Curried Student: An Unlikely Pleasure
I am a ninth-grade English teacher in a suburban American high school. There, now that I’ve confessed, I suppose you’ll start looking for me awkwardly sitting in a bland kitchen across from Chris Hansen, a Dateline cameraman, and an audio guy with a disgusted look on his face. It seems obvious to most that the only person who would take on such a job must be someone who really likes kids.I will protest just enough; I am not a pedophile or insane, and I do enjoy working with my students. What’s not to like? They know everything, are willing to help improve my intellect by pointing out my errors and misconceptions, and are there for me when I need eye-rolling or pouting lessons. And yes, they do sometimes even provide me with surprising, unlikely, and perfectly legal stimulation.
During one of my recent class periods, I found myself walking past the same spot near the door. I couldn’t quite figure out why. I normally roam the room while I am teaching or helping or just trying to keep roughly fifty kids from doing whatever it is they would rather be doing. On this particular day I was patrolling for cheaters during a vocabulary test. The room was blissfully silent save for the scratching of forty-seven pencils. I kept quickly looping back toward the front of the room and slowing town in one particular area, looking for shifting eyes, crumpled crib notes, and PSPs tucked under concealing jackets or bags. I listed for whispers, for the buzz of cell phones, for the tinny thumpzz-zz-thump of earbud hip-hop, and for the telltale drip-drip-drip of saliva from any student who managed to fall asleep with her eyes open while sitting up. Nope. Nothing. The room was firmly clenched in my adamantine grip (which we all know is stronger than iron, or even mithral, but can be cut by DuPont monofilament wire; or so some jackass DM I used to play with insisted.)
So why did I keep stalling in this one area? Then it came to me; I was focusing on the wrong senses. It was something I smelled, something faint and familiar and pleasant.
It was the smell of Grimsbury, a tiny neighborhood in Banbury inhabited mostly by immigrants from the Indian sub-continent. It was founded in the 19th century and is a collection of a few streets lined with narrow terraced and semi-detached houses made of brick We lived there for a few years in the late 1980s and I often walked down to the local shop to pick up a bag of anthracite or a box of jaffa cakes or a packet of crisps. Oddly enough, I relished going to the store and back, even under those normally damp, melancholy English skies. I loved hunching down the pavement, hands stuffed in warm pockets, listening to the steady slap of my boots on wet concrete, feeling the chill push of the air against my face, reveling in the comfortable warmth of my coat and, the best part of all, inhaling the invisible, spicy essence of Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh billowing out of skinny house-fronts with bright red, blue, green, and yellow doors.
And right now, in a corner of a cinder block educational cell painted the color of a cold war Russian fighter cockpit, 5,170 miles as the imagination flies from those same festive doors, I smelled it again. There, near the “Turn-In” and “Graded” trays, next to the dictionary cart, and under the watchful eye of a glistening whiteboard, drifted a spectral blend of cardamom, coriander, turmeric, and pepper cooked in oil.
I was determined to find this olfactory ghost. I approached but still couldn’t discern where it was coming from. The lunch lady doesn’t serve curries (there is some law against serving appetizing food in public schools), the smell wasn’t anywhere near the air vent, and I didn’t see any other obvious source. I tried to keep my sniffing surreptitious and widened my nostrils to drag in as many molecules as possible.
Then I remembered the name of the boy sitting at the end of the table closest to the door. His isn’t an Indian, or Bangladeshi, or Pakistani name, but the sound of it would blend well with Samarkand and all that name evokes. I realized at that moment that the fourteen-year-old boy sitting three feet from me and worrying over how to write a sentence using the word “suffice” was unknowingly carrying generations of culinary culture in the threads of his clothing. It was hard not to lean in and take in a good, long whiff of his jacket. He scribbled and scratched and I stood in a little closer and felt the spice tingle the fine capillaries and membranes of my nose and eyes. It pulled me back down Grimsbury’s winter streets and made me outwardly smile.
It also made me suddenly realize how weird and creepy it was for me to be sniffing students. I hope nobody saw me, especially Chris Hansen.