A House Called Askival

by Merryn Glover

  For a time, anyway. Until the drama became a sham to her and she could no longer stand her role in it nor have any faith in the script.

  But back in the seventh grade (when Manveer first slipped quietly onto the scene, stage left, as it were, and Ruth barely noticed), she still believed and was still behaving herself. More or less. Trying, at any rate. She spoke politely to the staff, never swore (out loud) and followed Hannah up the hill on Sunday mornings to Morrison Church, still wearing a dress for the occasion.

  But the strain was beginning to show. She was caught messing about in Study Hall once too often and made to sit alone. Her jumbled wardrobe, crammed with clothes and a mish-mash of possessions, always failed Cupboard Check, so she was confined to the dorm on Friday afternoons to tidy it. Worst of all, Hannah spotted her holding hands with a boy on Film Night and wrote home about it. In a reply from Ellen, which was neatly carbon-copied to Mrs Cornfoot, Ruth was banned from films for the rest of the semester and warned that if she could not keep her hands to herself then no doubt the dorm mother could find useful employment for them.

  Indeed she could. Mrs Cornfoot thrust a square of sandpaper into the offending hands and sent Ruth to scrub off the graffiti in the Upper Dorm toilets. As Ruth worked, she cursed Oaklands and her parents with equal measure, not realising that with the scouring away of crudities on the cubicle walls there was an equal and opposite erasing of an inner text.

  It was one she had never consciously questioned, instilled as it was from the cradle and reinforced by daily repetition. A text that was not just The Word, but also all the other words that rode along with it, like bus passengers clinging to the roof. A text by which all things were understood and measured, all things bound and loosed, all things named and known. It was also a text by which Ruth found herself increasingly accused and rarely acquitted.

  Her parents claimed to take their Bible literally, but were selective in application. Although the Scriptures didn’t mention boyfriends and dating, these were forbidden. And though the text did permit drinking and dancing, the Connors did not. This latter was particularly painful for Ruth. As a baby she’d started bouncing whenever she heard music, as a toddler she’d skipped and spun round till she was dizzy, and as a little girl had pinned scarves over her hair and performed the dances from weddings and festivals. Her parents had watched all of this with tender amusement and not refused the folk dancing in PE. Nor had they minded the early years of her Indian dance when it was just village lasses in full skirts chasing their goats. But it was disco that was definitely out. And jazz, and tap, and aerobics, and creative movement, and anything involving hip swinging or tight clothes. For Ruth, however, who longed to attend the discos that were the new privilege of seventh grade and to choreograph splashy items for the High School Talent Show, these bans were a great trial. And a test of faith. She was starting to see the discrepancies in her parents’ Biblical code and it was eroding her own.

  Along with dancing, for example, there was the scorn of jewellery, that had some basis in the Apostle Paul, but the Connors chose to ignore the prohibition, from the same pen, of women braiding their hair. Hannah’s braids, in fact, were so long she could sit on them. They hung like glossy twists of treacle down her straight back, tasselled ends bouncing off her buttocks as she walked. Ruth’s hair, on the other hand, was too curly and only got to her shoulder blades before growing out, like tumbleweed, so in the eighth grade she cut it into a layered cascade of curls and stretched a sparkly headband across her forehead like Jane Fonda. It was the envy of the dorm and the wounding of her parents.

  But she had not cut off all her ties. She still believed and in this she was not alone. Oaklands was brimming with Belief. At least a third of the students were the children of missionaries like her – Mish Kids, they were called – though having Christian parents from Overseas was about all they had in common. Ruth certainly had little to share with Dorcas Fishbacker whose folks were Canadian Mennonite and even stricter than the Connors. Dorcas wasn’t allowed to wear trousers or go to any social activities, in fact, wasn’t even allowed to stay in boarding because of the potentially corrupting influences (like Ruth). Mrs Fishbacker, whose greying braids were always neatly pinned under a headscarf, stayed on the hillside year round while Mr Fishbacker came and went from whatever it was he did in the plains. Ruth wasn’t sure, but it seemed to involve large trunk loads of Bible tracts. Dorcas called it Full Time Ministry, which distinguished it from what the Connors did, which was Ministry on the Side, as if it was a garnish or a blob of sauce, the main dish of their medical work clearly not counting.

