Shobha Rajbans was in my ninth-standard class. She was one of the sparkling ones, those bold girls who make others laugh and cry. At fourteen, Shobha was already fully bloomed, tall and wide hipped, with respectable breasts bobbing inside her blue-checked uniform. She flashed her almond eyes, she tossed her short wavy hair, and she knew that the world was hers. She had dimples and wonderful, loud laughter that could be heard echoing in the hallways.
Shobha intimidated me from the start. She was bright, she was confident, she was rich, and she was so, so superior. She also had the right accent. She had the urban-upper-class-right-school English accent, and although I knew more of the literature of that little island than she ever would, my accent was what the girls called vernacular. And that gave them the permission to turn me into a caricature.
I was teaching the ninth-standard English, English literature, and the British Raj in Indian history. I taught them for at least two and sometimes three periods a day. And until I was able to raise my voice against her, the classes with Shobha could dissolve into hell at any time. I got to being thick-skinned about it once it occurred to me that there was no need to take it personally. It was merely a part of the girls’ great ongoing war against authority. And Shobha was a natural warrior.
The first day, after prayers, I had her class for English. I made them all stand up in turns and tell me their names and their hobbies. But that was a mistake. Hobbies were for ten-year-olds, not thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds. The “good” girls said reading, sports, and music. The rebellious ones said things like seeing movies and meeting boys, watching my face for a reaction. Shobha, sitting at the back of the class, stood up with a disdainful flick of her hair and said, “My two best hobbies are drying Mahrukh Tunty’s bras on the sigri in the monsoons, and rotary swinging.”
I did not understand, of course. But I did know that it was a part of their insular humor.
I forgot Miss Henderson’s biscuit-tasting advice and flashed Shobha a friendly smile. I was sure I was going to win them over by just being friendly. I couldn’t really go wrong, I thought; I was almost their age. “Maybe you will explain them to me after school today,” I said.
“The explaining of this would indeed be terrific, Miss Apte,” she replied in a very vernacular accent, at which point the already giggling girls convulsed in laughter. I thought they laughed at my accent. I vowed to speak like them.
“Please write a three- to five-page essay, ‘How I Spent My Summer Holidays,’ ” I said before I swung out, pigtail and dupatta flying.
The next night, I slipped up at dinner duty and said “Eat your vegetable” to Amla Sanghvi, pronouncing it “vagitable.” Shobha imitated me all evening. Every time I passed her table, she would loudly say, “Can I have more va-gi-ta-ble, please?” or “The vagitable is so good today, no?” The girls would then burst out into giggles all over again, until little Amla had to be taken out to the dormitory because she choked on her food.
It was the second-worst evening of my entire stay in Timmins. The noise grew in bursts, bouncing around the room like a ball. Girls began to squeal and shout from one table to another, and soon started throwing bread and even cutlets across the room. I thought I glimpsed a girl on her hands and knees scurrying under the table. Butlers in red turbans passed along the periphery of my vision, carrying large steel trays. I knew my humiliation to be complete.
I had long ago devised a trick for dealing with all those patronizing aunts, all those nudging girls and staring strangers, living as I did, with a blot by my side. I could take my soul out of my body, or perhaps it shrank and became transparent inside me like a boiled onion. Anyway, I could be looking down on myself from above the room. And I would keep telling myself in a firm but kind voice, “This is not happening to you. Not happening to you.” I had never cried in public, not even when I had been punished for kicking that little girl in a pink nylon dress at Baba’s office Diwali puja. I had not cried when Baba shouted at me right in the middle of the prayer ceremony, and so I knew how to keep the tears from my eyes.
Two days later, I came upon Shobha’s essay in the staff room. The staff room was between the gym and the piano room. It faced the upper netball field, where the senior girls wandered around during their breaks. In the afternoons, the sounds of chopsticks and Brahms wafted into the room. There was usually some tepid tea in a large brown teapot covered with a tea cozy embroidered in a green and red rose design, in chain stitch, which looked most certainly like the handiwork of Miss Henderson.
I was sitting in the staff room. It was a hot, quiet afternoon, pregnant with the promise of the monsoon. When I came upon Shobha’s essay, I couldn’t help laughing out loud. I had just met Miss Malti Innis, small and smiley, in a printed cotton sari, sitting on a creaky sofa nearby. “Call me Malti,” she said. She was the class teacher for standard five and was mainly involved with the juniors. “You must come to Sunbeam for dinner soon.”
I showed her the essay. She arched a neat little eyebrow and started reading it aloud.
In the summer holidays, parents are Apt to spoil the child. In Timmins, we are Apt to get food that the village goats discard. So, after the terrible, terrible food of the past three months at school, all my favorite dishes were Apt to be cooked every day. Deoka, our cook, who has been with us since I was a child, was Apt to ask me every morning what I wanted, and spent most of the day making it. I was Apt to eat too much. All the girls are Apt to eat too much, like camels, storing up for the desert ahead. It is Apt to be hot in Bombay in May, and I was Apt to eat ice cream and go to the club for a swim everyday.
