The English teacher
Ms Rajes Kandiah
Mrs Kandiah had never even been to England but through the words of the favourite nature poets, she could immerse herself in the meadows and hills of the English countryside, without leaving her home in Batticaloa.
Transcript and translations
Language
Subjects discussed
To me England was just in my brain all the time
Sometimes foreigners ask me how come I am sort of so fluent in my English and things like that. I would tell them, I haven’t even gone into the sea here for a swim. I have never left Sri Lanka. And that, of course, was something that impressed the foreigners.
Without leaving Sri Lanka, without even leaving Batticoloa for a long, long time, till I was 20…until I was 20, I Hadn’t left Batticoloa at all. I would go to Colombo once, in a way. But still, not till I was 40 or 50 did I go to England. And when that girl who accompanied me to show me everything, you know, I said, “Well, this is Christopher Wren’s building”. She said, “Aunty, how do you know all this? We in England don’t know at all. About Christopher Wren. About Westminster Abbey.” When I went into Westminster Abbey, it looked as though I had been there for years, almost every day in my life. Things like that were so familiar, all through imagination.
I didn’t go to the countryside, but my memories of this meadow that set up is still there. Meadows, lambs, streams and you know… the valleys and what I learned in Psalms also. It looked as though I was very, very familiar. I still don’t know what it was that made me understand British life so well. And British life in the 18th century, Jane Eyre’s time, mind you. Now I realise how important imagination is to a child. It goes on through your childhood, well into your adulthood.
I feel more comfortable with English than in Tamil. And of course, it depends on the listener. When I know that the person who is listening to me doesn’t know a word of English, then somehow I managed to speak good Tamil, because the home language in those days, because my mother didn’t know any English, was Tamil. So once we left school and came home in the evenings, we had double session schools, then. I would come home for lunch, get back and then get back home after playing netball and things like that. It was almost dusk when we returned from the playing field.
We would switch on to Tamil. And that didn ‘t…wasn’t quite a problem with us kids those days. We were fluent in both languages and we did a lot of English literature taught by English women. So that accounts for all the imagination. And to me, England was just in my brain all the time.
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