My mother always tried to shield me; she would give me a pat, or a pleading look, which hurt even more. I hurt for me, and for her, having to bear us both, her husband and her daughter, like weights upon her back. For we both had our blots, he and I.
My ayi rarely hugged me; we were not a hugging family. She put all her love into my hair. She massaged my scalp and oiled it with the special homemade coconut oil. She coiled it around her hand, shining in the sun like a serpent before she plaited it. She wove bright and beautiful ribbons into my hair, and tied them in big bows that I wore through the day like medals. She told me stories, mainly from her endless legend store. And she would weave it all into my hair.
“This mark makes you special. Now only those who can really see inside can know what a beautiful girl you are,” she would say, tilting my chin up so she could get the parting straight down the middle. “It is your special mark, maybe from your last life. It is a signal for the right man. Now don’t forget your Ayi-Baba when you go off to the palace with your prince,” she teased, sending me out laughing to meet the world. Later, when I started wearing flowers instead of bows, Ayi paid the doorman’s son five rupees a month to bring gajras and fresh flowers every morning at seven.
Miss Nelson put her purse arm comfortingly around me and assured my father that they would take good care of me. “We are a family here,” she said.
The school was terraced down a hillside. Behind the stern gothic face, it fanned out into long low buildings with red tin roofs. Miss Nelson led us down wide covered corridors and staircases, through the school to the hospital building. I was hypnotized by her jiggling bottom.
“Most of our younger teachers are in Sunbeam, a separate house behind the bazaar, but we thought we would keep Charul-a-a-ta-a here with us,” Miss Nelson told my father. Then she turned to me, and her eyes seemed to twinkle a little. “We can’t have your parents worrying, now, can we?” she said.
She never got to calling me Charu, like everyone else. And until the end, she did not change the drawn-out la-ata with the very wrong t.
The hospital was at the bottom corner of the school, set at right angles to the rest of the buildings. It contained about ten narrow beds with white counterpanes and painted white metal lockers. There were two smaller rooms for infectious cases. In the front was a dispensary. Out to the right, two rooms, one for the nurse, and the other, to my horror, was to be for me.
Baba, being a man, could not stay in the school, and had decided to go back to Poona right away. He looked at me longingly, passed his hand over my head, and left. We promised each other a letter every week. I went back to my room and sat on the narrow spring bed. The room had a desk, a lamp, an upright chair, and a small lumpy sofa covered in the same bright pink fabric as the staff room. There was one window facing some trees and dried bushes. It smelled of disinfectant. I felt dislocated from everything I had ever known. I did not have the strength to get up and unpack. I just sat on the bed, staring at the peeling wall, until it was time to go to dinner.
Two
The Playing Fields of Eton
Miss Nelson had told me to come to the staff dining room for dinner at seven, and I walked in as stiff as a post. Only the three British missionaries had arrived. Besides Miss Nelson, there were Miss Manson and Miss Wilson, both with short curled hair, long dresses, and big red feet encased in sensible sandals.
I imagined how they must have come from picture postcard villages in England to this remote outpost in the hills of western India to do the Lord’s work. They were here to convert the daughters of rich Bombay businessmen. They were known as the Holy Trinity. They sat at a table for four in the center of the room. Miss Nelson invited me to join them “while we wait for the others to arrive,” she said.
“Indore, Miss Apte,” said Miss Wilson. “It must be very hot at this time of the year.” I was grateful to her for giving me such a solid opening line. Miss Wilson wore a straight orange skirt that reached just below her knees. I guessed her to be in her thirties. She was the youngest and most fashionable of the missionaries, though she was by no means beautiful. She had a long, hatchet-like face, stringy blond hair, and narrow brown eyes that twinkled when she smiled.
“Yes, we all drink sherbet and wait for the monsoons,” I replied.
“You will find Panchgani most pleasant, Miss Apte,” said Miss Manson, a thin, blue-eyed woman with big teeth. “Although the monsoons can get very heavy in these parts, and unfortunately, you have joined us in the monsoon term. The girls get very restless with the constant rains. This is why I introduced Scottish dancing last year; it keeps them active and busy. Perhaps you would like to join me in teaching the middles Scottish dancing this year,” she added brightly. “I could do with some help.”
I really knew nothing about the dancing habits of the Scottish. But I wanted to help. “I could teach them Indian folk dances,” I offered, scrounging my mind for school dances in gaudy garments.
“Well, I’m not sure that they would be complex enough for competitions,” she said. Pursing her lips, she blushed a dark, deep red. I knew I had said something wrong, but it took me a few days to understand the reason for Miss Manson’s disapproval and discomfort. She blushed a beetroot red because I had unwittingly questioned the core belief of the school: British was Better.
The rest of the staff members came streaming in and saved me from the need to continue the conversation. Miss Nelson bowed her head, and said, “For what we are about to receive may the Lord make us truly thankful.”
After grace, Miss Nelson took me around and introduced me to a blur of women, occasionally putting an arm around me in an encouraging manner. She pulled out an empty chair for me at a table made up of three brown ladies in curls and frocks.
“The last empty chair,” she said, smiling at the ladies. “I am sure you will welcome young Miss Apte to your table.”
