I went to a convent school, to two actually, and they had many things in common. One of them was the etiquette of sneezing.

Before I went to school, more than three decades ago, I used to think that a sneeze was a spontaneous outburst, something as natural as a hiccup but without the attendant discomfort, something, in fact, absolutely satisfying. It was your inner turbulence trying to essay forth, with the inexorable force of rushing water from a dam, swift, clear and powerful, through your nostrils, so that after the event you achieve, even if for a moment, a sense of perfect equilibrium, distilled peace, a sudden stab of freedom, a sense of detachment from the world, mixed with an element of surprise.

Unless, of course, a malevolent cousin got wind of the fact that it was about to happen and waggled his fingers under your nose, smiling wickedly and saying: “No, no, no, no no…” Then the sneeze, a delicate thing, would just retreat into the inner parts of your being and refuse to come out. This is unadulterated cruelty and no less frustrating than a choked Durgapur Expressway and should be declared criminal.

But a successful sneeze is pure bliss and before I went to school, coming as I did from a middle-class Bengali home, I thought it was accompanied by the sound “Hanchchho-ooo”. It was onomatopoeia at its best — in Bengali a sneeze is called a “haanchi”.

So imagine my surprise when I learnt at school that I was wrong so far. A sneeze, in English, went “A-tish-oo”. I learnt it from the books, from the sisters and from Enid Blyton, the greatest influence then on young minds, trying, as they are still I feel, to grapple with the world’s contrariness.

The bit of knowledge was difficult to put into practice. How did one do it? “Hanchchho” just happened. So once, at home, as a mighty sneeze gathered force inside me, I withheld the sound, and added: “A-tish-oo!” in what I hoped were clear, confident syllables. My parents looked baffled. “What did you say?” they asked. It was just as well that I did not tell them that I was to follow up “A-tish-oo” with an “Excuse me!” and they were supposed to respond with a warm, understanding “Bless you!”.

So for years, it went like that — “Hanchchho” at home and “A-tish-oo” at school. At school, too, however, there were times that “A-tish-oo” didn’t quite sound right — it sounded too much like a careful afterthought. I learnt to muffle a sneeze. Yes, I had a tortured childhood. It often shut me up. It left me conflicted.

Even now, sometimes I don’t know if it’s right to sneeze and let out a “Hanchchho”. In a polite gathering, how do you sneeze? Do you sneeze at all?

There were some more things like that. In school, whenever I stumbled, or was hit by something, or was hurt in any way, the thing to say was: “Ouch!” If there was some prevarication on the matter of “A-tish-oo”, “Ouch!” was universally accepted. If the door slammed on me, I had to say “Ouch!” If someone stepped on my foot, deliberately, I knew, I had to first say a well-mannered “Ouch!” I couldn’t even say “Oof”, let alone “ Baba re” or “ Ma go”, for that would be really declasse. I would be fixed with such stares from my teachers and classmates that I would then have to forego the pain.

But at home, when I said “Ouch!” once, in another experiment, my parents reminded me of the Gopal Bhand story. There was a man at Raja Krisnachandra’s court whose origins could not be determined for he spoke all languages. Gopal Bhand was given the task of finding out where he was from. He hid behind a door and as that man was passing, gave him a shove. “Shora ondha ochhi!” exclaimed the man. “He is an Oriya!” Gopal Bhand announced confidently, for a shock is always supposed to force out the mother-tongue.

But to my school-friends, I couldn’t even repeat the Gopal Bhand story. It was so downmarket.

chandrima@abpmail.com