Miss Timmins' School for Girls

by Nayana Currimbhoy

  The dream blossomed in my mind and became a big, shady tree. The blot sometimes disappeared before I began the sleuthing, or sometimes it disappeared towards the denouement. But, always, beautiful and bold, I would lay the whole truth bare before the world, my glowing parents by my side.

  I would be like Jhansi ki Rani.

  In 1858, during the siege of Jhansi, the British soldiers wrapped their burning heads in wet towels, and, in the long hot hours, as they lay behind their sandbanks, they strained for a sight of the rebel queen. They wrote in their diaries how for hours, for days, they watched her, their rough uniforms sticking to their red bodies. It was said that the Rani, during battle, wore a long red tunic, red trousers, and a belt with a diamond-studded sword. In the cool of the evenings, the British strained their field glasses at the ramparts of the fort, hoping to catch a glimpse of her. Some claimed to have seen her, seated together with her female favorite—who never left her side and dressed just like her—drinking sherbet with four hundred troops of the Fifth Irregular Horse. Sometimes I dreamt that I was the Rani, charging on my white horse to save the world.

  But in the mornings I would be the same smiling, tentative girl again, swinging her pigtails to school.

  Baba was kind and careful now, very slow to anger or emotion. He was small and shrunken; he had closed in the canvas of space around him, this man who had once been waiting to paint in large, bold strokes. The first move he taught me in chess was castling. “The king is the core of your game. First protect the core,” he said, “and then you can take your risks.” The only time he was ever angry with my mistakes at chess was when I passed up the ideal castling opportunity and wanted to forge ahead instead.

  The year of the court-martial for me was a year of whispers. At home, the adults were whispering behind closed doors at all hours of the day and night. At St. Anne’s School, where I had been just one of many children, suddenly I was surrounded by whispers. I would find teachers whispering to each other and pointing to me. Bhavna, my best friend, came to me one day when I was drinking at the water fountain. She was with two other girls. “My father said that her father is a bad man. He took things from the government,” said Gauri with the puffed chest and double chin of a child imparting important information. Bhavna did not look at me as I passed by them, and she stopped being my best friend.

  I told Ayi what they had said as she was combing my hair one morning. She began to weep. My mother was a common crier. Tears came into her large green eyes, and they slid silently down her face for weddings, Hindi movies, and arguments with Baba. But that day she wept. It was the first time I felt that bottomless feeling in my stomach. We hugged each other and wept and wept and wept. I did not go to school that day. Soon after, we moved to Indore, and into the soothing arms of anonymity.

  Over the years we built a life for ourselves, a small and simple life of rituals and habits. My parents turned their backs on the world and wove me into a little safety net. They created a snug little nest of a life for me. There were no raised voices, no fights, and few issues. No passions, no dreams. Baba got a job as a regional manager in Chitnis Transport, the large trucking company that belonged to my mother’s family. He sat in a small air-conditioned office above the garage. He rarely missed a day of work. He left the house at 9:30, after his morning walk. He came back at seven, and then we played chess or read or listened to the radio.

  He earned much less than he used to in Bombay, but it was enough for our new lives. We lived in a one-bedroom flat in a concrete-block colony of tiny flats with gray and green terrazzo floors. We lived on the third floor. My parents enclosed the bedroom balcony, built some cupboards, and put in a bed, and I had a cozy little balcony room. It overlooked a gulmohor tree, which played with every tiny breeze on hot afternoons, and swayed under the night sky. I had to go through their room to enter mine. In Bombay we had a cook, a cleaning boy, and an ayah just for me. In Indore, we had no servants except the maid who came to clean the bathrooms and sweep and mop the floor for one hour every day. Nobody ever came to dinner. Sometimes we went to family or community functions, and once or twice a year my mother took me to Kolhapur to visit her parents. The family gash was closed up, unlicked, unmourned.

  And so it seeped into my face, red and angry. It started with a rash on the right side of my face, just above my lips.

  At first, Dr. Dhavle decided it was an allergic reaction to food.

