Natural Beauty

A recent bout with a bacterial infection reminded me quite fondly of a few weeks ago when I learned one of my first Tamil words.

It’s just like any normal day in a pre-school art class, where at any moment a child might be stabbing a peer with a pair of scissors or you turn around and find ten children under a table playing 'animals', meowing like cats and dogs with unyielding passion. Today, the project was to draw things from their outside environment. Walking around, one of the little girls excitedly squeals, “Teachah, teachah! Look it’s poo in Tamil!” Clearly confused, I look at her neighbor and assume she’s commenting on this young gentleman’s brown squiggles all over his paper. Real mature, I think. But no, she is pointing directly at her paper and says again, “it’s poo in Tamil”. All I’m seeing is what I presume to be a flower. And then suddenly it hits me that the word for flower in Tamil is in fact poo! So yes, in this innocent sequence of events, I learned that there finally is a way for poo and flower to exist as one in the same.