CHRISTOPHER RAJA Into the Suburbs: extract
This week’s extract is from Christopher Raja’s memoir Into the Suburbs, a story of immigration and family, ambition and tragedy. It is also a resonant portrait of Australia through the eyes of an outsider.
Christopher Raja spent the first eleven years of his life in Calcutta, a place where ‘car horns, children playing, birdsong, street vendors trying to attract customers’ were all ‘familiar, everyday sounds’. When the family arrives in suburban Melbourne, one of the first things he notices is how quiet it is: ‘To look out the front window and see not another soul was strange, even disturbing.’
Christopher’s father was a respected school principal in Calcutta, but in Australia he initially has to take shift work at a factory before he secures a job as a teacher at a prestigious private school.
Christopher, an only child, bears the family’s hopes for this new life, but at Springvale High he stops reading and praying and starts swearing and fighting. When he gets beaten up by thugs in Iron Maiden t-shirts who want ‘to teach the Indian guy a lesson’, Christopher’s father decides enough is enough and arranges a scholarship for him at the private school where he teaches. In this extract Christopher describes his entry into this new world.
Extract courtesy of University of Queensland Press
from Chapter XI: A Classless Society
The raftered entrance hall of the administration building at St Sebastian’s College, Brighton, contained a series of portraits of old principals that leaned out at sharp angles from the walls. They allowed their subjects a clear view of the comings and goings in the old school. There were heavy pieces of glistening brown furniture, including a mirror where I could see my reflection: a new blazer, a warm woollen jumper, a shirt and tie, and new black shoes. Stained-glass windows with images of birds and trees filtered in shafts of sunlight. The reception area was silent. My father paused and straightened my blue collar and tie. I wasn’t enjoying this.
‘The facilities here are great,’ Dad said as he smiled at the principal’s secretary, Ms Spurgeon. She was a young woman, remarkably good-looking, with long hair and an aquiline nose. Teachers rushed past. ‘We manage to show the students a thing or two,’ an older man said in a Scottish accent. Apart from a circlet of curly hair around his ears, he was bald.
‘Christopher, meet Mr Charters,’ Dad said.
The Scot winked at Dad and took me in. ‘So this is your son? Spirit is the thing that counts, Christopher, remember that.’ And without missing a beat Mr Charters was gone. The secretary summoned us. ‘The principal will see you now,’ she said.
Dad straightened his tie as Ms Spurgeon led us into an office with more portraits and antique furniture, where the principal, Dr Sparrow, greeted us. The principal’s office was on the first floor, its windows overlooking a football ground. Dr Sparrow was a high-shouldered, white-bearded, hard- eyed man who stood motionless, staring at us. He had crumbs in his beard. In front of him, a silver teapot and four china cups and saucers, cheese, biscuits and pastries were laid out on a mahogany table. The floor was covered in rich red carpet.
Over in a corner, sitting on a red chair near a window, was a strange-looking lady. She was not beautiful, but her eyes were grey, laughing and creased. Her long hair in a fishtail braid fell over one shoulder. I knew who she was: an artist whose work was held in the National Gallery of Victoria. I also knew she was immensely rich, didn’t like small talk and was something of a hermit. She had made a substantial donation to the school for my education. Dad bowed towards her.
Dr Sparrow cantered forward a little and, like one of the portraits above him, gazed at us curiously. His grim, rigid face gradually broke into a smile. ‘Welcome,’ he said slowly, and shook my hand limply. ‘I think I can answer any questions you might have.’
I shrugged.
‘No questions,’ Dr Sparrow said. ‘Sit down,’ he added, and gestured towards four green armchairs.
‘Thank you,’ Dad said. He seemed awkward and uncomfortable. ‘We just wanted to express our gratitude.’
At this, Dr Sparrow gave a throaty chortle and said, ‘Make the most of it, Christopher. Good luck. I trust your father will help you find your way to class.’
Dad turned to the woman. ‘Thank you, Ms Grant,’ he said. Ms Grant raised a furry eyebrow and didn’t say anything. She placed her hand over her heart. Then she stood up, hunched and arthritic. She was even older than I thought. ‘I want to take a better look at you,’ she said, and shuffled towards me slowly. She sat in one of the green armchairs. ‘It’s nothing,’ Ms Grant added. ‘I had some good fortune in the share market. It is the least I can do.’
She leaned towards me, staring at me. Her eyes sparkled. Her face was wrinkled with age but somehow she retained an air of youthfulness.‘I’m so glad it’s you,’ she whispered, as though we knew one another already. ‘You’re a breath of fresh air.’
I felt extremely embarrassed.
With that we left, headed out of the administration building and went to the classrooms, where Dad left me with a cluster of students. The bell had gone and the students were milling around, waiting for class to start. I opened my locker, looked at my diary, found Monday and read what it said: ‘Assembly, Science, Maths’.
‘Good morning,’ the students greeted each other, and me. ‘Good morning,’ I replied, surprised. Everyone seemed polite and well mannered. There were no earrings or Iron Maiden T-shirts.
I sat at a desk at the back of the class. Two boys named Josh and Martin sat next to me, teenagers who seemed very glamorous to me, even exotic. They wore watches, had pristine shoes and seemed genuinely interested in studying. The girls in the class had blue hair ribbons. One sitting nearby was named Rita. ‘All your clothes are new,’ she said.
I didn’t detect any attitude. She was being genuinely friendly.
The first question Martin asked was: ‘What university do you intend to go to?’