  “It could well be a mango allergy. I have seen that very often in children. Starts suddenly,” he said.

  But the rash became a stain as large as an onion. When active it itched so furiously that I had to fight from rubbing and rubbing and rubbing till it grew red and sticky and white liquid would ooze out so that everyone would be afraid to look at me. When fallow it lay brown and round above my lip with a paper-thin patina over it. I became quiet and secretive. I called it the blot. It was the blot on my face, a blot on my world.

  We went to see a skin specialist. “It is an eczema, a nervous condition caused by the recent changes,” he said. Ayi tried homeopathy, she tried Ayurveda, and she took me to all sorts of astrologers and healers. I remember so many afternoons when she would come in a rickshaw to pick me up from school, and we would wait in crowded rooms and corridors, and even in a line that snaked down the steps of dark buildings, for some famous visiting savant. She always brought me lemonade in a flask and a chutney sandwich. Those afternoons, surrounded by people with improbable diseases being cured by outlandish procedures, were tinged with the aftertaste of those sandwiches.

  All my life green chutney sandwiches have stood for hope.

  The more bizarre schemes were the ones we expected the most of. They seemed more likely to produce miracles.

  We disagree now on whether the cow-dung phase was after the cow-pee phase or concurrent with it. I clearly remember washing the blot with hot and foaming cow urine in the morning, and at night, tying a bandage of cow dung on it.

  The cow-dung bandage was a big event. Ayi mixed the dung with some herbs and medicines, and then applied a thick paste of it to a bandage cut from soft cotton saris. The poultice had to stay in place over the blot, but not cover the mouth, a process that took hours. It would always be done in the back balcony where we hung our clothes to dry. Baba would patiently tie a sling over my left ear with his deft naval fingers, till all three of us felt it was just right.

  The dung bandage would smell and prickle, and I could not sleep. Ayi often sat by my bed in the moonlight, singing old lullabies. I thought she had the sweetest voice. It was much later that I realized she sang completely out of tune. Every morning we would open the bandage breathlessly, wash my face, and examine the blot. Each morning, we felt it was fading, getting less angry, or getting marginally smaller. I remember this phase going on for at least half a year, though Ayi assures me it was just a little over a month. She also insists that the cow-dung phase was different from the cow-urine phase. “I can tell you because I remember going to get the urine from this old woman called Tanbai. At five every morning. It used to be dark, and she would come with the cow, holding the urine in a tin mug. It had to be the cow’s first urine.”

  Another urine phase created a more lasting change. My mother became what she referred to delicately as a urinetherapy practicer, which actually meant, much to my disgust, that she drank her own urine.

  It started with a dream seller who came to our house one mellow winter morning. He had an unkempt beard and a juicy, nasal voice. Slurping his tea from his saucer, he told us that he was confident that he could cure 90 percent of all diseases with two things: a buttermilk enema once a week—“Cleans your whole system out,” he roared—and drinking a few sips of one’s own urine every morning. “You can even apply your urine to cure skin diseases,” he said. He assured my mother that my blot would be gone by puberty if I did this.

  My mother wisely decided against the buttermilk enemas, but felt that the urine t
herapy was worth pursuing. Even Morarji Desai was doing it. “But he is at least sixty-two years old,” I whined. “That’s different.”

  I was twelve years old, and I just could not bring myself to drink my urine. I did pour it in a red plastic glass and try to bring it to my lips, but I could not. In order to set an example, my mother started doing it herself. She began to feel healthier almost immediately. “You know how my feet hurt at night? Now all gone,” she would say. Or, “You know that burn I had on my right hand? I applied it for two days, in the morning, and see, it’s gone.” I was embarrassed and disgusted at the thought of my mother drinking pee, and I made her promise never to tell any of my friends. The first person I ever told was Merch, the Mystery Man, but he always made telling so easy, listening with those big, still eyes.

