“You are?” she mocked.
I don’t know if she ever guessed the sudden turmoil that could sometimes overtake me. I put our secret world in a separate compartment and tried to pretend it did not exist.
“And if you were not a good girl, would they love you?” she asked. She always played with my hair.
I broke into a sweat. If Ayi Baba saw me now, could they love me?
“Parents must love their children. Even if they cast them out, deep down, they love them. It’s the nature of life,” I said, hoping it was true.
“Nope,” said Pin. “Not true. I don’t think they did. In any way whatsoever.” She did not refer to them as parents.
It was a part of the romance of her, the brooding and the mystery. “I’m certifiably unlovable. You should know that,” she added, flippantly.
“I love you,” I could have said, but did not have that kind of confidence. “Why, were you terribly naughty?” I asked instead.
“I was flawed goods to them. From the beginning, I think,” she said, shrugging her shoulders to show she did not care. “They just loved the Lord. I was always different from them. I remember thinking they were idiots when I was about seven.” And then she changed the subject.
I did not understand. If her parents died when she was an adult, she was not an orphan in the traditional sense. So why was she tied to Nelson? I brought it up once, on a late night cigarette run with Merch, when we had left Pin behind with a gray cloud perched upon her head, angry about some slight from Nelly.
“Why does she have to hate Nelly so much? Nobody is forcing her to stay here,” I said, though of course I did not want her to go, I just wanted to dig deeper. “Why does she have to take everything Nelly does as a personal insult?”
Merch did not answer at once. He watched his gum boots squelching in the mud. “She’s going through a tough time. She feels alone in the world. She feels they all betrayed her.”
“And did they?” I prompted, after a pause in which he added nothing.
“It’s her story, really,” said Merch gently. “She’ll tell you when she is ready.” I imagined a small reproof in this and decided to ask no more. But I always felt safe with Merch after that, knowing how he guarded his confidences.
“At least if they had died when she was a child, she could have imagined how they would have loved her,” he said.
“So you think it’s true that they did not love her?” It popped right out, though I had promised myself a minute ago to delve no more.
“It is true,” he said, handing me the umbrella to hold while he took out two cigarettes. “It’s her truth.” The rain splashed around our ankles, and our heads almost touched as we lit our cigarettes with a single match.
The bidi stall was just a five-minute walk from Merch’s. At around eleven, just before the bidiwala closed for the night, Merch would usually offer to go and replenish the cigarette stock. I would stand up and walk out with him. We took Merch’s large black umbrella and walked in step, our faces wet with windblown drizzle.
I had begun smoking cigarettes. I liked Wills, though Merch and Prince smoked Charminars. I started just because the smoke, the lighting, inhaling, and languid curling, was so much a part of those nights. But I had not smoked a joint yet. I would always smile and shake my head when it was passed around. I helped Merch make the joints, though, mostly because it gave me something to do. I would empty the cigarettes, Merch would burn and soften a part of some large ball of hash of which he seemed to have a steady supply, and I would mix it into the tobacco. He would refill the cigarettes with the mixture. We always made three joints at a time.
Sometimes, in the days of the long rains, when we did not feel like slicing through to the bidi stand, we would assure each other that we had quite enough cigarettes of all brands and would just end the party when they were over. Then, deep into the night, we would set off in the Fiat, searching for cigarettes and strong sweet chai. They were always wonderful nights.
I can cut my time in Panchgani into two with a warm knife. The second half began after Kolhapur. I was in hell one minute, and in heaven the next. When I was not with her, I felt I should not see her again. It was her fault. She was turning me into a depraved person. No wonder her parents hated her. I must stop making love to her, or I would turn into her. I could not even bring myself to say the word in the recesses of my mind. A lesbian, branded for my whole entire life as a fallen woman. But then I ran to her, and wanted nothing else, except her.
