Pilgrim in the Palace of Words Read online

  This was the real global village right here in front of me, staring at me, waiting for me to begin.

  “Okay,” I said, “let’s see what you already know. We’ll start with some of the verbs. I wrote the word walk on the board and made a walking motion with my fingers. “Walk,” I said, dutifully striding back and forth along the front of the classroom. A few of them mimicked the word. All of their eyes were on me.

  Rupinder put up her hand. A few wary faces turned to her. Some, I could tell, didn’t know what it meant to put up a hand. I could see them trying to work it out, glancing back at me for clues.

  “Yes … uh …” I looked down to check the names on the attendance sheet. “Yes, Rupinder?”

  “The past tense of walk is walked.” She spoke with the musical phrasing of the Indian subcontinent.

  “That’s right,” I said, smiling. Encouraged, I blundered on. “Now, drink … that one’s more complicated.” I cupped my palms as if to drink, slurping noisily. A few of the kids chuckled. “Drink.”

  “Drink,” Omojok repeated. He tried out the word carefully. Keyak, beside him, was still blank.

  Rupinder’s hand swept into the air again, this time waving a little more insistently.

  “Yes, Rupinder?” I had a keener here, I thought. Already I was thinking that it would be important to keep her in check, to allow the other kids a chance.

  “The past tense is drank. The past participle is drunk.”

  “Right again, Rupinder.”

  This girl was a walking grammar book. She looked around proudly at the other students, and I decided to steer the lesson in a different direction. I’d already made some labels. I’d put the word clock up on the clock. I’d put the word desk on the teacher’s desk at the front. I gestured toward one of the labels. “I think now, class, we’ll look at —”

  Rupinder raised her hand. “The past tense of think,” she said automatically, “is thank.”

  “Well, thank is a different word, Rupinder.” The poor girl was suddenly confused. “Like in thank you.”

  The class bubbled up. Everyone seemed to know this one. “Thank you, thank you,” they mouthed between themselves. Here was something they all knew. Even Omojok managed a smile.

  “No, no … the past tense of think is thought.” I turned to write the word on the board. “Thought.”

  Expressions of confusion were all around now. I seemed to have messed things up, but what was I to do? I pushed on regardless, and somehow I made it through to the bell. The following days weren’t a whole lot better, either. Rupinder continued to dominate the class, but she didn’t seem to be learning anything. On a quiz at the end of the week she tried to conjugate the verb wake. Wake, she wrote. Past tense: woke. Past participle: wank.

  I didn’t have the heart to tell her she was wrong.

  Outside the windows the long grass of the playing fields called to the kids. Omojok tried out and made it onto the school soccer team. It turned out he’d been kicking a soccer ball around since he’d first learned to walk. He had astounding skills and, being a big kid with a big smile, he easily made the team despite his lack of English. His feet spoke the universal language of soccer.

  All the students started to reveal their true personalities. Xi Chen displayed a remarkable aptitude for art. She folded little paper dragons and gave me one. I sent her up to the art class where she began to produce some very fine drawings.

  Rupinder wore blue jeans for the first time, and all the kids tried out short phrases in English. I picked up bits and pieces of their languages, too. Right from the beginning, on any given morning, I’d be greeted in any one of seven or eight languages. Their own languages flipped from their tongues like water splashing onto hot pavement. “Zhou sun, Mr. Dixon,” Xi would say. One of the Afghan girls called me ma’lim, which in Pashtu means “teacher.”

  I smiled and tried to answer back with a word or two in their own language. It was the least I could do to say “good morning” in Mandarin or “thank you” in Punjabi. They giggled at my pronunciation, but things were getting better, and in light of all the struggles they had to endure, my linguistic contributions were pretty modest.

  I would try to catch them off guard sometimes, too. I learned how to say “Could you please be quiet” in Pashtu. I used it on a lone Afghani boy, Humayoun, who was already starting to act up. He responded first with alarm, his eyes growing wide. Then his face melted into a smile. “It good, Mr. Dixon. You speak good.”