  My mother had been a beauty. She was a small-town girl, from Kolhapur, but she was the daughter of the famous Chitnis clan, an upstanding and light-skinned Maharashtrian Brahmin family whose gaily colored trucks plied the roads as far north as New Delhi. She was a princess. She had large green eyes that lit up when she smiled, and an oval face with delicious dimples. She was vivacious and high-strung. Her match to a promising young naval officer from a much less stellar family had been quite controversial since there were already many offers for her hand from good families. My grandfather had met my father in Bombay at a dinner and was so impressed by this bright, graceful officer that, without even meeting his family, he had decided to marry his favorite daughter to this man. The young man would give her a big life, he had reckoned. Wisely, he cultivated him, followed the young man’s career for two years while his daughter was finishing college. Then, a month after her B.A. exams, when Shalini was twenty-one, the couple had a grand wedding in Kolhapur. My father was ten years older than my mother. With his well-bred beauty by his side, he jumped a few steps up all sorts of ladders. I wonder still how she felt about it. Did her father ask her what she wanted?

  The “tragedy” of Shalini’s life always hung in the air during our visits to Kolhapur. I dreaded the visits. I felt apart from my cousins because I was marked. For the aunts, I was a part of their beloved Shalini’s “big problem.” I hated and feared the seven aunts. I slunk around the rambling house on hot afternoons as they sat gossiping, waiting to pick up clues about my mysterious past.

  One day, I overheard Tai, the oldest sister, talking to a new young daughter-in-law of the house. “And that night, after the court-martial, she broke every bottle in the house,” my aunt said with relish. “She took a stick and smashed the whole cupboard, bottle by bottle. Then she started cleaning up the mess. But she was crying so hard, and, just imagine, eight months pregnant, she was down on her hands and knees, picking up the glass. They found her passed out and scratched and bleeding. I tell you, she is a saint,” she said, solemnly, adding in a whisper, “They said her sari was soaked in whisky.”

  Tai was the oldest, fattest, and most domineering of the aunts. The younger women called her Hitler. She was going through a long and sweaty menopause, and periodically had to wipe her fat and pitted face with a small towel she kept tucked into her sari waist. I remember the towel as always being shocking pink with white polka dots.

  The episode she related brought alive an afternoon I had until then believed to be a dream: My mother is in hospital, and Baba has been sleeping there at night. My ayah Anandi bai and I are picking up pieces of glass in my parents’ bedroom. It is hot in the room; the windows facing the sea are closed against the monsoons. Anandi bai has big patches of sweat on her pink sari blouse. I remember finding a large, thick piece of glass on the counterpane. Often, in my little balcony room in Indore, I awoke in the dead of night from a dream in which I was picking up large pieces of clinking glass off my bed. I would find myself sitting up, sweeping the quilt with my hands, my hair falling over my face.

  Now I knew the central memory was true, and the dreams, ripples. The story filled out a whole corner of the jigsaw puzzle. My father’s booming voice, the late night fights and tears, the long parties. My father was drinking in those days! And my mother had blamed that for all the troubles. She had passed out that night and lost her baby.

  After that stolen conversation, the summer holiday in Kolhapur passed in a daze. I was fourteen years old. I was numb with shock. In all my years in Indore, I had never even met anyone who “drank.” Sometimes a person was referred to as a “going to clubs and drinking sort of man,” and I always imagined such men to be mysterious and brutal, smelling of aftershave. Not like us. I spent that holiday reading Barbara Cartland romances, novels set in nineteenth-century England. Every morning I would set out with one of the ayahs, walk to Kamal’s Book House, and take out a romance. I read twelve Barbara Cartland books and a thick, fat hardbound romance called Thelma on that holiday. At night, I read with a torch under the mosquito net and listened to the dogs howling. There were nights when the dogs of the town seemed to be discussing the history of the entire universe.

  “Shalini, what’s with that daughter of yours?” the aunts would ask. “All day she lies around and reads. She should learn to cook. How will you get her married?”

  How will you get her married? That was the refrain that always followed my mother and me like a tail on a dog. We had learned to ignore it. Ayi would smile and proudly say, “Our Charu is so clever, she wins so many prizes. English prize, chess prize, history prize. Charu, go get your report,” she would order proudly.

