Suprovat, Mr O’Shaunassey

I was 11, a skinny dark-skinned boy with white teeth and a mop of thick black hair, amidst a class of thirty-two freckled white children with grayish-violet teeth (some in braces) and smooth-as-silk hair in a palette ranging from platinum blond to yellow to ginger to red to black. In spite of their colours, I stood out in black and white.

The other children seemed to know each other from their previous class. So, they jostled in groups, talking amongst themselves. One or two glanced in my direction, out of curiosity. No one spoke to me, which was reassuring in a way as I couldn’t speak English properly, let alone their Australian tongue. Naturally, I was nervous.

He welcomed us in, requesting us to take our seats at any available desk. I was the last person in and got an empty seat on the aisle, at the back. He wished us ‘good morning, class’ in a loud gravelly sort of voice and we all wished him back in unison, standing by our seats. He introduced himself as our class teacher, an elderly gentleman with silver hair. We were to address him as Mr O’Shaunassey, he said.

We were all settling down when, out of the blue, he asked me what was the equivalent of the English ‘good morning’ greeting in my language in India. I hesitated. I wasn’t sure. India spoke many languages. Moreover, in India, we normally didn’t greet each other with a ‘good morning’; preferring to use ‘namaste’ or the equivalent of a ‘how are you?’ in our respective mother tongues.

However, in the nick of time, I remembered a word in Bengali, my mother tongue. It was ‘shuprobhaat’, though I wasn’t sure if it was a greeting. Mr O’Shaunassey said it would do and tried several times to pronounce it correctly (the way I did), throwing the class into fits of laughter. Finally, we settled upon ‘su.pro.vat’ (broken down in syllables), and he wrote it in capital letters on the top left corner of the blackboard.

He made a rule, instantly. Every morning he would wish his class ‘good morning’ and they would respond in English. Then he would wish me ‘suprovat’ and I would respond in Bengali.

That wasn’t all. Now and then, Mr O’Shaunassey invited me to the front of the class and asked me questions on India, requesting me to speak to the class about India, encouraging the class to learn from me. He would explain to the class that they were fortunate to have among them someone from another country, another culture, from whom they could learn first-hand. Culture was such a difficult thing to learn, he would say.

Over the next few weeks, Mr O’Shaunassey turned me into ‘an India expert’ for the class, and had the other children asking me questions, sharing stories, interacting with me freely. Soon, I was accepted as one of them. I guess that was a part of Mr O’Shaunassey’s intention.

Life moved on. Mr O’Shaunassey left us to become the Vice Principal of the school and, several months after that, suddenly left us for his heavenly abode. He was 59, I remember. Mrs Wells became our new class teacher, a cranky lady who was fond of using the ruler for discipline. But ‘suprovat’ remained written on the top left corner of the blackboard and the practice of wishing ‘suprovat’ every morning continued with Mrs Wells.

That was a long time ago.

The night before last, while thinking about the Western world’s curiosity about India in the early seventies (in connection with another blog I was writing), I was reminded of my childhood in Australia. And strangely, Mr O’Shaunassey and his ‘suprovat’ greeting suddenly flashed through my mind. Inexplicably, a heavy grief overwhelmed me and I felt unsettled.

It is only now that I am able to put my thoughts down in words.