My blot began to change. I slept so little, and went through the days in a haze. The long hours I spent composing my face and attending and containing my blot were no more. One morning, I noticed it had turned darker. Then, the edges started wavering and spreading. It began to change from day to day. I studied it every morning with detachment. Once a tight pink coin, it turned into a dark brown amoeba whose edges seeped into my face.
I wondered if Ayi would notice the changed blot when I saw her in two weeks. I wrote her short bursts of notes, dashing off two-liners on postcards before I went for dinner. “Counting the days to seeing you,” and “Remembered you today when I made aloo puri at Sunbeam.” She wrote once, a letter that gave no indication of her state of mind and ended with “You must be busy with end of term work. Do not worry about me. The two Bhabhis look after me so well, always making my favorite dishes.” I chose to find the letter reassuring.
I was tired and dazed during the day, and sometimes short-tempered with the girls, but discovered to my delight that they were better for it. They were less inclined to be cheeky. I began to go into the class with almost no preparation. I went with the flow. In standard ten, we read Macbeth and dissected it backward and forward and sideways—guilt and war and A-line dresses, and Indira Gandhi’s non-effect on changing the role of women in India. I beamed specifically to Nandita, who seemed to process every word.
I often came across Nandita with two other girls, Ramona and Akhila, after class. Ramona was a gangly, high-strung girl who was prone to giggling fits. Akhila was a cheeky chimp of a girl who always drew a smile after her name. In their free time, the three of them often sat on the covered steps leading down to the hospital. They were always engrossed in secrets, and stopped abruptly as I passed them on my way to my room. “Good evening, Miss Apte,” they chorused, waiting until I turned the corner before resuming.
Miss Nelson smiled at me one day in the staff dining room, and said, loud enough for all to hear, “Charulata, you are doing very well with the tens. I heard you as I passed by yesterday.” Praise from her was enough to puff you out for a day or two.
But my spot in the sun was getting increasingly precarious.
Soon it became difficult to restrain Pin in school. She would run up to me and pull my plait from behind. She tried to kiss me in the staff room one morning when we found ourselves alone.
“Can’t you please, please behave in school?” I begged. The last place I would choose for a kiss would be the staff room in the morning.
“Now you want to put me back in the box, Miss Charu?” she would say darkly at times, and “OK, promise, ayi chi shappat,” another.
But she would not stop. I lived between the dread of being caught and the pure excitement of running into her in a hallway. The rain was liberating. We walked away from the covered corridors and broke out into the rain as soon as we spotted each other. The hockey pitch and lower gardens were always deserted. The rain became our very own portable curtain.
Miss Henderson accosted me near the long steps one afternoon. “Where are you these days, dear? Come and have tea with me,” she said, adjusting her ringlets. “You never come now.” Her smile seemed a bit cold.
“Everything fine with your family, dear?” she asked as I bit into the biscuit. “Too bad I missed Padmaja. She, now, has the stamp of breeding. I told the girls, I always said, all the girls from that family have it.” And then, after
a stitch, she said, “Even you, my dear, I know that stamp of breeding when I see it.”
Then, looking intensely down at her table runner, she said, her voice soft and firm, “I am sure you feel far from home here, but you must be careful about the company you keep. People talk too much here.” I did not ask her what she meant. I pretended I had not heard and talked nervously about Padmaja’s daughter for a short while before standing up abruptly and saying good-bye.
I wanted to sneak into my room and lie down and think for some time, and was tiptoeing down the hospital steps, quaking, when Sister Richards called, “Come and have a brandy, child, to dry the bones. This wretched rain. Pah. All my life.”
Sister would often hear me bustling in my room in the evenings before dinner, and call out to me. “Come and join, my girl,” she would say. I did go in sometimes and listen to her rambling. I always refused the drink.
“In the war, of course, we all drank,” she would say every single time. “And then, got so used to it, can’t sleep without it, you know. Mind you, I never drink more than two.”
The dinner bell rang at seven. I always left her drinking her “second” drink as she waited for the ayah to bring her dinner.