  Ruth met Dorcas’ superiority with her own barbed pity. ‘You mean, you can’t even go to the Valentine’s Party?’

  But she couldn’t help noticing that, despite all her restrictions, Dorcas was happy. Smugly so. After all, she had the trump card: her parents. Sacrificing jeans and films was nothing to the loss of home. While Ruth and the others insisted on regaling her with tales of midnight feasts and shared wardrobes, Ruth knew whose lot she preferred.

  At the opposite end of the missionary spectrum lurked Ben Lacey from the World Alight Mission. He wore a skull necklace, listened to the Doors and filled the margins of his notebooks with violent cartoons. Ruth couldn’t wait to see his parents, but when they arrived at the end of the semester they were disappointing. Mr Lacey wore polyester trousers and Mrs Lacey was fat. But it made Ben’s deviance all the more fascinating, so when his sweaty hand crept towards hers through the first reel of Fiddler on the Roof she did not ram her hand into a pocket but let it rest – available, delectable – on her knee, welcoming him with fingers wide. She never found out what Ben believed.

  Oaklands was also roost to a sizeable flock of Asian Christians, although many kept their heads down and their wings folded. It was years, for instance, before Ruth realised that Matthew Sugitharaja from Sri Lanka was Methodist and knew more hymns by heart than her. Or that Lydia Lalvunga from Mizoram came from a whole tribe of Baptists. Frankincense from Calcutta, on the other hand, nailed her colours to the dorm wall on the first day of grade three in the form of a glow-in-the-dark crucifix. It terrified everyone except for Sita, who stirred it into her dark and bubbling pot of horror stories. And then there was Thomas Verghese, Syrian Orthodox and claiming a religious heritage back to the first century. Thin and possessed of an electric energy, he cherished the prophecy – delivered at his christening – that he would one day be India’s answer to Billy Graham. It proved not to be the answer anyone was expecting, but at that time, at least, they all still believed.

  In various things. Though nominally a Christian school, well over half the students were not. “Non-Christians” they were called, though the likes of Thomas and the Fishbackers preferred the term “the lost.” To themselves they were Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, Sikhs, a handful of Jains and Zoroastrians, some Jews and one Ba’hai. Plus, of course, the “nothings” who apparently didn’t believe in anything.

  ‘How can you believe in nothing?’ Ruth asked Aulis Nikulainen after a Religious Education class where the Finnish boy had confessed to his parlous state. They were in the echoing racket of the school dining room eating a lunch of stale white rolls and runny mince.

  ‘It’s better than believing in something that’s not there!’ he retorted and stalked off to the disposal hatch with his half-finished tray.

  And then there was Kashi Narayan. With an Austrian hippy-turned-Buddhist nun for a mother and an Indian guru-turned-tour operator for a father – now divorced – he had been brought up in profound religious confusion. He did seem lost. Not so much that he’d gone astray, but more that he’d been abandoned: dropped in the wilderness of boarding school without map or compass while his mother turned prayer beads in a monastery in Dharamshala and his father ushered wealthy foreigners around temples. For Kashi, the fact that anything was possible meant that nothing was sure.

  The school is a Melting Pot of religion and culture! Principal Withers always claimed. No �
� a Fruit Salad! advanced Chaplain Park. We live closely together but keep our distinct identities! Ruth pondered the images as she gnawed on her roll and decided that either way the outlook was grim. Fondue or fruit, you got eaten.

  Or was Oaklands more a blend of the two? She imagined the fruit salad left out in the sun, everything oozing into everything else. Chunks of banana going brown in the heat, orange segments sweating, mangoes slimy and soft.

  The truth was, life in the dorm wasn’t like any of that. None of the softness of ripe fruit or melting cheese, but something infinitely more feral. It was a jungle of wild, exotic plants. Beautiful, rare, strange. Some that stung, or shot out, or devoured you, others that intertwined and grew together in hopeless entanglements.

  Some that did both.

