In the House of the Interpreter Read Free Page B

done better than me and were placed in stream A, while I was among the twenty lesser geniuses in stream B. It didn’t matter, really: every student learned the same lessons, studied the same texts, and took the same tests. My wings of pride might have been clipped a little, but I was still driven by the pact with my mother: I would always try my best and see what the effort would earn me.
    English language was my very first class, and like everything I encountered here, it started with mystery and drama. The potbellied Englishman who entered the class was the same P. R. Oades I had encountered as senior bursar. After introducing himself, he said, Follow me, and walked out. We trooped behind him, across the parade ground, past the soccer field, toward the main gate. He then veered to the left, onto a dirt road that sloped up towards the top of the hill, with gray-stone-walled and brown-tile-roofed bungalows and big manicured lawns on either side. Oades led us to the door of one of these houses: Welcome to my castle. Our first English lesson was a tour of a real Englishman’s house.
    It started in the living room, the parlor, as we learned, and Oades described its contents: some landscape paintings on the wall, scenes of an English countryside; the carpet, rugs, fireplace, and mantelpiece with candles and china figurines; a cushy sofa set and cushions, side and coffee tables (Not for resting your legs, he hastened to say), a bookcase; and a tall cupboard with plates and glass on display (Not for regular use, he added). In the bathrooms, we discovered bathtubs, sinks, faucets, toothbrushes, and toothpaste.Everything was in dramatic contrast to my village hut, an all-purpose living space sometimes shared with goats. Our bathrooms were the riversides, where we washed clothes and bathed behind the reeds, and the yard, where we dipped feet or hands in water collected in a basin. In our village, red earth was part of the bathing culture; here, everything was immaculate white.
    We moved on to the kitchen, where Oades named the gadgets within: electric cooker, pots, pans, knives (which he described as cutlery), and utensils. In the dining area was a table on which were plates, forks, and knives of various sizes and shapes, and of course, napkins. Oades described how not to sit (Never plant your elbows on the table); how to hold forks and knives, the order of forks and knives, and whether they were used for meat or fish. It was polite to say, Pass the salt please, instead of leaning on another guest to reach out for what one wanted; and of course to tilt the plate away from the body so that one did not spill sauce or soup on oneself. And don’t talk with your mouth full of food. There was a lesson on placement of napkins (on the lap, not tucked around your neck), and how to use the tip of a napkin to clear an unwanted something on the lips (but never to blow your nose). We learned that one placed knife and fork crossed or at an angle, preferably a wide angle, to show the waiter that one had not yet finished with the dish at hand, and of course, to place knife and fork together in parallel to tell the waiter that he could now take the plate. We learned about a three-course meal that ended with fruit and dessert. I thought he meant desert, and I wondered how onecould eat a piece. Another boy voiced similar doubts. No, it was a dish, not a piece of sand, and the name was
dessert
, not
desert
. We laughed. It was all abstract, so different from my rural cuisine of
ugali
and
irio
that I usually ate with my fingers, certainly without anybody waiting on me. Under the ideals of table manners, Oades was training us into the habit of being waited upon or, at the very least, planting the idea in our minds.
    Finally, we moved to the master bedroom, where Oades named mattresses, bedcovers, dressers, drawers, closets, pajamas, and dressing gowns. As he was about to lead us to the guest bedrooms, some of the boys spotted guns hanging on a side