Priya Subramaniam Nair
Teacher, Mother of Three, Heart of the Family

In Loving Memory of Priya Subramaniam Nair

22nd November 1937 – 14th March 2025

Priya Subramaniam Nair was born on 22 November 1937 in Palakkad, Kerala, into a family of Sanskrit scholars and schoolteachers. She trained as a primary school teacher at the Government Teachers' Training College in Thrissur, married Gopalan Nair in 1961, and for the next decade taught at a village school where she was known for bribing reluctant readers with murukku she made herself. In 1973 the family moved to Leicester, where Gopalan took up engineering work and Priya, after a short period adjusting, resumed teaching at a local primary school where she would remain for twenty years.

She was a woman of considerable discipline and even greater warmth. Her home in Oadby was run with care: the puja room was swept and flowers placed before dawn each morning, the kitchen produced food in quantities designed for thirty rather than five, and the front door was open to anyone who knocked. Her three children — Deepak, Kavitha and Ananya — grew up understanding that hospitality was not a choice but a moral obligation, a lesson absorbed from watching their mother rather than being told.

In her last years Priya enjoyed visits from eight grandchildren, long phone calls with her sisters in Kerala, and reruns of old Tamil films. She passed away peacefully on 14 March 2025 at the family home in Oadby, surrounded by her children. Gopalan preceded her in death in 2014. She is deeply loved and dearly missed.

Memory

Diwali at Oadby

Diwali at Amma's house was not optional. However far you had moved, you came back to Oadby for it. She would have been cooking for three days — the whole house smelled of ghee and cardamom — and the front room filled up with cousins and neighbours and people none of us could quite place. She lit the diyas herself, every single one, and would not let the children do it until they were old enough to be careful about it. The photographs from those evenings are some of the only ones where she is sitting down. She is always smiling in them, usually mid-sentence, usually telling someone to eat more.

Diwali at Oadby
Ravi Venkataraman · 10 Jun 2026
Eulogy

For Amma

She never sat still unless she was in puja. Even then, her stillness felt purposeful rather than restful — the way water is still in a deep tank rather than a puddle. She woke before five every day of her adult life, swept the puja room, placed fresh flowers at Krishna's feet, and lit the lamp. By the time the rest of us were awake, she had already been in conversation with God for an hour. She cooked as an act of love and she loved on an industrial scale. She would cook for twelve when six were expected, on the logic that someone would always knock on the door. Someone always did. Neighbours, students from the university who had heard there was a Kerala household that made proper sambar, distant relatives materialising after years of absence — all were fed. She made it look effortless. I know now it was not. She taught primary school for nearly three decades and she maintained that children were her best teachers. She said they showed her where she had not been clear, and she respected them for it. She brought the same attentiveness home. She listened properly. She asked real questions. She held the family together not by will but by attention, and that is a rarer gift. We miss her every hour. We will light the lamp.
Deepa Krishnamurthy · 8 Jun 2026
Memory

The Sambar

Priya Amma's sambar was something my mother used to talk about before I ever tasted it. When I finally married into the family and came to Leicester, the sambar was exactly what she had described: the particular sourness of real Palakkad tamarind, the freshness of the curry leaves she grew on the kitchen windowsill, a depth of spicing that took her two hours and she would not share the method. She tried to teach me twice. Both times she kept adding things after I thought we were done. I think the secret was in what she did not measure.

The Sambar
Deepa Krishnamurthy · 8 Jun 2026
Memory

Forty Years of Friendship

Priya and I arrived in Leicester within six months of each other. We were both strangers to England and to each other, and we became the kind of friends you only make when you are both slightly lost in the same place. She taught me how to find a GP, how to read a gas bill, how to make English people feel comfortable at Indian functions. She was sharper than she let on and funnier than people realised. She had a way of saying the most devastating thing in the most gentle voice. I will miss her every day.
Sunita Pillai · 8 Jun 2026
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