Racism, bricks and monkey tricks

So ... Monkey is now confirming itself as the latest entry in the Book of Racism. It would appear that we' ve gone past the colours - black, white and yellow; and also past dreaded letter-words such as the N-word.

Personally, I wish this whole Harbhajan fiasco could have taken place, say, when swing was giving way to rock & roll.

A boy of merely seven or eight, I had a tuition teacher, whose instruct was to anchor me firmly in the rudiments of Tamil - the language of the state I was living in, and the language chosen by my grandmother as the one I should master as a 'second language' in school, it being imperative (maybe for later skills in the art of doublespeak) that every pupil be fluent in two tongues.

Try as I did to drink deeply from the well of linguistics, the whole enterprise was a failure from day one, and grandma's tuition fees were ill-spent.

A lot of my Tamilian friends - the ones who went to the same tuition teacher - ended up speaking fluent English - thanks, they say, to involved conversations with me. I, in return, gained nothing by way of reciprocity.

Every time I attempted to outline my thoughts in Tamil, I ended up providing my listeners with undiluted amusement. When the merriment dried up, I was often told to, "Shut up. Give up even trying. Stick with English."

During these raucous sessions, when I harboured secret notions of life as a comedian (even a Tamil-speaking one), the tuition teacher would berate us roundly. "Stop it, you little monkeys," she would shout, whacking a wooden ruler on her converted dining table.

"Remember, you have come here to study. To exercise those little organs in your head called brains. If you don't want that (tapping her temple) to develop, go outside and swing on the trees, which you're all good at anyways."

Indeed we were, and often played a tremendously dexterous game called "Monkey up the tree".

At other times, she would greet the lot of us who turned up on her doorstep in one large group, "Ah, the monkey boys are here! Come in, come in. Put away your tails, now, we have some serious studying to do."

It's only just dawned on me that had "monkey" been deemed racist then, how much money (taking the "k for kash" out of "monkey") I may have saved grandma, committed as she was to a venture from which there could be no justifiable returns.

Forget monkey, even. I have been called what I believe is worse. There used to be, among us "ruffians" a diligent, intelligent girl whose study habits put us to shame.

On one occasion, I recall, we were given 15 minutes to memorise six lines of a poem. Her memory was flawless; mine utterly flawed after the first line.

"Do you see the difference?" asked the teacher, after we had both recited ourselves dry. "'She," she said, pointing to the girl, "is an elephant. Elephants have excellent memory. You, on the other hand, are a ... .What animal would you imagine I have in mind?" she asked, clicking her fingers.

"A donkey, miss," I ventured, thereby labelling myself with a racist slur while the teacher deftly - almost monkey-like - swung away from the trap of speaking the word herself.

Vermin

While narrating this recently to my friend Ryan he in turn recalled how a teacher used to refer to him and his friends as vermin, a term they at first mistook to be complimentary until its constant derogatory use drove one of them - an Arabic-speaking classmate -past endurance.

"You are such a brick, sir," he hurled back, one day, no doubt voicing what the others had been referring to the teacher in private.

"Do you really mean that? A brick?" asked the teacher, delight suffusing his features.

"Yes, sir, absolutely."

The entire bunch was rewarded with bottles of cola at recess and "vermin" was, henceforth, expunged from usage.

Kevin Martin is a journalist based in Sydney, Australia.