Miss Timmins' School for Girls

by Nayana Currimbhoy

  I don’t know how it started, but I do know it was soon after my sisters arrived in the school, both of them tender and straggly like young chickens, Viny not even five years old—I remember how she refused a banana at little lunch because she did not know, she told me later, how to open it. The Vendettas, we were called (because all our names ended in ta, I think, though it was so long ago I cannot be sure), like some slinky singing sisters, when in fact we were quite short and prosaic. “Like your father, all three of you,” my mother would say smiling, for it was established that she was the beauty of the family. Some of us were granted good bones. “You have good bones. They will stand by you when you are older,” my mother would say to Duhita and Vinita, though never to me. Apparently I was going to be left beauty-less even when I was older. But I didn’t really care, because I was never going to care what she said or did. Because I had my sweet father to myself. My father was an inventor. I would stand beside him on the balcony late at night as he explained his peanut-grading machine or his world bank scheme, which brought the head of Dena Bank to our house for dinner and was very close to making us as rich as princesses. “Observation is the key,” he would say, inhaling his cigarette. “You can get to the bottom of anything if you observe and reason.”

  It was not a private vendetta at all that had prompted Inspector Wagle to put Shankar in jail for the alleged murder of Miss Moira Prince, I told Akhila, Ramona, and Shobha as we clustered in the veranda beside the upper netball court. It was not private, because everyone knew it. It was a personal vendetta between the two men. But they paid no attention to that.

  We were huddled outside our class with Smita Sheth, who knew why the inspector had put Shankar in jail. She also knew why the Woggle believed the Prince had been pushed off the cliff. There were marks of a struggle upon her, her shirt was ripped, her buttons were missing, and there were signs that she had tried to stop her fall. “Her hands were tightly clenched around bunches of grass and dirt, and her nails were torn and bleeding,” said Smita.

  But what about the footprints? I asked. Aren’t there supposed to be signs of a struggle, and aren’t they supposed to get shoe sizes and such like?

  No, said Smita, the surface of table-land was so bald and rocky that it was impossible to tell.

  Smita Sheth had become our daily gazetteer. She was always surrounded by avid groups of girls, and she told the stories with relish. You could tell that her parents’ shop had become the center of the village gossip, because she was full of little details and opinions and phrases that you could picture spoken by a pursed-lipped adult. There were no newspapers or magazines in our world. In fact, almost anything written after World War II was considered modern in our school. We had never cared about our dearth of news, but now that we had become news, we felt suddenly isolated; we felt we were sewn into a shroud of mist. And so we turned to Smita, whose stories were passed down in an endless chain of Chinese whispers that poured upon the school like rain.

  Smita informed us that she edited the stories to suit her audience. “I mean, I can’t tell the standard-eight girls the details of the affair. But with you girls, I can talk frankly,” she said. She put on her mother’s voice and mannerisms as she told this story. Her mother had played an important role, after all, in this event that occurred before we came to Timmins.

  When the Wagles arrived in Panchgani, in the late fifties, the good townspeople were pleased to have the affable young inspector, his feisty wife Janaki, and their little twin daughters Pinkie and Yellow amongst them. Smita’s parents, the banya couple from Bombay who were making Panchgani history by setting up the largest and most modern shop that would ever be in town, were especially pleased to have another young city couple to help while away the time. “Though of course their ways were different because they were Marathi, and they ate fish,” said Smita with a vegetarian shudder.

  The inspector lived up to the hopes and expectations of the Sheths. He was often to be seen in his pressed khaki uniform, sipping tea and chatting with Jitubhai in the back office of the store. His wife, though, was considered to be arrogant by some in town, more specifically by Smita’s blameless mother, Taruben. Smita’s father insisted to this day, every time the conversation came up, that Mrs. Wagle was “quite a beauty, I tell you, in those days,” and her mother never failed to counter that she did not like those types of looks, and furthermore, she could see from day one that the lady had roaming eyes. Such a good man she had, but no, Janaki Wagle was not happy.