  Humayoun was tall, lanky, and a bit clumsy. He’d been caught in the middle of a sort of mini civil war between the Taliban and the Hozara people — the tribal group to which he belonged. He’d witnessed a massacre. His own uncle was murdered in front of him, but he managed to escape over the Khyber Pass and into Pakistan. From there the story got even crazier. He wound up in Cambodia of all places. For a year he lived in the back alleys of Phnom Penh without identification or papers of any kind.

  The strange thing is that Humayoun, for all his hardships, turned out to be the comedian of the group. It doesn’t seem to matter where they come from, kids are kids, and every class has its clown. Humayoun was mine.

  Humayoun played his first trick on me in early October. When I asked him how to say “goodbye” in Pashtu, he taught me a little phrase — Píshte píshte. After that I called it out to the Afghani girls at the end of the day when they were leaving, though I noticed they looked at me a little strangely when I said it.

  It turned out that Humayoun hadn’t taught me “goodbye” at all. He taught me a phrase used for shooing cats away. At best it translates as something like “Go on. Scoot. Get out of here.” For weeks I stood at the door at the end of the day, politely intoning this phrase to the girls, who were too polite to say anything. It took me some time to realize that Humayoun, guffawing down the hall, had pulled a fast one on me.

  But that was just fine with me. If they were laughing, I knew they would be all right. I knew they’d be ready to learn.

  One morning, still early in the year, with the days beginning to darken, I arrived at the school and unlocked the door to my classroom. I went across to the staff room to get a coffee, and when I returned, I found three of my students standing at the window at the back of the room. Something had caught their attention, and there they stood, wide-eyed and silent.

  Omojok was there with Keyak, and the third, a girl, was from Vietnam. I stood behind them, coffee in hand, and it took me a minute to realize what they were staring at. It was snowing. Great gentle flakes were drifting down. None of the three had ever seen snow before.

  Omojok turned to me, his face shining. He spoke a word he’d learned only a day or two before, forming it carefully on his lips, his eyes beaming. “Beautiful,” he said. “Beautiful.”

  It was a start.

  Throughout the year new students kept coming — often arriving at the most inopportune times. I’d get a call from the secretary, and down I’d go to the office to meet with another overwhelmed and bewildered immigrant family. I’d try to explain about bus routes and library cards. I’d go slowly through the classes their sons and daughters would need, pushing forms at them, explaining where they needed to sign, trying to get them to relax, to see that everything was all right.

  In late October a new girl arrived from Mongolia. I was quite excited. I’d never had a student from there before. The girl’s name was a convolution of syllables, but the mother, who spoke a bit of English, asked me to call her Sodah. It was an approximation of the first couple of syllables, anyway. “Like Coca-Cola,” the mother said, trying out a smile. “You can call her Sodah.”

  Sodah had the round moon face I’d become familiar with in Tibet. It was the same part of the world — the high plateau north of the Himalayas. Home for Sodah had been Ulan Bator, the capital of Mongolia. She arrived in the first blast of really cold weather, but that wasn’t a problem for her. The climate on the steppes of Mongolia is quite similar to ours. Even the geography of the prairies is much the sa
me. Sodah had been educated in a Russian school, and her eyes showed a quick intelligence. She took everything in, surveying this new world with interest, even enthusiasm.

  Her first day of classes was to be October 31. What I hadn’t counted on was that her first-class teacher decided to dress up as a witch for Halloween. Mrs. Taylor met us at the door. She wore a high pointed black hat, a long black cape, and a smear of mascara around her eyes. And she didn’t break character for this new student. “Come in, come in,” she cackled, and I saw poor Sodah’s eyes widen. Was this how teachers dressed in Canada? What sort of strange rabbit hole had she fallen down?

