Padma

I had a lovely elderly Sri Lankan student named Padma.  She was a teacher in Sri Lanka, and her husband had been a headmaster.  They spoke English well and had come to class to get a sense of American pronunciation.  It felt absurd to try to teach someone who is speaking with a lovely Sri-Lankan-British accent to change the pronunciation of their vowels to sound like geese honking.  Padma was very sweet and womanly and I became very fond of her.  Her husband was a bit more brittle, and he would bark out the correct pronunciation when someone tortured the pronunciation of a word.    He didn't understand it when I would let people struggle their way through a reading passage without interrupting them with a correction.

Padma means Lotus in Hindi.