  Like Sita. She was Ruth’s best friend and the first person she’d met when Dad dropped her off in Lower Dorm at age six. In Fruit Salad terms, she was Hindu, but as a plant, much harder to classify. She told jokes and fabulous stories. Terrifying stories. Her series on the Vampire Clown had left Ruth in the grip of horror for months. But you could forgive her that because if you were afraid at night she always welcomed you into her bed. And most of the time she shared the treasures of her Candy Cupboard. Her Dad was in the Indian Foreign Service and sent Foreign Candy. Ruth craved it and traded with Mom’s peanut-butter fudge, but it wasn’t as strong a currency as Reese’s Pieces and M&Ms, and Sita drove hard bargains. There were times when she wouldn’t let Ruth have anything at all because she was mad at Ruth because Ruth had spoken to Frankincense and Frankincense was being mean to Sita and Sita thought Ruth was supposed to be her best friend. At these times Sita unwrapped her Hersheys bar slowly, with maximum rustling, and ate it, even more slowly, in front of Ruth. If she was really mad, she’d share it with everyone else. Even Frankincense.

  Thus for Ruth, the business of boarding school was survival, conducted in the extremes of intimacy and isolation, where she was never alone but dogged by loneliness, exposed to all but never revealed, surrounded but abandoned. The great casualty was trust. In others, and in love. By the ninth grade, even her trust in the family faith was beginning to falter, though at the time it felt more like gain than loss. Hannah had graduated and gone to her deeply conservative Christian college in the States, taking her restraining influence with her. Ruth missed her more than she would admit, but she relished the lack of surveillance. The possibility of being her own person was appearing like a seductive light on the horizon. That person was starting to swear (when no staff were around), to smoke hash (in the graveyard and the back room of the Lhasa Cafè at Mullingar Hotel) and to join the trend of scornfully denouncing anything cheap and poor quality as ‘mission’ (choosing to ignore the slight pang every time she said it).

  That person, however, was still not allowed to attend school dances and the nights alone in the dorm were dull beyond bearing. On one of these she lay on her bed (pink polka dot sheets) blowing enormous gum bubbles and listening to the Devil’s Music on Sita’s tape player. The crashing of ACDC and KISS alternated with the soulful crooning of Air Supply and Bread and she sang along to them all with equal gum-snapping and gusto. She knew she should be doing homework, but it bored her and since she could never compete with Hannah’s A Honour Roll precedent, she’d long since decided to wallow in the below-average depths. She pretended she didn’t care. Just like she pretended she didn’t care about the dismay in her father’s eyes or the anxiety in her mother’s. Indeed, if Pretending was on her report card, she would be getting straight As.

  Through the wall she could hear Mrs Cornfoot bumping around in her apartment, the smell of her pickled onions seeping into the dorm like the tentacles of an invisible octopus. Ruth could tell from the sounds that Mrs Cornfoot was running a bath and knew from experience that this would take some time. She would not emerge, damp and warm as a steamed pudding, till 10.30, just to check all the girls were back from the dance. It was now only eight. Sita and some of the other girls were sneaking up to the graveyard to meet Ben Lacey and his cronies. There would be joints and beer. Maybe more.

  Slipping out was easy. Mrs Cornfoot was singing along to her praise tapes as she sloshed about in the tin tub and didn’t hear the main door creak open and click shut. But what Ruth hadn’t bargained on was the cleansing effect on the lady’s soul. At the very moment the girl was disappearing up the shadowy path behind the building, her dorm mother was being moved to tears by The Bethel Trio’s trembling rendition of What a Friend We Have in Jesus. It convicted her about young Ruthie Connor. There was no doubt the little scallywag was way outta line and causing everyone no end a worry and what’ll-we-do, but maybe what the poor girl needed was not punishment but a little plain old-fashioned love.

  Mrs Cornfoot lumbered out of her bath, towelled down and donned her quilted robe. Humming, she put together a tray of two hot chocolates, some home-baked coconut cookies and a small vase of dog roses. To get out of her apartment she had to put the tray on the floor, open the door, pick up the tray, walk through, put it back on the floor, close the door and bend to pick up the tray again. It was no mean feat for an overweight woman with osteoporosis and asthma. The exercise had to be repeated at the door into Upper Dorm – down, up, open, down, up, through the door, down, up, close, down, up, on – so by the time she shuffled into Ruth’s empty room with her rattling tray, she was sweating and a bit out of breath.

