"That year, my mother was taking French lessons at the Alliance Française in Bangalore, and she claimed that her teacher had been impressed with her from the start. "Madame Aurélie says I have a natural ear," she announced one evening. "Wonderful," my father, an architect, said, not looking up from the plans he had spread across the dining table. Tarun, my sixteen-year-old brother, and I were at the table, too, wrapping our notebooks in brown paper. Summer was over; on Monday, we'd return to school."
"But Tarun said only, "Denim." "What?" I asked. " De Nîmes. Means 'from Nîmes.' Well, technically, it's serge de Nîmes, which was a type of cloth from there. Anyway, it's French." Nobody asked how he knew this. Tarun was the brilliant one in our family, always first in his class, though he appeared never to study. I was three years younger, and my parents silently rejoiced if I brought home anything over a sixty per cent."
A mother takes French lessons at the Alliance Française in Bangalore and says her teacher praised her natural ear. She announces this at the family dining table while the father, an architect, studies plans and the children wrap notebooks before school resumes. Tarun, the sixteen-year-old brother, interjects with the etymology of 'denim'—serge de Nîmes—demonstrating his quick knowledge. The family trades examples of loanwords between English and Indian languages: bungalow, catamaran, cummerbund, toddy, ganja. Tarun's academic brilliance contrasts with the narrator's modest performance, and the mother, encouraged by Tarun, imagines becoming fluent in French. Despite her excitement and giggle, the family treats her claim with disbelief.
Read at The New Yorker
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