays are going to be so empty now. And Aunty, I’m really sorry for all those classes I missed because I regret it so much now. Aunty, I’m going to miss you more than words could express. You truly mean the world to me because there aren’t teachers like you; you inspire me so much. Thank you for being there for me because, Aunty, you’re practically family and it’s so tough not to see your family. This is really tough for me, Aunty, cause I’m gonna miss saying “I’m sorry I am late,’ or hearing you read poems so memorisingly or how you mime so well. Aunty’ let’s be real; there’s no one as dedicated and committed as you. Aunty, I really appreciate what you have done for me and I hope I achieve big things and tell you about it in the future. I hope I am [one of the] students you talk about because, Aunty, I am going to think about you quite often, because everything I am is because you trust me. I wouldn’t have made it this far without you. And of my god, Aunty, I’m gonna miss you like really miss you because no matter what you can’t forget daily and you can’t stop loving family and Aunty, like I said, you are family. And I will truly love and miss you. And I’ll do my best and keep the legacy going.  

If any of her students (those terrified of her like me and those who saw the love, dedication and nurturing like Salma) were to remember her today and think about their lives, they would no doubt acknowledge what Salma has above. She didn’t teach us the ‘A B C.’ She prepared us for lifelong and useful engagement with family, friends, colleagues and strangers. With confidence and humility.

Arjuna was right. He was young then. Salma is even younger than he was then. It took me a lot more time to understand and appreciate. Yes, today (is also) “Teachers’ Day” and, with no disrespect to the many who have taught and keep teaching me, I would dedicate this day to Lakshmi Jeganathan, our Aunty Lakshmi.

[This article was published in the Daily News under the weekly column title ‘The Recurrent Thursday’]

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No 27, Dickman’s Road, Colombo 5

 

Aunty Lakshmi with her student (and my sister) Ru Freeman

That’s an address. How on earth could it be the title of an article? It could. Well, it is. And this is partly attributable to what the address means to me. Here's the story and keep in mind that the tenses will, as they should, be scrambled.

One night, at my sister’s wedding, I was struggling to introduce a lady to my girlfriend. I wanted to say that she taught me elocution, but then stopped myself because those lessons were not just about pronunciation and enunciation. I wanted to say ‘effective speaking’ but that was not exactly true either. ‘Speech and drama?’ Yes, but that wouldn’t do it either.  

The teacher smiled, probably recognising that the four year old boy who she had met more than twenty years before hadn’t really outgrown his struggles with articulation.

‘I taught him his A-B-C, darling!’

In the thirty years that have passed since then I’ve had many occasions to remember Mrs Lakshmi Jeganathan, Aunty Lakshmi to me and to thousands of students and their parents. It was easier when I had to play out a script on a stage. The lines were already there, except on the odd occasion when circumstances wrecked things and one had to improvise. For the most part, things could be rehearsed. But it was not just a matter of reading something out. Again, enunciation. Voice projection. Characterisation. The need to read and reread the play. All this she had taught. All this I had learned, sometimes enthusiastically but mostly out of fear and for the most part not really recognizing who did the teaching.

Most students were terrified of Aunty Lakshmi. I know two who were not. My brother Arjuna, for whom everything came easy (acting, music, chess, public speaking, programming, you name it), and my older daughter Mithsandi who ‘got’ Aunty Lakshmi. She could see the conscientious teacher and her desire to see her students grow, all beneath the stentorian roar and strict demeanour. There may have been others.

Most, I’m sure, are grateful to Aunty Lakshmi for giving them the confidence that comes with learning, especially in articulating their thoughts.

Back in the day I didn’t realise that Aunty Lakshmi was in effect arming me for the years ahead. I have not discussed such things with her, but it doesn’t take much to realise that English is a weapon in this country, a sword that not just cleaves in pernicious ways, but hurts, puts down and even destroys those without appropriate defence mechanisms.  

And yet, never once, did she talk about wars or weapons. Never once did she even imply that this language instrument could be used to cut, chop and move ahead. I can’t speak for others, but I can state with utmost certainty that those of her students known to me, especially my siblings, cousins, daughters and her son Pradeep, one of my dearest and oldest friends and a much respected Loku Aiya to me, have understood the politics of language and never abused the skills she gifted them. If at all, they would use English to protect those who needed protection, deploy it to speak of injustice as perceived and to empower emancipatory political projects.

English has a snooty history and in certain ways the snootiness seems more pronounced now than before. Indeed it’s as though English has a way of extending one’s nose to the point that one cannot help but look down on the rest of the world. Some are, so to speak, born with such extensions, some cultivate them, some even imagine them. Aunty Lakshmi, simply put, wasn’t into nose jobs.

Her students learnt a language. They were exposed to literature. She taught them that all the world's a stage and that there are effective ways of playing parts assigned to embraced. She enabled them to acquire skills to understand how language works, how to dissect texts of all kinds, how to read between the lines, how to develop a grasp of metaphor and meaning, and how literature can help us be kind to one another.