  It was the end of plain old fashioned love.

  Ruth was gated for the rest of the semester, denied pocket money and made to pick hardened chewing gum off the bottom of beds. Mrs Cornfoot sent a graphic report to the Connors and when Ellen’s reply arrived – neatly carbon copied to her daughter – Ruth took the family photo by her bed and smashed it.

  And so it was, that by the time she got to the twelfth grade and Manveer moved from his bit-part to the role of romantic hero (or tragic victim, as it transpired), the stage was well set for Ruth and her world to fall apart.

  NINETEEN

  For most of high school, Manveer had been serious and studious, a bit square, with heavy-rimmed glasses and plaid shirts tucked neatly into his corduroys. He hung out with a clutch of other Indian boys with similar academic focus and dress sense, and Ruth never had two words to say to them. But in the summer holidays before his senior year, he’d gone to Canada – where his parents had newly settled – and returned transformed. He wore contact lenses and Levi jeans and was impressively tall, an effect enhanced by replacing the boyish patka cloth on his head with a full turban. Though his voice had broken some years before it suddenly seemed darker and richer. Or perhaps Ruth was just listening for the first time.

  Because Manveer had joined the choir. At Oaklands everyone had to take at least one year of an ‘aesthetics’ subject and this invariably presented a challenge to those students – mainly boys – who did not feel aesthetically inclined. It was particularly acute for those boys – mainly Indian – who were marked out by their families for careers in business, computing or hotel management and for whom aesthetics seemed at best irrelevant and at worst, a threat to the Grade Point Average. Choir was considered the soft option and the least likely to dent the GPA.

  Ruth was in it because she liked singing and had a crush on the teacher. Like her, Mr Haskell had been born and brought up in India by missionary parents, attending Oaklands in the sixties. Tall and reedy, he had waist-length hair in a pony tail, always wore kurta pyjama and favoured sitting on the floor. When directing choir, he perched on the piano stool with one leg tucked under him like a guru, the other on the pedal.

  In today’s class, however, Ruth was finding it hard to sing. It was the first day of semester and she was tired from her journey from Kanpur and weighed down by the spirit of August. It was the same every year, returning to cold dorms shrouded in cloud and feeling the familiar sadness seeping into her like damp. To make matters worse, she had left home on bad terms. Dad had read aloud a letter from Principal Withers warning that any further deviances
on her part would result in expulsion. Mom had sat beside him, hands folded in her lap, eyes searching Ruth for a sign of contrition. There was none. Not that she lacked it, but that it was so choked by the competing emotions of anger and hurt it couldn’t find voice.

  Nor could her singing that day, so she was glad when Mr Haskell’s attention turned to the boys. Listening to the basses, he looked up from the piano in surprise.

  ‘Who’s that?’ he asked. There was embarrassed confusion in the back row.

  ‘Yeah, who farted?’ hissed Abishek, a short plump boy with bright eyes. A titter of giggles and elbow nudging.

  ‘That big voice,’ said Mr Haskell. ‘Somebody sounds amazing. Who is it?’

  A rush of not me, it was you, no way, yeah you, not me from the basses till Dorcas Fishbacker settled it.

  ‘It’s Manveer.’

  ‘No way, man!’

  ‘Yeah, you’re right behind me. I can hear you clear as day. It’s definitely Manveer, Mr Haskell.’

  The boy flushed and slapped his music over his face while the others slapped his back and whistled.

  ‘Veeru, yaar, you’re it, you’re it!!’

  ‘Get stuffed.’

  ‘And you farted,’ said Abishek.

  ‘Well, well, well,’ said Mr Haskell, folding his arms, a soft smile playing on his face. ‘Man-veer.’ He breathed the name like it was a new idea.

  Ruth looked from him to the boy, who couldn’t help grinning through his embarrassment. His eyes met hers for a moment and she smiled back, noticing for the first time how long and thick his lashes were. Nice teeth, too. She turned again to the front as Mr Haskell was clapping his hands and calling for attention.