Today, still turning hot and cold from Hendy’s meeting, I accepted a brandy from Sister. “You were as timid as a rabbit when you first came. Used to scoot out backwards when I asked you for a drink,” said Sister, smacking her lips after the first long sip.
“That’s what I said to that Raswani woman. I told her, ‘They’re youngsters, why not be friends?’ I like Moira. She stayed here when she was sick. She would come down and have a drink with me. She’s been to England a few times, you know,” she added, approvingly.
I began to feel faint with fear. I knew for a fact that Sister Richards and the Hindi teacher were enemies. I had seen the way they threw dagger looks at each other. If they were holding a conversation about me, everyone in school must know, must know something, but what did they know? My thoughts were scurrying and screeching like rats in a metal maze.
Common Knowledge. I felt dizzy with it. The Hindi teacher hated the world in general, but she hated Sister Richards more, and she hated Pin the most. Pin baited her like a matador, red cape just outside her reach. “See the smoke coming out of her nose,” she sniggered as Raswani snorted and pawed the earth. “Can you imagine, the other day she called me ‘a burden to mother earth’?”
“These women here can drive one to madness,” said Sister, after a refill. “That Raswani woman, you know, she used to be in your room when I first came to Timmins. She’s cuckoo. Just plain crazy. Pah.” She spoke with venom, the “pah” short and sharp, as if she were spitting. “No life. Nobody. Stays here through the short holidays. Rents a room somewhere in the December holidays. Just imagine, wanted to come with me to Deolali. You know, my brother Cedrick and his wife, I have a room there, anytime, waiting for me.” Sister usually talked in shorthand after her first drink. “Everyone hates her. Everyone. Girls, teachers, servants.” The whole school lived in terror of Miss Raswani.
“Except for Miss Nelson,” I pointed out.
“Pah. That Nelson of yours wouldn’t admit it if she had a viper in her bosom,” said Sister with a dismissive flick of white curls. “That Raswani is plain crazy. I should know. We had to treat so many people driven crazy by the war. She’s twisted. Should be locked up. I could tell you a thing or two about her.”
I was still too roiled about my own good name to be too interested in the Hindi teacher’s madness. But Sister continued.
“You know, I saw her peeping into my bathroom one day, those mad eyes of hers. I went to Nelson straight and told her. That Nelson, so saintly, just smiled and said, ‘Maybe it was dark, Sister.’ ” Sister pursed her mouth and mimicked. “But next day, I went to her again. I said, either I go, or she goes. Cannot live with that wretched woman. Always muttering and praying in her room. Now she’s next to Nelson. Bet you she’s spying on her.”
The brandy crept into my veins, and I began to feel less fluttery. Sister would not be so casual about it all, talking to me like this, if Raswani had seen Pin and me kissing behind the gulmohor tree at the outer edge of lower garden, as we had done, just once or twice.
Raswani must have seen us walking in the rain and laughing. We did that all the time. But it was innocent. In fact, I was the picture of innocence. I knew that. Even if she had seen a hint of something, no one would believe it. That quiet little Maharashtrian girl with a blot on her face, who could think she was carrying on with anyone at all, let alone a woman—and let absolutely alone the dangerous Miss Prince? That was it. They all thought we were a bit too friendly. Maybe they even thought the Prince was trying to seduce me. My secret was safe. If they had known, if Hendy or Sister or Raswani knew, all hell would have broken loose. Surely.
Tai’s voice came floating back from a still afternoon in Kolhapur: “Chastity. Let chastity be your sword.” I was sitting on the floor while Tai was advising Padmaja’s older sister Joytsna, who had been caught kissing her fiancé in the car at night. I must have been around fifteen. “A woman has her own power,” said Tai. She was sitting on the bed, legs apart, like a pasha.
“Whatever they may want to do,” she said, her face screwed in disgust. “We have to take a firm”—she pronounced it “farm”—“hand. Chastity,” she said to the squirming Joytsna, “chastity should be your sword”—she pronounced it “swared.”