Turned out that, in a room arranged, both at breakfast and at dinner, quite symmetrically by race, I was deposited at the Anglo Indian table because there was no empty chair at the Indian tables. The British table at the center, one Anglo Indian table to the right, and the rest, Indian. I had never in my little life met either a British missionary or an Anglo Indian. I learned soon enough that Anglo Indians were a small ethnic group of mixed race—progeny of British civil servants who had married native girls. They had adopted Western ways, and though most of them looked as brown as us, they wore dresses, and spoke English with a nearly British accent.
The food was awful. The mutton was chewy, the gravy watery and tasteless. I felt all choked up, thinking of myself every evening in this room, with all these strange women, eating nasty food and then going back to my hospital room. Gird your loins, I told myself firmly, this is not the time to turn into jelly, although jelly was what I longed to become. I stuffed the food in my mouth and answered in monosyllables.
As we got up to leave, one of the three Anglo Indian ladies, Miss Henderson, the middles matron, invited me to tea. Her room was in between Upper and Lower Rowson, the two dorms that were her domain. It was a large room, with runners and tablecloths with lace edges everywhere, and smiling photographs of family looking down from every wall. Miss Henderson, a brown woman with bowlegs and buckteeth, had been in Timmins, she told me, for fifteen years.
A tall and stately ayah bought in the tea tray, with an embroidered pink tea-cozy. Miss Henderson produced some delicious biscuits from a tin.
“I hear you are teaching the seniors. If you have any trouble with them, you come and talk to me,” she said. “So many of them have passed through my hands. This is your first time teaching? The thing to do, my dear, is to be strict for the first month. After that you can relax.”
“Are they difficult?” I asked, anxiously.
“Well, at this level, there are some troublemakers, but it’s mostly just high spirits,” she assured me.
After tea, she took up her knitti
ng—she was halfway through a tan sweater for Frankie, her sister’s son, who was soon to be going to college. She asked after my cousins who had been in Timmins.
“And you looked a little lost at dinner,” she added, as I was leaving. “Don’t worry. You will soon meet all the nice young teachers who live in Sunbeam, in town, and then you can go out with them. Not that there is anywhere to go, really, in Panchgani,” she said with a sigh.
I left her room feeling much better.
Timmins was a small school, with less than two hundred girls, no more than fifteen in each class. It was set firmly in the pattern of British boarding schools. The girls were divided into three houses—green, yellow, and red—called Rowson, Clarens, and Willoughby. Miss Rowson and Miss Clarens, it appears, were former principals. No one knew who Willoughby was. The girls wore their house belts and badges at all times.
The prospectus and accompanying instructions had made it clear that each girl had her bed, her stool, her locker, her peg, her bath time, her place in the dining room, and her desk assigned. From the rising bell at 6:45 a.m., to the lights-out bell at 9 p.m., each moment in each day was regulated. Activity changes were signaled by bells, and each activity had a prescribed dress code down to shoes and knickers. Navy blue blazers emblazoned with “God My Leader” were worn in the winter term. Before entering the dining room, the prayer hall, or the church, the girls naturally fell into class lines in height order, and when they left the school, they formed a double line that was called the crocodile.
“The Battle of Waterloo,” Miss Nelson often said without a trace of irony to a hall brimming with brown girls, “was won on the playing fields of Eton.”
I had decided that I was going to stick to my dress code from college. Tight chudidars with A-line kurtas were in fashion. Even Bombay girls wore them when they were not wearing short dresses or bell-bottom pants. I had had ten “teaching sets” stitched, each of them with cotton dupattas in solid colors. I always wore them crisp and starched in Indore. I did have a sari moment when I saw all the Indian teachers wrapped up in them, but I had brought only two silk saris from Ayi’s Bombay days. “Take them in case you have to attend a party or function,” she said. They were not appropriate, and so I decided against it. I was the youngest teacher in the school, and kurtas were very long and decorous. Even conservative young girls in second-city colleges were wearing them—there was no doubt about that—and I would look most ridiculous in a frock, with my wide hips and thin stick legs.
Mornings started at 8:30 with prayers. The girls lined up by class and filed into the prayer hall to piano music, and then they stood up and launched into hymn number 328 from little bound hymn books.
Great is thy faithfulness.
All I have needed,
Thy hand has provided.
Great is thy faithfulness,
Lord unto me . . .
The prayer hall was a part of the school’s main building. Light streamed in from large windows to the right. Through the front arches, I could see the net-ball field, and beyond, the school gate. The air was crisp, and quite cool for the month of May. The girls’ sweet voices rose and fell, the gold frames of Miss Nelson’s glasses glinted in the sharp sunlight. It was all from a novel I should have read.
In the drawing room in Indore, we had a glass paperweight with an Eiffel Tower inside it. I had spent years gazing into its magical depths. If you turned it upside down, snow drifted around the tower. I saw Miss Timmins’ School inside the paperweight, sloshing in blue water. That morning in the clear mountain light, I stepped inside that paperweight. My life in our third-floor flat in Navjeevan Housing Society, my room overlooking the gulmohor tree, my days as an earnest student in Jeejeebai Wadia College seemed all wavy and distant, like a shore seen from the underbelly of a sunlit lake.