I saw four movies this holiday, three English and one Hindi. I am Apt to like English movies better than Hindi movies, and my favorite movie was “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” with Sidney Poitier. I went to see it with my cousin Bubli, who studies in Bombay. But she is Apt to like Hindi movies better, and preferred “Bobby” starring Dimple Kapadia.
Summer holidays are Apt to go by too fast. Soon, three weeks were over. Now we are back in school, not tired, certainly not happy, and Apt to be angry when asked to write retarded essays for English class. As Hurree Jamset Ram Singh, the Nabob of Bhanipur, would say, “The unfairfullness of this is terrible.”
Moira Prince strode into the room around the second sentence. I had heard of her. They always said her name in lowered voices and stopped short. She was one of the two British teachers in the school who were not missionaries. I had not seen her because she never came to lunch in the staff dining room, itself quite a scandal, since it was a quickly conveyed if unwritten rule that all teachers must come to lunch.
She poured herself a cup of tea, stood with her legs apart, and stared at me long and hard. Her green eyes reminded me of glass marbles. Most adults look at me, flinch a little, look away briefly, compose their eyes, and then look again at me. Some studiously avoid looking at the blot, others take it in their stride and treat it naturally. It is my Rorschach blot; I had a whole science of judging character by the way people first looked at me in those days. But the Prince deliberately moved her cat eyes slowly around me, stopping, always, at the blot. It was an insolent look, I thought. I hadn’t come across anything like this before, and I froze into a clear cube of ice, a pasted grin on my face.
When Malti finished reading the essay, Prince put down her teacup with a decisive thump. “That Shobha girl needs to be brought down a peg or two,” she said. “I would love to put her across my knees and spank her bottom until she cries
.” She spoke in a soft, slow drawl, in an accent I had not heard before.
She had a compact, muscular body, a freckled face, and reddish brown hair, cropped short. Large jowls and a button mouth with soft pouty lips lent her a slightly bulldoggish air. She wore khaki jodhpurs that puffed out at the thighs and then became tight from the knees down, and brown tall boots that stopped just below the knees. She seemed to have stepped out of some other universe, and I was quite completely flustered. For some reason, I had a flash of Phileas Fogg striding around the world in eighty days.
The Hindi teacher, Miss Raswani, a vigorous white-haired woman who wore her sari an inch above her ankles, had been sitting at the back correcting her papers. Miss Raswani was a crusty old bird. The girls were terrified of her, and the teachers just left her alone. No one ever sat at “her” desk in the staff room, no one spoke to her, and she never entered conversations. She sat at the desk backing the room, slashing at notebooks with a red pencil.
Suddenly, she banged her books on the table, pursed her lips, straightened her sari, and strode out of the room muttering “wicked, wicked, wicked” in a hoarse voice. She did not look at any of us. I wasn’t sure whether she was referring to Shobha’s essay or to Miss Prince. I suspected it was Miss Prince.
Malti flashed a conspiratorial smile. She had her back to Miss Prince and did not turn around to look at her. The bell rang, and, stowing our books in our respective shelves, we both left to face our classrooms.
“Shobha’s last line is a reference to the Nabob of Bhanipur,” Malti explained to me on the way out. “He is an Indian character in the Billy Bunter books. He always says only one line in any conversation, and it always goes like this: ‘The telling of this would indeed be terrible,’ ” she said, shaking her head from side to side in the Indian version of the British version of the Indian speaking English.
“The nines and tens were speaking like him all last term. They said that this is how the British expect the brown race to speak. It was very funny at first, though I must say it is getting a bit tedious now,” she added. She did not bring up Shobha’s cheeky manipulation of my name. She must have sensed that I would need to digest this on my own, and I liked her immediately for that.
Shobha had passed the essay around the class before she handed it to me. It went down as the Apt Essay. In Timmins, I will always be called Apt behind my back. It could have been worse, I figured. Most teachers had a “behind their back name.” I could so easily have been christened by one of the more spiteful girls and ended up with a meaner name. They called Miss Debabushnam, the fleshy-faced junior art teacher, “Gaylord,” after a Punjabi restaurant in Bombay.
I wanted to know about Moira Prince. I wanted to know who this scandalous white woman with a strange accent was, and what she was doing in this small backwater school. I brought it up that evening with Miss Henderson while having tea and Shrewsbury biscuits in her cozy pink room.
“Moira Prince is Miss Nelson’s cross,” Miss Henderson said. “You wouldn’t think it to look at her, my dear, but Moira’s parents were missionaries. They were in Nasik with Miss Nelson, and very dear friends. It appears that Miss Nelson promised Moira’s mother on her deathbed to look after her.”
“How did they die?”
“It was a big news story. A bus overturned just outside Nasik. It was mostly full of locals, I think ten people died. They were coming back from a prayer meeting in another town. Her father, Reverend Prince—we knew him, he held such wonderful meetings here with us—died instantly, but her mother was in critical condition in hospital for some days. It was all so sudden and tragic. She called Moira and Miss Nelson to her deathbed, joined their hands, and said, “She will be a good mother to you.”
