“Do you like gulab jaman, sir?” Very much so, I told him. It was my favourite Indian dessert. Inderpal clapped his hands. He gave his big trademark grin, so wide that his eyes almost disappeared above his rounded cheeks. He was so pleased that he could barely keep still. “I bring surprise for the whole class tomorrow!” he promised. He was as good as his word. His classmates enjoyed the little balls of dough in sugar syrup as much as I did. The practice of bringing dessert caught on with other students, and we shared weekly treats in the ESL room for months, each the product of doting mothers proud to display cooking from their native lands.
“Owzat, sir, owzat!” This became Inderpal’s constant cry, not only when he had himself done well on a test, but whenever anyone else had, or had said or done anything that warranted praise. His unfailing enthusiasm, his genuine love for others, his zest for life, composed in part of childlike innocence and a gift for wonder, served as a powerful antidote to the homesickness, academic anxiety and family worries that so many of his classmates must have felt as new arrivals in a strange land with different customs and a new language to master. I knew we would all miss him when his father’s posting to Ottawa expired, as it would early in the new year. At the classroom door shortly before Christmas he buttonholed me with a question.
”Your name is like Scotch whiskey, sir. You like Scotch whiskey?” Again the grin, and the visible shivers of delight that passed through him whenever he had a new idea to impart. “ You like it, sir?”
I hesitated to say I did not drink spirits, not from any Calvinistic desire for temperance, but from a dislike of anything alcoholic that was not sweet, so I fibbed, not wanting to hurt his feelings, and said I liked it very much, but cautioned him not to bring anything alcoholic to school, thinking that as a minor he would have little chance to do this anyway.
The Christmas holidays began. Snow fell relentlessly. Gazing out of our apartment window at the Ottawa River flowing black between banks of white twelve floors beneath us, I looked forward to an evening’s quiet reading with my wife, then an elementary teacher with a neighbouring Catholic school board.
“It’s Christmas Eve tomorrow,” she said. “I remember the excitement of anticipation I felt as a child. The lights, the tree, the Nativity scene above the fireplace, and all the cotton wool snow I would drape over everything, all around the manger, with Baby Jesus warm inside with the animals.”
I looked over my glasses at her and smiled. “ I had not even seen snow as a child—not until we came to Canada…”