The address. I’ve not forgotten. And I will not either. No 27, Dickman’s Road, Colombo 5. It’s not ‘Dickman’s Road’ any more of course, but we remember the addresses that had meaning to us, never mind name-changes and other dislocations.

Nothing has changed in that house. It is as it was so many decades ago. Aunty Lakshmi has not lost one bit of her wit. She’s as updated as anyone else about the world and literary debates of the day. She had, as she always does with everyone probably, long shed the sternness the moment we ceased to be her students. A striking presence as always, exuding regality as always, she reminded us, i.e. her son, my brother, sister and myself, of things we had forgotten, like the fact that my brother was the first of her students to take a class in her place. And there was pride when she told us how she had spoken about my sister’s novels and her son’s collection of short stories to a student who had said she wanted to become a writer.

As for me, she taught me how to be crisp in communication. And most importantly that it is possible that 'No 27, Dickman's Road, Colombo 5' is as legitimate a title as any.

We all know of a No 27, Dickman’s Road, Colombo 5. There are memories waiting to be unearthed inside. It is also possible that the memory-maker who unbeknownst to us did much to make us who we are still lives there. We don’t visit No 27, Dickman’s Road, Colombo 5 often enough, do we? Not that the resident would hold it against us of course. Still, it’s good to visit. Good to say ‘thank you.’

['The Morning Inspection' is the title of a column I wrote for the Daily News from 2009 to 2011, one article a day, Monday through Saturday. This is a new series. Links to previous articles in this new series are given below] 

 

Other articles in this series:

Visual cartographers and cartography

Ithaca from a long ago and right now

Lessons written in invisible ink

The amazing quality of 'equal-kindness'

A tea-maker story seldom told

On academic activism

The interchangeability of light and darkness

Back to TRADITIONAL rice

Sisterhood: moments, just moments

Chess is my life and perhaps your too

Reflections on ownership and belonging

The integrity of Nadeesha Rajapaksha

Signatures in the seasons of love

To Maceo Martinet as he flies over rainbows

Sirith, like pirith, persist

Fragrances that will not be bottled 

Colours and textures of living heritage

Countries of the past, present and future

A degree in creative excuses

Books launched and not-yet-launched

The sunrise as viewed from sacred mountains

The ways of the lotus

Isaiah 58: 12-16 and the true meaning of grace

The age of Frederick Algernon Trotteville

Live and tell the tale as you will

Between struggle and cooperation

Of love and other intangibles

Neruda, Sekara and literary dimensions

The universe of smallness

Paul Christopher's heart of many chambers

Calmness gracefully cascades in the Dumbara Hills

Serendipitous amber rules the world

Continents of the heart The allegory of the slow road

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Of lessons learnt on dreaded Saturdays and unlearning the mis-learnt*

My last conversation with her took place almost ten years ago. It was at my sister’s wedding. I was struggling to introduce her to my then girl friend. "This is Aunty Lakshmi," I said and then got stuck trying to explain who she was. "She taught me eloc...no, speech and drama actually...she taught me..."  Aunty Lakshmi came to my rescue. She quite definitively interjected, "I taught him his Ei, Bee, Cee!" Immaculately "elocuted", as always. And I remembered.

I remembered those endless Saturdays when my mother took me to Aunty Lakshmi’s place off Pedris Road and later down Dickman’s Road with Aiya and later Nangi. I remember the first day, the last day and the eleven years in between, the recitation of poetry, voice projection, effective reading, mime exercises, acting excerpts from various plays, learning about dramatists, poets, novelists, about the differences between rhythm and meter, the Shakespearean sonnet, getting the endings right and so much more.

My mother had known Lakshmi Jeganathan from her school days at Holy Family Convent, Kurunegala. She was a tall, no-nonsense lady. She never tolerated slack and knew how to make you cringe, and it didn’t seem to matter to her if the "victim" was four years old or eighteen. I can’t remember any teacher whose wrath was sinister enough to force me to do homework. "Satisfactory" did not satisfy her. Aunty Lakshmi wanted excellence and she extracted it from most of her students, most of the time. Actually, the accompanying parents were de facto students, for the "homework" she wrote down on a little book that every student had to bring with him or her contained much work for the parents as well.

She taught at Royal College for a while and it did not take too long for the students to dub her "Jeggie Kochchi Miris". I do know that most of the teachers were mortally scared of her because she would not tolerate mispronouncing from them either.

I think parents suffered as much as their little boys and girls did, but at least they knew what it was all about. At the age of four, I didn’t know that pronunciation counted for anything. At the age of ten or twelve I didn’t know that knowing the differences between rhythm and meter could be what differentiates a would be poet from an unbounded exponent of the word. At age 15 I didn’t get the point in knowing who S.T. Coleridge was. My mother taught English Literature, so she must have known. Other mothers, as members of a society where status made all the difference and where English was a defining line and a cutting edge, must have known too. I didn’t.