“Poor thing. How old was she when her parents died?” I asked, imagining the Prince as a tomboy of ten, the day she became Miss Nelson’s cross.
“Oh, my, I can’t say for sure. Let’s see, she must be twenty-seven or twenty-eight, maybe twenty-nine now. She’s not thirty, I can always tell thirty. So she must have been at least twenty-five when her parents passed away. It was in the monsoons, in August, I think, two years ago. Miss Nelson had to rush down by taxi it was raining so hard. And Moira was teaching in Pelham Girls School in Mussoorie—you know, in the north, in the Himalayas.”
She was already older than me when her parents died. “So why did she need to be looked after at that age?” I asked.
“Moira will always need to be looked after,” said Miss Henderson with a sigh and a shake of the head. “Mothers know these things.”
Miss Henderson always got her tea piping hot, because, as she pointed out, she was closest to the kitchen, and also because she and Mrs. Cummings, the mistress of the kitchen, were the best of friends.
Miss Prince, I was told, had saintly parents. She was an only child, and a bad seed. Started out teaching in Bombay, in Queen Mary School for Girls, but had left under a cloud. In Mussoorie, she had been asked to leave Pelham.
“My sister Rosie is the kitchen matron there, and she told me this,” said Miss Henderson with relish.
“But what was she thrown out for?” I asked, all agog.
“Lord only knows,” sighed Miss Henderson, wiping her lips with her lace-edged handkerchief, which she kept tucked in the sleeve of her flowered shift. “It happened soon after the parents died, in the middle of the winter term. Miss Nelson called some of us to the drawing room and told us that Miss Prince had had a difficult time, and that we were going to look after her a little. She said she was confident that our Timmins was such a good place that Miss Prince would get along just fine here. Miss Nelson always believes the best of everyone, you know. And Miss Prince has been given very few responsibilities here, less chance to get into trouble.”
Although Moira had taught various subjects in her other teaching jobs, she had been given a more marginal role as sports teacher to the middles and seniors in Timmins. She worked closely under the watchful eyes of Miss Manson, who was the sports mistress.
“And has she?” I asked. “I mean, has she got along fine here?”
“Well, there has been some trouble, here and there, and it could have turned into a scandal, I tell you,” she started, lowering her voice, and then paused to do some complex maneuver with her knitting needles.
When she looked back up at me, she changed the subject. She had decided not to tell the story. She’s too young and raw, and she’ll find out soon enough in this place, she might have thought. Miss Henderson was absolutely right. I did find out, though the knowledge did not come to me in quite the way she might have imagined as she sat there knitting her cable design sweater.
So far, Miss Henderson had emerged as my best guide in this dense and opaque world. She was a homely, maternal woman with bowed legs and thin brown hair that was always composed in neat rows of tight little ringlets. Her room was on my way down to the hospital after classes, and I had made it almost a habit to stop by for tea. Miss Henderson always seemed glad to see me. The girls would have gone down for evening games, their shouts floating up from the hockey field and lower garden. She was usually free at that time. She would put down an extra plate and bring out her tin. The Shrewsbury biscuits were thick, butter-laden, and not too sweet, and they crumbled deliciously in tea. Miss Henderson always took only one biscuit, but she always urged me to have two, which I always did, though I did it with the guilty feeling that I should really be more well-bred and take only one, and I never enjoyed
the second quite as much as the first. Those early, innocent days always taste of Shrewsbury biscuits.
“These are the famous Poona biscuits. Kayani’s Bakery is not far from our house there. I always make everyone who comes bring me a tin,” said Miss Henderson. The Hendersons were a large and close-knit Anglo Indian clan with good English names. There were four Anglo Indian staff members in our school. Miss Henderson, Sister Richards, Mrs. Cummings, and Miss DeYoung, who all ran the home section of the school. They were all descendants of British railway clerks who had married Indians many generations ago, and were proud of their blood. Anglo Indians married each other, held on to their British names, and identified with the whites, not the Indians.
Miss Henderson was the crossroads matron. The girls got their periods in her dorm, they became boy crazed, had crushes on their prefects and teachers. They turned high-strung, cheeky, and delinquent. But Miss Henderson was a simple woman of good instincts, and she managed to herd them through those difficult years without too much trauma. Unlike the missionaries and most of the teachers, who kept their worlds quite shuttered from the girls, Miss Henderson could often be seen at the center of a blue-checked crowd, listening to eagerly told anecdotes from home. And she shared her life with them. She discussed her father’s railway job, her mother’s asthma, her widowed sister’s only son, Frankie. Even I remember how her brother’s daughter got third-degree burns and was forever scarred.
Miss Henderson was carrying a large pot of boiling water with a towel into the bathroom of the family home in Poona. Little Joan, naked and ready for the bath, was to have been sitting on the stool near the cold water tap. But Joan thought of hiding behind the door, and as Miss Henderson kicked the door wide open with her left leg, Joan burst out from behind to say boo. “Oh, how much I wept,” she would say, shaking her head. “And to think nothing happened to me. Just one or two small burns.”
Miss Timmins' School for Girls Page 4