At my old school, everyone was ready to leave school as soon as they turned sixteen. Here I felt like I was a boy in a classroom filled with young men and women.
‘Who says Australia is a classless society?’ Dad said later that day, as we drove home. ‘This place is more class-conscious than anywhere in India. Not everyone in Australia is equal. It is the myth of egalitarianism.’
Christopher Raja
Photo: Adam Smith
I never heard anyone else acknowledge that class played any part at St Sebastian’s. Yet we had charity stalls to help poor people in Bangladesh. Scholarship students could declare themselves or not, as they wished; the school itself gave no sign. But it was clear that, on the whole, poor people and new migrants didn’t go to a school like this. Dad was the only dark person working there, and I was the only student. ‘Mr Raja’s son’ was how I came to be known for the next three years.
‘You can never really advance in a place like this,’ Dad recognised. ‘You have to work harder than everyone else just to keep up.’
It was understood that the students here would be future leaders. Mostly they were privileged people being groomed to marry other privileged people. They would go to university, travel the world, take over the family business, run for parliament, write books and make films. The school valued its famous, glamorous graduates: sportspeople, swimmers, footballers, netballers. It also prized its high-flying scholars, singers, musicians, actors and debaters.
At this school, class was a fact. Not just the clothes people wore, but how they wore them. How people spent their holidays. The sports and musical instruments they played. Despite a reticence among them at the mention of money, the students here would never struggle to find opportunity in the world. Even if they kicked against the place, they were defined by it and therefore protected. These were the type of people Dad was employed to serve, and serve them is what he did. He worked with total absorption in a job he was overqualified for, so that I could experience a similar sort of protection and treatment. I wanted the rich lifestyle Australia had to offer, but felt that this setting made the otherness in me evident.
My relationship with Eleni, Darren and my old friends had abruptly ended when Dad enrolled me at St Sebastian’s. I met up with Eleni a few times after I started there, but our hearts weren’t in it anymore. Some months later she called and announced that she had met someone else. I could hear her breathing, and I tried to swallow. The news hurt but I didn’t say anything. I knew that to settle in at my new school I had to give up my old life.
After a while I became resentful of my home neighbourhood: I’d become more conscious of the things I had been missing there. I no longer felt free or spontaneous when I was at home. I suppressed my rebellious streak and tried harder to please others. As a result I became less self- destructive, but I started to see myself as weak and subservient. I did do better at school academically, though, and this pleased my parents. Once again I was becoming a different person. It was like putting on another mask.
One day a writer visited the school. She talked modestly about what it meant to be a writer and a person. ‘Stories,’ she said, ‘have the power to change lives: the past, the future and the present.’ She’d been an agnostic since her teenage years despite her parents’ Christian belief, she explained. Yet there was one aspect of the Bible on which she agreed with them: the power of words. ‘Words enter us,’ she told us, ‘they travel through generations.’
One of the best teachers I had that year was Mrs Mancini. She was a chic woman with bobbed grey hair, and she taught Art and English. She always had a new word of the day. ‘Your word for today is “passion”,’ she told us. ‘Who knows what that means?’
The class remained quiet. I could smell the pencil shavings, ink, and deodorant mixed with body odour.
‘Emotion and language can change the world,’ Mrs Mancini continued. ‘Each one of you is filled with passion – it is our aches that we stay alive for. What will your passion be?’
I turned around in my seat as students began to answer. Evgeny, a Russian Jew, played the clarinet and guitar – his passion was music. His family had left the Soviet Union during glasnost. His father, Leon, was a music teacher and pianist working at the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music. Evgeny’s mother had recently divorced his father and lived in Greenwich Village, New York. She was studying tarot and Jungian psychology. Evgeny had black curly hair, often wore a black scarf and looked like a poet. The teachers always confiscated the black scarf and told him it wasn’t part of the school uniform. He was extremely talented, and in time would introduce me to a world beyond the suburbs of Melbourne.
The brightest and best-looking girl in the class was Rita, a banker’s daughter from Germany. Sitting in the front row, she turned and surveyed the rest of the class with a forgiving smile. She was a tennis player and a debater. She spoke of Mikhail Gorbachev and the world beginning as a primordial soup and the merits of Christianity.
Hardly anyone ever knew the answers to Mrs Mancini’s questions except for Rita and a boy called Martin. The other students called him ‘Martin the Martian’ because he was ugly and short. He was different, and being different was hard. Martin was exceptionally smart but at school was treated like a freak.
Mrs Mancini really liked Martin. She would recommend books for him to read, like The Plague by Albert Camus. I sat behind Martin and kept note of the books that she recommended.
Martin was what Aunty Philomena called ‘an old soul’. He had a tendency to make sudden pronouncements in a clear and confident voice. His family came from Hampshire, on the southern coast of England. James Joyce, he said one day, was a visionary because he treated Exile as a ‘given’ or existential state. ‘He removed the notion from the religious paradigm of Paradise, Fall and Return,’ he said. ‘We are both physically exiled from our homeland,’ he told me, ‘but the intense feeling transmutes into a broader, more universal state.’ As usual, Martin was right. I was coming to see that urban Australians were exiled from their landscape, having little or no contact with the interior of the continent. One day, I thought, I will go and live in the desert.
From Christopher Raja Into the Suburbs: A migrant’s story UQP 2020 PB 200pp $29.99
Like to keep reading? You can buy Into the Suburbs from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW here or you can buy it from Booktopia here.
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