  Gradually, there developed a groundswell of rumors that Shankar was seen riding his bicycle towards table-land almost every afternoon at two. In the summer, sweat pouring down his face and damp patches on his shirt, he was sometimes seen whistling as he turned the corner from the municipal park to Echo Rock Road, where the light bounced off the black rocks and a breeze blew down from table-land even on the hottest afternoons. There were rumors, said Smita, but her mother refused to believe them. “Why would anyone like us have relations like that with a servant?” Smita said in holy terror.

  It was Smita’s mother, the spiderwoman Taruben, a stick of a figure with hair on her arms so long you might think she brushed it, who came upon Shankar and Janaki in the most compromising of positions.

  Most people did not ask her why she had walked all the way from the bazaar up the steep slope to the Wagles’ Nest in the middle of the afternoon, but she always made sure to explain, lest they suspect her of being a busybody. Inspector Wagle, she said, had just informed her that his wife would be arranging the women’s and children’s activities at the Independence Day fair in the bazaar, and she had decided to go up and talk to Mrs. Wagle to see how she could be of help. Of course, everyone was very enthusiastic about August 15 in those days, she would add.

  She saw a bike lying lazily by the pink bougainvillea bushes, and a tall steel glass still frosted with drops from the ice that had been in the chas on the veranda table. Through the window she could see the new white fridge standing proudly behind the dining table. Janaki had opened it and shown her all the drawers and shelves two weeks ago, preening because Taruben’s own husband did not deem it necessary to have a fridge in the house. He told her she could use the fridge in the shop downstairs. It is more than enough for our needs, you know, no eggs, no meat, only milk and such, Taru had told Janaki in defense of her fridgeless condition, though she could not stop the stab of jealousy in her tiny bosom when she saw the neatly stacked tomatoes in the lovely plastic bottom drawer.

  Because of the bicycle outside, Taruben said, she naturally assumed that there was a guest in the house and that she would find them seated in the shaded living room beyond the fridge, and so she walked in. She heard a giggle and murmurs from the closed bedroom door. “Janaki Bhabhi,” she began calling, her tentative voice growing louder each time. She happened, she said, to be positioned right outside the bedroom when Janaki burst out adjusting a crumpled sari, and Taruben saw Shankar lying on the bed with a white sheet pulled up to his naked chest. She said he had a tuft of hair on his shoulders, and that during the split second before the red curtain fell back into place, they stared at each other, and she saw him leering at her. He did not even look ashamed, he looked proud, she said. Her whole body recoiled in horror. Even the sheets must reek of his smell, she thought, with the sour acidity of bile rising to her mouth.

  She dropped the notebook marked “Independence Day Ideas,” and ran back out and all the way down to her shop, and although she knew herself to be the last person to be starting any gossip, she wondered whether she should tell the inspector about his wife, and in her indecision, she discussed her dilemma with Mrs. Dubash, who had come by to buy a new Duckback raincoat, since of course Panchgani Stores had the largest selection. And perhaps the story was even heard by Pandu, the peon whom Taruben had taught to make a most superior masala chai.

  It was not clear who informed the inspector that his wife had been unfaithful, with a lower-class man, no le
ss. But the news was flying around the town, and it was inevitable that he caught it. The people of Panchgani waited to see if Inspector Wagle would leave his wife or beat her; they looked for bruises when they saw her walking through the bazaar with laden bags. They watched and waited, but the inspector did nothing. He continued to do his rounds, with his loud jovial voice and his starched khaki uniform that was always a little too tight for him, but everyone could see that his smile was pasted on. Soon after, when Janaki produced a son, Panchgani shook its head. Look, he is so much darker than both of them, they said. But the inspector did nothing to indicate anything was amiss, and young Kushal was often seen wandering around in the police jeep or in the bazaar with one of the older hawaldars.

  Shankar became arrogant. He would slow his cycle as he sailed past the police chowki, which was just past the municipal park, outside the bazaar. Soon he set up his illicit den in the cave under table-land. And the inspector was unwilling or unable to shut it down.

  “All those years I’ve known Shankar, and my goodness, I cannot imagine him and the inspector’s wife, can you?” said Smita. She had not known the story growing up, she said, though she was used to hearing a sigh after the inspector’s name. What can he do, poor man, his wife stabbing him in the back like that? people would ask. His own policemen are taking bribes from his enemy, and yet he is afraid to stop it. “She has just finished him,” Taruben would say shaking her head. “F-I-N-I-S-H-E-D, that man.”

