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The world’s a small place
S. MUTHIAH
Talk about the world being a small place! A couple of days after I had made mention of Llanstephan on December 10, I got a call from a Prof. Thomas whose cadences made me think he might be Welsh. And sure enough he was, a Professor
of Law at Cardiff University who had been visiting India from 1993, recruiting students for his Faculty. But much more significant was the coincidence that he came from a Welsh village just about ten miles from the village of Llanstephan, in remembrance of which the Madras house was undoubtedly named. Would I be able to tell him who the Welshman was — and it had to be a Welshman to have given it the name it got — who built it or was an earlier owner? I’m afraid I had no answer, but given that the Madras records of the past are fairly well maintained, the answer must lie somewhere in them.
So, while I could give Prof. Thomas no answer but only help to find his way to the house, which he visited — and reported back as being “fasvinated” by — he did give me a lesson in Welsh in return. The double ‘Ll’ he told me should be pronounced with the tongue rolled backwards to touch the back of the top palate and a soft ‘F’ should be blown out to precede the second ‘l’. Now let’s all try it together...and I’m sure we’ll all fail - like I did - to sound like him.
Getting past that hurdle, he told me that ‘Llan’ meant ‘Saint’, so we were talking about St. Stephen. Just as his village, Llanstadwill, was named after St. Edward. Now don’t ask me to work that one out. To get away from a lesson in Welsh, I remarked that a person from Llanstadwill finding a Llanstephan in Madras only went to show how small a place the world was. I’ll tell you how much smaller it really is, he replied.
When he first came to India in 1993 and landed in Madras during the course of his metro visits, he got to talking with his neighbour, a fellow-European, in the Immigration queue. Only to discover that they lived within a quarter of a mile of each other in a Cardiff suburb and regularly visited the same neighbourhood pub! Which, of course, was a story demanding to be matched and I recalled that on a dawn flight to Bangalore many years ago, my neighbour was an American and we got to chatting. Only for us to discover that we had been to the same engineering college in Massachusetts – though he was ten years before my time — and his home from childhood, till he had moved out when he had begun working in another State, was round the corner from where I had boarded and my landlady and his family had been friends!
Incidentally, going back to my ancient Philip’s school atlas, I did find Llanstephan in County Carmathen, on the west bank of the estuary of two rivers joining to flow into Carmathen Bay; Llanstandwill, in neighbouring County Pembroke to the west, I, however, could not find.
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