I’ll give myself six months here, I thought. Then, with the money I collect from teaching, I will go to the best plastic surgeon in Bombay, get my blot removed, and then, and then, after glamorous adventures and maybe even a romance, I will go back to Indore without a blemish and marry a handsome boy from a good family. After that moment I did not feel homesick for a single instant. I simply felt that I had been dropped into another life.
Three
Baba’s Blot
The window of my room in the hospital looked out upon a few straggly bushes. I missed the moon from my balcony window in Indore, though there were nights there when I had hated everything, especially the cold hard moon. Those were the nights I blamed Baba for my blot. But in the morning when I saw him, puffs of graying hair above the newspaper and curling toes popped up on the footstool, I could not hate him. I could not love him, either. He was a man who had learned to be content with the pickings from the ground.
He began to teach me chess when I was seven years old. We had just moved to Indore under a cloud. My father was a good and patient teacher. “Think at least three moves ahead,” he always said. He was proud when I beat him. “Look here, Shalini,” he would shout to my mother in the kitchen across the hall. “Your daughter is getting smarter than us.” He made me love the game. We played with the sounds and smells of my mother’s cooking, the children shouting in the corridors, and echoes from the radios of neighboring flats. But I was at best a middling player, and we both knew it. Later, in college, when I had to study or preferred to read or go out, he began to play with Prashant, our neighbor’s son. Prashant turned out to be a star student and became a state champion when he was ten. My father went with him to the championship games and beamed happily from the sidelines, his receding-hairline forehead shining under the tubelights.
Baba had been a rising star in the navy, a favorite of the Admiral. It was understood that he was being groomed for the big time in those heady years after Independence. I remember him coming home in the evenings, putting his white cap on the telephone table, and throwing me up in the air. I remember him rubbing his stubby evening chin against me till I cried. The father of my childhood was tall and broad-shouldered. He had a loud voice and a quick temper. We lived in a flat in Bombay facing the sea, and we had many parties in which women in chiffon saris and bright red lipstick leaned out into the sunset, their sari pallus billowing out like sails.
One hot afternoon in Indore, in my mother’s steel Godrej cupboard, I found a family photograph from those days. I kept it in the top drawer of my desk at all times, until one late-night moment in Panchgani, when I shoved it into some safe spot from which it has not emerged. I know it will turn up smiling some day from some forgotten purse or shoe box. But in those days, even when I was not staring at it, I could see it, lying on top of my notebooks, taunting me, like a naughty child.
Waiting to pull me into a vortex of strawberry and cream dreams, and then return me, rigid, to my empty little life.
We were so full of promise then, the three of us. My father, lean and erect in his white uniform, looks sharp and arrogant, reaching for the world. My mother is pregnant, perhaps five months. She smiles straight past the camera into a future filled with laughing sons. It is a black-and-white photograph. I stand between them, six years old, wearing a white lace dress, my hair tied with a large bow. I am frowning because my mother has forced me to wear a stiff petticoat to hold out my frilly dress. I still remember how it poked that morning. There were times I would open the drawer and kiss the chubby, petulant little face in that picture. That face had inhabited another life, not mine. My skin was clean, soft, and smooth in that life.
But I remember also, from the flat by the sea, raised voices of my parents fighting late into the night, and my mother sobbing in the balcony. I remember once she shook me awake in the middle of the night, and said, “Get ready. We are going to visit your cousins.” She dressed me up in a red dress with a white sash, made me sit in the living room, and went to pack our things. I fell asleep on the sofa and woke up the next morning in my red dress. She had lost her courage, or her resolve, and decided t
o stay on. The house was always filled with the glare of the sea, so that in the afternoons you had to squint around with half-closed eyes.
Two years later, we were a flat-tire family, the air sucked out of us. If a photograph had been taken of us then, it would be a Hindi movie parody of the first one. My father, his face gray, his shoulders stooped, his uniform gone. My mother, twenty pounds heavier, her face ten years older, her tall and strapping sons to live only in her dreams. During the nightmare of Baba’s court-martial, she had lost her pregnancy in the eighth month. She barely escaped with her life and knew she could have no more children. And for me, just above my lip, on the right side of the face that grown-ups had always found so beautiful, the first signs of a vivid strawberry mark appeared. That was the last time anyone ever petted my head and said, “You will be beautiful, just like your mother.”
But in the flat-tire photograph, I would have been smiling. The blot had made me conscious of how people looked at me, and I was always careful to put my best face forward. I was always smiling.
I did not know why my father was court-martialed, though I knew that the charges had finally been dropped. He had never been found guilty. I asked my mother once, many years later. “There were people who were jealous of him, very powerful people. Your father played big games in those days,” she said, sighing. We were folding the washed clothes, stiff with starch. She kept rubbing down the same pajama leg, and I was afraid to ask again.
I did not want to jump into the deep unknown that swirled around our family island. I’d rather step into it slowly, testing the waters. But I would reinflate the family again one day, I promised myself that evening. I would go back to Bombay and discover the truth.
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