4 minutes reading time
If you walk into a house in idayarpalayam or some dusty town in anywhere in coimbatore, I am assuming elsewhere too, when the afternoon heat is high enough to melt the rubber off your chappals, someone will hand you a steel tumbler of water or sour buttermilk. You swallow it down. Your throat stops burning. You don't say a damn word. You just wipe your mouth with the back of your hand, hand the tumbler back, and say "Varata?" (meaning "I’ll take leave and come back").
That was the deal. Nobody expected an receipt.
Lately though, I’ve been watching urban meat-puppets around Madras and Bangalore drop "Nandri" like they’re paying a toll at a highway booth. You pass someone a ballpoint pen across a desk, "Nandri." A guy hands you a five-rupee pouch of Aavin, "Nandri." It feels off. It feels like wearing a heavy woolen three-piece suit to plant paddy in the monsoon. It’s stiff, it’s sweaty, and it smells like something imported in a crate from London.
Back when I was growing up, Nandri (நன்றி) wasn't some loose change you tossed out of your pocket every five minutes. It was a heavy word. You saved it for when a guy pulled your father out of a ditch or paid your college fees when the crops failed. If you handed your cousin a tumbler of tea and he looked you dead in the eye and said "Nandri," you’d figure he was either mocking you or planning to cut you out of the family land. It signaled distance. It meant, we ain't kin, we're accountants.
Now, I know what you’re thinking. Deadrat, you old cynic, what's wrong with a little politeness? Does saying thank you hurt your fragile little feelings?
Well, no. But it turns out some anthropologist fellow named Arjun Appadurai back in the eighties wrote a whole academic paper on this exact nonsense, titled Gratitude as a Social Mode in South India, or something like that. He spent pages of JSTOR prose explaining what any village auntie already knows in her bones: in our part of the world, gratitude wasn't a verbal receipt. It was an open account.
In Western politeness (what the linguists call "negative politeness"), everyone assumes they’re an isolated island. You do something for me, I give you a verbal "thank you," the ledger is cleared, and we both go back to being strangers who don't owe each other a damn thing. It’s neat. It’s clean. It’s corporate.
Traditional Tamil hospitality was built on keeping the ledger perpetually unbalanced. You give me buttermilk today. I don't give you a verbal token to settle the bill. I accept the debt. The debt stays open. Maybe next month your goat wanders into my yard, or maybe ten years from now I help your nephew find a room in BTM Layout. The open debt is the glue. The moment you slap a "Nandri" on a glass of water, you’re closing the account. You’re telling the host, we are even now, don't bother coming to my house.
It's the same Victorian prudery that brought stitched blouses and petticoats to suffocated women in the humid South coast, rebranded now as modern civility. We traded implicit warmth for explicit verbal lube. Most folks working nine-to-five in open-plan cubicles spend eight hours a day typing in English, where "please" and "thank you" are mandatory lubricants so people don't stab each other with scissors. Then they switch to Tamil in the evening and directly translate the script without realizing they’ve brought the office policy home.
I’m as guilty as anyone, I suppose. If an Ola driver drops me off in the rain, I say "Nandri" because we’re two strangers in a city of eight million people and the verbal token keeps the machine running without friction. It’s low-risk civility for out-groups.
But when I’m with people who actually know my name? I keep my mouth shut. No receipts. Just a nod, a clean departure, and the unspoken understanding that the books remain open until we're both under six feet of dirt.
Bates, Katharine Lee, 1859-1929, ed, licensed under Public domain.*
Image Credit: Yashoda with infant Krishna early 12th century Tamil Nadu Pudukkottai and Tanjavur districts via Wikimedia Commons