“Do you like cricket, sir? You’re from England, right, sir? Then you must like cricket! I play cricket, sir. At home in India. I’m fast speed bowler. I take many wickets! Whoo, whish-whish. Wheeeoww!”
And with wildly flailing arms, narrowly missing a diminutive fellow-student, Inderpal proceeded to demonstrate. Before I could temper his enthusiasm, he had seized a sheet of foolscap from my desk, crumpled it into a ball, and sent it with practised artistry into the wastebasket. “Owzat, sir, owzat!” With his infectious grin and exuberant joy of life, he soon had the whole class laughing and applauding. “You need to explain what ‘owzat’ means to your classmates,” I said, as I smiled, motioning to him to resume his seat near the front. “If you don’t, they will think it’s a word in Hindi or Bengali.” He looked puzzled. A frown creased his handsome brown face.
“It is, I think, Punjabi word for ‘you are out.’ ”
“Well, that is what it means, but it is English, for ‘How’s that?’ which a bowler says with pride when he takes a wicket. Then a player is out,” I explained to the mystified class. They were ESL (English As A Second Language) learners, some dozen or so teenagers from many countries, most with a smattering of English, lively but endearingly polite, with a deep respect for learning instilled, no doubt, by parents anxious to begin the process of adaptation to a new land and an unfamiliar culture. I could see how a childless teacher, as I then was, could all too easily begin to think of such likeable but vulnerable charges as his or her own surrogate children. As there remained a mere five minutes until the bell, I let Inderpal explain to them how to play cricket, but they appeared no better informed than before. This did not matter. They loved Inderpal, and he loved them in return. Among them was Emily, a very bright girl from Hong Kong, who had once described a first visit to a fast-food restaurant thus: “I enjoyed myself big-time at Bugger King!” I hastened to correct her spelling without elaborating on what she had appeared, but not meant, to say. Jao, from mainland China, was another, a small lad with an irrepressible sense of humour whose father, he told us, worked as a cook at a camp “in the woods” apparently in northern Quebec. He loved to say the word ‘McDonalds,’ which he pronounced “MaDONNoo.” Masoud and Mina were Iranian refugees from the pogrom inflicted upon liberal Iranians by the intolerant regime of ayatollahs who had overthrown the regime of the Shah. Manuel was yet another, curiously enough, like Inderpal, the son of an embassy employee, and thus not destined to remain long in Canada, unlike the vast majority of ESL students. Manuel’s father I met once, a brusque, self-important man from a South American country unimpressed by my attempt to speak Spanish to him, and sublimely uninterested in his son’s academic progress.