  At Christmastime I put up a little Christmas tree in the classroom. I wasn’t really supposed to. The school board was now calling it the winter break, but I thought that was garbage. The students had asked me about Christmas, and I couldn’t think of any good reason why I shouldn’t tell all about the traditions I’d grown up with. Just as I was trying to understand their cultures, they were trying to comprehend mine. That was what it was all about. So I had them come up one by one and put an ornament on the tree. Rupinder put the angel on the top.

  I was astounded when Xi Chen and the Vietnamese girls broke into a squeaky version of “Jingle Bells.”

  “We learned it in our country,” they told me happily. “Everyone knows this song. But, Mr. Dixon, what is a jingle bell?”

  Into the new year they came bundled against the deep Canadian winter, and the riddles of Canadian life began to unfold for them. They asked me about bank machines and driver’s licences. A boy from India started to cheer for the Calgary Flames hockey team, announcing the scores proudly to me each morning before class. He began to wear a big team jersey that floated around his skinny shoulders. He still wore his turban, but the jersey was like a signal to the Canadian-born kids in the school. This was, after all, still a regular high school. The so-called “regular” students now talked with him in the hall. They called out to him, “Hey, Gurdip, how’d we do last night?”

  “Two nothing,” Gurdip replied. “We clobbered them.”

  Clobbered, I thought. I knew I hadn’t taught him that word. It seemed that my students were acquiring English from all sorts of sources. They were soaking up Canadian television programs and reading Canadian magazines. And most of all they were listening carefully to the other students in the hallways, drawing out language like “Awesome” and “Catch you later” and “What’s up?” — words far more useful than the ones I was giving them on their vocabulary lists.

  After school one day, I discovered that someone had written something on one of the desks. It was an English word, all right, though it was misspelled. “Fuk,” it said in tightly pencilled letters.

  Humayoun, I thought instantly. That looks like his handwriting.

  Early in the spring I started an art class. Xi Chen had inspired me. The art teacher was raving about her, and already there was talk of her going to art college. My kids had been squirming in their desks for sometime now. There were only so many grammar exercises they could take. So for an hour a day I took them up to the art class to do some drawing and painting.

  Most of them took to it easily. Only one boy, Keyak, still seemed to struggle. He had never seen things like scissors or Scotch tape, and his hands weren’t used to holding them. He sat by himself in the corner and didn’t really talk to anyone. Omojok, meanwhile, had blossomed in this new world, but Keyak remained closed off. He had, I learned, walked several hundred kilometres by himself to get to a refugee camp along the Ethiopian border. His family was gone. They had dropped off one by one on the long march and he alone had survived. Keyak smiled in a kindly way when I tried to help him, but he seemed resigned to doing poorly. Sometimes he just sat and stared at nothing.

  The others tumbled joyfully through their projects — drawing animals and buildings and rocket ships. I showed them three-point perspective and explained colour theory, and they ate it up. There was a slight lurch with the Muslim students when we learned how to draw human faces. Such representations aren’t allowed in mosques, and in their stead a great tradition of abstract tile work has grown up. So I gave the Muslim students the option of drawing these abstract designs. They didn’t like that much, though. In the end, they all went home and came back the next day with notes from their parents, allowing and even encouraging them to draw whatever was normally drawn in “English” art classes.

  One day Zeeshan, the boy from Pakistan, wrote out the Prophet Muhammad’s name in a beautiful ornate Arabic script. It filled the paper in tight curlicues, and I accepted it for extra marks, then put it on the wall.

  Many weeks later, when it was time to change the displays, Zeeshan asked about the paper. “What you do now?” he asked. Something was bothering him.

  “Well, we’ll just put the paper in the recycling bin with the other papers … unless you want to take it home.”

  “No, I no take it home. But, Mr. Dixon … recycling no good also.”

  I held the paper uncertainly. I wasn’t sure what he was trying to say.

  “It is the name of Muhammad,” he went on seriously. “We cannot …” He didn’t quite know how to continue. “We, uh, we are not allowed to put this name in the garbage. Do you understand?”

  “Oh … then what should I do?”

  “In our tradition, for respect, you must burn the paper, so it not touch garbage. So that it not … unclean. You understand?”