And innocence shall be mine, I thought. Chastity has gone, but I still need a weapon. Innocence will be my swared in this battle. I will smile and dimple, as I always do.
I skipped dinner and went to Merch.
“Ah, Charu on a weekday,” said Merch with a giggle of pleasure. Soon, Samar came by, we picked Pin up from Sunbeam, and drove up the back road to table-land. Before I knew it, we were at Shankar’s fabled den in search of some Afghani hash. It appeared that Shankar had passed Samar in the bazaar that morning and indicated that he had some good stuff from a foreign hippie.
Shankar, the school handyman, lived a double life. By day he bustled around the school mending and lifting. At night, he sold hash and illicit liquor from a cave halfway up the table-land cliff. Strange though it seemed, the missionaries did not seem to know that he ran a thriving illegal business on the side. I knew Shankar quite well in school. He had come and fixed a leak in my bathroom. It was I who broke the ice, by talking to him in Marathi. He said when he saw me he always thought of his daughter, who was in college in Vai.
After that, he showed me her photographs and her letters, which he insisted she write in English, though he could not read them. He carried them around in his pocket and showed them proudly to select teachers. Miss Nelson had promised that his daughter would teach Marathi at the school as soon as she finished college. This was a vaulting leap up the ladder for her, and he could not contain his enthusiasm. “Bhagi will be like you,” he often would say to me as he stood on a ladder fixing a light or sloshed through puddles in his knee-high black gum boots. “You must be her friend and help her out.” And I would nod my head and assure him that I would, although I did not really plan to be around for so long. But we had met each other with our good school faces. I had never been to his den. And I did not wish to go.
Pin and I had stayed behind in the car as the boys walked up the final steep path to the cave. We stopped kissing and squirming when I heard them splashing back. I pushed Pin away and adjusted my clothes. I never let Pin touch me in front of the gang. Samar directed a dim torch light at the backseat. His bulging eyes, which got very red and glassy when he was stoned, peered down at us. I composed my face. “We’re taking Shankar to the bazaar,” he said. I saw Shankar’s smiling face perched like a moon on his shoulder. I saw his smile freeze, in slow motion, when he saw me there. “Charu!” he said, terse and shrill. And then he looked away. He got into the front seat and did not look at me through the ride, not even when
he got out. Shankar was in shock. I had taken on the responsibility of being a daughter, and then he had found me at night among the depraved and debauched. Veils and virginities were being stripped away so fast, I had no time to think or feel.
I’ll deal with it tomorrow, I thought, and reached out for the joint as it was passed to Pin. I smoked my first joint that night.
Now that I can sometimes see my life swirling like a bowl of clear soup, I cannot quite recall the intensity of those days when the door first opened. I remember the panic, the fear of falling, and then, the music.
Samar had rigged two large black speakers in the car so we could have the right kind of music. It was Cat Stevens that night, hammering his sad voice into my small soul.
Lisa, Lisa, sad Lisa
Tell me, what’s making you sad, Lee?
I heard the pauses for the first time. They were wide and deep and dangerously lovely.
After that, Pin would always produce a rumpled cigarette at choice moments. “Let’s have a small one,” she would say with a sheepish grin. I soon learned to tighten my throat and inhale properly.
The effect was instant. It was wide, wild, wondrous. I walked in wet and tense, and tight as a button. After the joint, we would roll around, or play and talk and giggle and kiss. We smoked, we kissed, we looked into each other’s eyes and sighed. We lay on her satin sheets, her body white and soft as a goose feather. In the dim red glow of her room, we would whisper and laugh, we would start playing with each other and fall asleep warm and wet and entwined. The drumming of the rain became our own private dancer.
Twelve
The Vortex
It was the fortieth day of rain. Even Mr. Blind Irani, the oldest Panchgani resident, could not remember such a long stretch of constant rain. The light was dim and gray, the sky always overcast. The rain on the tin roof had become a steady beat in all our heads. It was as if the whole entire school were living inside a giant drum.
Miss Timmins' School for Girls Page 12