Hillview Days -The N Word

I don't know why, but there's just something fascinating about the word "nigger" when you go to a school that's predominately East Indian. It's like a little kid who has just learned to say the word "poopy" and thinks it's the most hilarious thing in the world. So, naturally, we'd all use it in situations that we though to be extremely funny (except for me, seeing that I was only half Indian). The following account was one such situation.

Now this is Aadil:

He was sorta the "life of the party" character in our class. I included this picture so that you could notice his pigmentation or lack thereof. It has some irony to do with what happened on that day.

Now, on the day in question, Aadil was sick, and had stayed away from school. We all thus, extremely bored, since, as I mentioned above, Aadil was the fun person of our class. To alleviate the boredom, Jonathan, one of out classmates came up with a brilliant idea. He would call Aadil on his phone, and when he answered, we would all scream "NIGGER" as loud as we could. And of course, we all thought it would be funny, seeing as how 'nigger' is the funniest word in the world. It was again funny that Jonathan came up with this, as he too had the same complexion as Aadil.

So we put our plan into action. A group of about seven of us, myself included, stood around Jonathan's phone as he made the phone call. As soon as we heard Aadil's groggy voice answer "Hello?", we all screamed to the top of our lungs "NIGGER!!!". It was of course followed by an insane amount of laughter.

But somehow, in the midst of our laughter, we all felt the sudden urge to look to the back of the classroom. Standing there was none other than Mr. Nazimudin Mohamed, (Nazim for short), our Biology teacher. He was pretty big guy, with the power to strike fear into any student. He just stood at the back of the classroom and stared at all of us, crowded around the cell phone, probably wondering what in the world was going on. It was then I realized that Mr. Nazim could use the Force. Because, as he stared at us, we didn't run or anything. We just collapsed. It was if we were those playing card soldiers from Alice in Wonderland. We fell on top of the other and just sort of stayed there. All of us except Jamie.

Now let me explain. Jamie and Mr. Nazim had a very special relationship, the likes of which cannot be explained in this post. He also lacked the necessary skin pigmentation to use the word 'nigger'. When he realized that Mr. Nazim was looking at us, he turned and bolted for the door. However, since we had all on the floor by now, my head was directly behind the door. Jamie, in his haste, apparently didn't recognize this as he repeatedly attempted to open the door, which was stopped each time by my head. By this time, I guess Mr. Nazim had given up on trying to figure out what was going on and left shaking his head.

After that day, we all stopped using the word 'nigger' as we realized that we never know who could be watching or listening....

Nah, that's a lie. We continued using the word with wild abandon for the rest of our high school life. I even got a Caribbean Studies SBA out of it. I got a 2. Not bad I'd say.