I do recall that I was quite enamoured with the illustrations with which Aunty Lakshmi decorated the poems she typed out for our mothers to paste on our books, at least in the first few years. "Rain, rain go away" I thought was actually about the rain, and I don’t think anyone can blame me because she was an artist who somehow knew how a picture can capture a child’s heart. That’s how she got us to pronounce the diphthong "ai" properly. There were of course other poems equally "educative" in this way. the mists and coldest frosts" somehow unlocked our culturally and probably genetically conditioned predilection to drop the "s" endings. 

No fault of the Sinhala language of course, which unarguably is many times richer than English for many, many reasons. Anyway, those poems all came from one source, the Wendy Whatmore Academy, to which through Aunty Lakshmi I suppose we were all affiliated. All the certificates carried that name.

Aunty Lakshmi’s son Pradeep was in Aiya’s class. A brilliant student and an extremely gentle human being, Pradeep is at the relatively young age of 38, is on his way to being a retired Anthropologist. He will teach social theory much better as a photographer, novelist or in any creative field he chooses, so versatile a man is he. Pradeep is pertinent because he was Aiya’s class mate. We were invited for Pradeep’s birthday parties. 

I still remember digging in Aunty Lakshmi’s flower gardens for hidden coins. The richest haul was actually under the doormat. I remember watching the bigger children fighting each other to collect as much loot as possible. I was happy with my collection of one cent coins and in any case I was too small to compete.

Aunty Lakshmi was a different person altogether out of class. When the occasion demanded it, she was the kindest person around. Countless must be the number of students who have been treated with soft drinks and something to eat and showered with gentle, comforting words, if ever parents got late to pick them up. Her tough exterior has to have hidden a gentle heart, for blue was her favourite colour. The walls of her house were painted in various shades of blue. The cushions were blue, so were the curtains. She even had two miniature lamps that were blue. Blue was the metaphor that spoke out from every corner in that household.

I was in Grade 10 when I "dropped out" of her class. I wasn’t quite ready to tell my mother that I just couldn’t go anymore. If I remember correctly, I missed a couple of classes deliberately because I was unprepared. I hadn’t done the homework. Fear of being lectured when I see her next did the rest. I left home on Saturday morning, but didn’t go to Dickman’s Road. I can’t remember where I went, but I got home at the usual time. I believe Aunty Lakshmi gave up on me around the same time, otherwise she would have called my mother and inquired after me. My absence, I am convinced, was more than compensated for by Aiya and Nangi, who were much better students than I could ever be. Aiya, of course, was one of her favourites. Aunty Lakshmi never once asked me what happened.

I still don’t know how the Wendy Whatmore Academy came into being apart from the fact that Wendy had a lot to do with it. What I mean is, the origins of the Prof. Higgins type philosophy of getting us to speak correct English irrelevant to me as a child are no less obscure now. It doesn’t matter. The ideological issues associated with what some people rather cynically call "elocuting" are clear to me now.

For almost twenty years at least, I regarded the entire elocution business a colonial remnant and a weapon of neo-colonialism. I resented the elitism it engendered and which was indeed its source. If English made a difference, speaking BBC English exacerbated this difference. I realise now that this has less to do with the elocution project but a subjugated mindset, and that both have to be dealt with if we are to be truly free as a nation and as a people. Over twenty years since my last "class encounter" with Aunty Lakshmi, I know that freedom comes not only from rediscovery of self but that it also requires us to seize the weapons of the oppressor. The reason is simple, at least in the case of English: anyone with an inferiority complex is doomed to slavery.

My mother was right. The importance of knowing about the Romantic poets, about Shaw, Shakespeare and Jean Anouilh, was less about breaking into the "inner circle" of the elite, than about being able to understand the fact that their merits are relative, that they did not, do not and will not make the world or define humanity for us. My mother was right not because she took us to Aunty Lakshmi but because she also took great care to ensure that we grew up appreciating our history, our heritage and our way of life. I can only hope that all the parents of all the children who have walked in and out of that house on Dickman’s Road, do the same. It would make a huge difference in the man or woman their child will grow in to. And in some small or significant way, it may make a difference for the nation we will someday grow into as a collective.

I have never discussed these things with Aunty Lakshmi. Back then, I was too scared. Today, it is not important. She had her own style. She showed results. I never grew up fearing English or the English-speaking. Aunty Lakshmi had a lot to do with this, I record with all sincerity and with love that I still do not know how to express.

*This was written more than 10 years ago.  May 25, 2003 to be exact. I was published in the 'Sunday Island'.  My mother is no more.  Aunty Lakshmi continues to teach. I've had many conversations with her since I wrote this because my two daughters attend her class now.  

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