By Patrycja Romanowska, 2006 PitR alumna
patrycja[at]cosmopolitanreview.com
EDMONTON, Alberta -- On floor number eight, in the first apartment to the left of the elevator lives a beautiful little girl from India. Charmed by her stunning smile and friendly manner, I invited her over for an afternoon. The sight of her playing with my blue-eyed, Polish-Canadian son gladdened my multi-cultural, immigrant’s heart. How we all can get along …
After playing for about a half an hour, my five-year-old neighbour came up to me and, not wavering her glance for even a moment, said: “Your house is dirty.”
What? For a moment I regretted recruiting this urchin for a playdate with my son. Should have stayed outside and let him get tossed out of a couple more soccer games by the “big” boys instead. At least they don’t insult my housekeeping.
Besides, my house isn’t dirty. Sure, there’s some newspapers underfoot, a pup tent in the living room and an exercise ball that once again mysteriously made its way from my closet onto the couch … but that hardly qualifies as a level of filth to be commented on by a kindergartner.
“Why do you say that?” I asked, trying to sound only casually interested.
“Because you are all wearing shoes. And people only wear shoes inside their house when it is dirty.”
Phew, the scathing indictment was made only on the basis of footwear habits! My sense of housekeeping pride can remain intact.
We all wear shoes for different reasons, I explained. My grandmother had surgery and one leg is shorter than the other so she has to wear a thick insole. My son, after I made the mistake of buying him two pairs of flashing sneakers, seems to have developed a shoe fetish and won’t go anywhere unless there is something blinking on his feet. And while I can appreciate the visual appeal of harvest gold wall-to-wall carpeting, actually stepping barefoot onto my apartment’s thirty-year-old rug seems disgusting.
She remained unconvinced.
“Nah, your house must be dirty.”
“Nuh-uh,” I said, perturbed.
What is the big deal with wearing shoes? To me, walking on carpet is dirty. Wearing slippers is perfectly normal. As my grandmother is fond of reminding me, all ailments result from getting chilled and there are few better conduits for cold than one’s feet. When I was growing up and we lived in tiny apartments in big concrete buildings without wall-to-wall carpeting (disgusting or otherwise) and everything was damp and everyone was perpetually cold (thanks to malfunctioning heaters and Chernobyl-induced thyroid problems), walking around barefoot was a surefire way to damage one’s kidneys. Slippers, you could conceivably say, were actually preventative medicine. It was also considered good manners to have an extra pair or two on hand to offer your guests or if not, to ask them to keep their shoes on.
AND, WEARING SLIPPERS DID NOT MEAN YOUR HOUSE WAS DIRTY.
But what would they know about cold concrete and northern winds in India?
Nothing, I realized, my indignation fizzling away. When we try to understand each other’s notions of “clean” or “polite” (to name but a few of many) and why these words, so simply defined in the dictionary, do not mean the same things to all people, the environmental context is often forgotten.
The girl’s mother told me afterwards that in India you never walk around someone’s house with shoes on. It is considered rude. Indians, she told me, often have a special place by the door for guests to put their footwear.
Well of course; it is warm there for starters.
Later on, as I clopped around my apartment picking up newspapers and putting the exercise ball away (still a little out of joint at the thought of my house as dirty) I realized that with her child’s brutal honesty, my five-year-old neighbour had given me an unintentional lesson in cultural etiquette. Now when I go to an Indian friend’s house, I will most certainly leave my slippers at home. CR
"House slippers" top picture by mothlike from creativecommons.org. CC-licenced.
Among other things, Patrycja Romanowska is graduate student in natural resource economics at the University of Alberta. In her parallel life, she is also the associate editor of Alberta Oil Magazine, an Edmonton Sun columnist and a mother to a beautiful five-year-old boy. In the oodles of free time that this leaves her, she cooks, bakes and goes on wilderness trips.