  As she sat gossiping with the women in the courtyard at the center of the house, I could see that she was apart from them all. Not only was she the most beautiful, I would think happily, she also had an inner grace. I do not know if it was the urine therapy, as she said, or if it was her sweetness and strength, but her skin had become more and more translucent over the years, and her face glowed with an inner light. Her soft green eyes were always ready to twinkle. I called them the Eveready batteries, because they were ever ready to light up with a smile.

  She had grown over the years from a spoiled daughter of a transport magnate to a strong and grounded woman shepherding her wounded family. She was our shelter from the storm. My father became quiet and retiring, rarely venturing an opinion. She, in turn, became cheerful and optimistic. She did it at first to hold our fragile lives together. We could always trust her to see the brighter side of things. “When you marry, you are together rowing the same boat through life,” she told me. “If one partner loses his oar, you just have to row harder; otherwise, the boat will sink.”

  She kept all her fancy saris, jewels, and purses from those days locked in a separate Godrej cupboard. Some evenings I would open the cupboard, pull out the saris, and finger all the brocades, silks, and chiffons. A faint perfume always clung to the saris, petticoats, and neatly piled lace handkerchiefs—the perfume of the flat by the sea.

  I got my period when I was thirteen. That night I heard my father firmly say, “Ata bus kar, Shalini.” Now stop it all, Shalini.

  Soon after, all the cures were terminated. My parents had always believed the blot would go away or at least fade a little after puberty. When it did not, my mother braced herself and set out to teach me to live with it. She taught me to be a stoic, to fold up my life and expect little, to live within the borders of my fate, to make my joy from small things, from incense and flowers and shining surfaces and delicately cooked food. I was raised to be happy in the graces of an orderly life.

  Her words washed off with the first rain of Panchgani, because they were a lie. She told me to be content with my lot, but she was not content with hers. She taught me to follow her, but she did not know where she would go.

  Because our life was a sham. Because while I lay in my room with my hair spread out on the pillow and dreamed of escape, I believed Baba behind his patient eyes was dreaming too. Of leaving us one morning, of walking out of Navjeevan Housing Society and turning the corner and becoming a man without a past.

  It was not a life
without passions as I had thought—hearing them snoring in the room next to mine as the seasons passed and I ate and slept and my body stretched and bulged—but an elaborate mask dance. We did have dreams, the three of us. We lived piled atop each other in six hundred square feet of space (including the balcony), inhabiting a hive of secret dreams and passions. We ate and slept and awoke each day, putting nothing into the family dream pool. We did not say we will go to the caves for a picnic this Sunday with Dhanu, we will go to Simla for holidays this summer, we will get Charu married with so much pomp we will bring in a band from Bombay. No. We did not dream together, we did not hope together. It had been a half-life, a life in the shadows.

  But the glass, Ayi always said, look at the full side of the glass. And so, dutiful daughter that I am, I swirl my Indore life around again and see through the clear liquid.

  I see that I did not scowl and glower at my parents at the dinner table. I did not say I am counting the days until I leave this place, I am waiting to go to Bombay. I passed the spinach demurely under the tubelight because I could not bear to hurt them.

  I understood why Baba did not leave. Over the rim of his newspaper each morning he saw Ayi with her hair parted down the middle making his perfect cup of tea, he saw me with my starched school uniform and my spanking white socks and my satchel slung over my shoulder—and he knew he would have to come back so he could see us again. He bowed his head and manfully shouldered his yoke each day, only because he loved us.

  And Ayi. Who knew what Ayi dreamt of as she smiled and sang and surrounded us in her net of love? The trajectory of our dreams did not include her. We did not know, we did not care to know, that her joy was as thin as tracing paper.

  Four

  Miss Nelson’s Cross

  Later, when they asked me how I, a conventional girl usually considered meek, had become so friendly—they would say “friendly” with a wink or a leering grin—with the scandalous and most salacious Miss Prince, I would sometimes say it all began with Shobha Rajbans.