  “Yes, yes, I understand.”

  So later, out around the back of the school, where the bad kids went to sneak cigarettes, I found myself hunched over the paper with a pack of matches. Hidden from view, I lit the paper and watched it curl up in a tight ball of flame. How would I explain this if anyone happened along? What was a teacher doing lighting fires behind the school?

  When spring came, we moved onto clay sculpture, and the kids got up to their elbows in the wet, cool clay. This was something more familiar to a lot of them. They made little bowls and figurines. Zeeshan put together a set of chess pieces. They were really quite good.

  Off in the corner, Keyak began to take an interest. He worked over his glob of clay, pinching and pulling at it, and when I went over to see what he was doing, he held the form up to me. It was the figure of an ox, perfectly fashioned, its stylized horns and square body the very image of his traditional culture. “Oh, Keyak,” I said, “that’s beautiful.”

  The other students gathered around to admire the ox, and for the first time Keyak broke into a wide, toothy grin. We fired his little ox in the kiln and glazed it so that it shone. At the end of the semester Keyak gave it to me. “In my language,” he told me, “it is called a yok. It is worth … everything.”

  I still have Keyak’s figurine on my mantelpiece among all the other treasures I’ve accumulated from around the world. It’s the only one that isn’t from a far-off country. Except, though, it is.

  At the very end of the year we had a final exam. My students had to write an essay on “setting goals.” What was it they wanted to do in the future? Where were they going now that they had settled into this new country, this strange new language? Some of them wrote about wanting to go to university, wanting to be doctors one day or engineers. Omojok told me he wanted to be a teacher. Well, he wanted to be a professional soccer coach, but if that didn’t work out, then he wanted to be a teacher. “Just like you, Mr. Dixon,” he said. “Just like you.”

  Humayoun played his final card of the year. ‘The most important thing,” he wrote in the very first sentence, “is setting your goals.” Only he didn’t write it quite like that. His lazy pen forgot to cross the t’s. Instead, the blue ink strayed across and crossed the l on the word goals. So what he really wrote was this: “The most important thing is selling your goats.”

  I couldn’t be sure if he’d made an honest mistake or whether this was his last chance to make a joke. I think, though, that I caught the flash of a smile as he walked out of that final class.

  These students of mine are t
he unimaginable future. What they do with their lives and their languages will, most likely, be a complete surprise … even to them. New meanings will emerge. New Ways of Being will unfold.

  We are already living in a postmodern world where we speak easily of reheating pad thai in our microwaves, of flipping past Bollywood movies on our television sets. The world has come to us, and we can’t expect that things will ever be the same. After all, they never have been.

  A bright new world is emerging, despite all news reports to the contrary. Humans are meaning-making creatures, comfortable in a wild array of different conceptual systems. Yet we still feel sadness and love. We all experience fear, regret, hope, and joy. We are all concerned with “selling our goats.”

  So, though we come from different places, from completely different worlds, we all still pull to the sense of human touch. We all eat and sleep and dream in much the same way. To understand this is to reach the top of the Tower of Babel where nothing like mere words can prevent us from understanding one another.

  Bibliography

  Abley, Mark. Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages. Toronto: Random House Canada, 2003.

  Belsey, Catherine. Poststructuralism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford, Eng.: Oxford University Press, 2002.

  Bergreen, Laurence. Marco Polo: From Venice to Xanadu. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007.

  Boroditsky, Lera. “Linguistic Relativity,” in L. Nadel, ed., Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science. London: Macmillan, 2003.

  Boroditsky, Lera, and D. Casasanto. Time in the Mind: Using Space to Think About Time. Cognition.doi:10.1016/j.cognition. 2007.03.004.

  Bringhurst, Robert. A Story as Sharp as a Knife. Vancouver: Douglas &Mcintyre, 1999.

  Brosnahan, Tom, and Pat Yale. Turkey: A Travel Survival Kit. 5th ed. Hawthorne, Australia: Lonely Planet Publications, 1993.