  And then, more than a decade later, when Shankar was found leaning over the dead body of a white woman on the rocks outside his cave of ill-repute, it was as if God had given Inspector Wagle a second chance. He arrested Shankar immediately and sent him down to Poona the very next day. He knew how they beat up the lower classes at the Poona jail. They would beat Shankar into submission and get a confession out of him. And the murder of a white woman could keep him in jail for life.

  The papers reported that a local man who was a servant in the school in which the white woman taught had been apprehended and was being held prior to trial. “He has been a petty criminal in Panchgani for years,” the inspector was quoted as saying. The small article appeared on the second page of the Satara Daily the evening after the Prince’s death. Failing to find a photograph of either the Prince or Shankar on such short notice, the newspaper had seen fit to run a photograph of the inspector himself, who smirked for all the world like a man who has just killed two birds with one stone. The newspaper mentioned that Mr. Wagle was the son of Ishwardas Wagle, a prominent Poona politician. Smita brought a clipping of the article to school. She did not let it out of her hands. We clustered around her as she read it aloud, and then carefully folded it and put it back in the pocket of her blue blazer.

  The town took sides. It was clear from the beginning that no one cared even one bit about the murdered white woman. They hardly knew who she was—though they had seen her often in the bazaar hanging around with the ruffian youths—and they did not care that her death had been tragic or that her life had been cut short by someone in their midst. They cared only to sit for endless hours and discuss whether or not Shankar had killed her, and whether or not the inspector did the right thing in arresting him. In school the ayahs looked sad and resigned as they sat on their haunches deftly making pans and popping them in their mouths. Shankar’s lovely wife was often with them, wiping her doe eyes with the edge of her sari pallu.

  It was Mr. Blind Irani’s letter in the Poona Herald that took Panchgani by surprise and upset the regular balance of the town.

  It is difficult to imagine what were the grounds for arresting Shankar Tamde for the murder of the British teacher Miss Moira Prince from a Panchgani school. Although due to signs of a struggle on the body of the dead girl, it might be fair to assume foul play, it certainly runs against the grain of justice to lock up a poor man because he cannot defend himself. It would be a crime to consider the case closed. Small towns are hotbeds of gossip, and it is indeed shameful to see the state of our law and order system. Have we sunk so low that a man can be locked up on the basis of a private vendetta that was played out more than a decade before this time? This would not have been tolerated by the powers before this Independent era. What use is our democracy when a man cannot defend himself against charges that were likely trumped up?

  The people of Panchgani were stunned. Mr. Blind Irani should have been on the side of the inspector. That is where he belonged. Inspector Wagle sometimes filled in to make up the bridge club that met on Tuesday afternoons. Who would have thought that the old man would care so much about a man like Shankar, a servant-class man?

  The town divide should have run along the English fault line. Those who read the English papers versus those who either read the Marathi paper or could not read at all. Hotel owners, semi-retired Parsi couples, and ex-tuberculosis patients who had come from Bombay and Poona for a cure and stayed on would be in the English camp, on the side of the inspector. And the villagers, the wiry ghat people who had inhabited the mountains long before Shivaji’s day would be behind Shankar, who was one of their own. It was only the English side that mattered, of course, since the others barely had a voice. Mr. Blind Irani’s letter thrust the two sides onto a nearly equal footing.

  Everyone agreed that it was the hand of Merch. It was Merch who sat with Mr. Blind Irani at the corner table and read him the newspapers and the correspondence of like-minded letter writers. It was Merch who wrote out the letters that he dictated for the Poona Herald. It had to be Merch who had pulled Mr. Blind Irani to the other side of the tracks.

  Mr. Dubash’s rebuttal appeared promptly two days later.

  If the man, Shankar, was falsely accused, let him bring forth the evidence. Let him come out and confess what he was doing at the bottom of the cliff, bending over the body of the dead girl in the middle of a rainy night. The arrested man is known in these environs for his nefarious activities and has been a corrupting influence on the schools. Further, his dealing in narcotics has attracted young men of dubious character to our town. The law-abiding citizens of Panchgani have been at their wits’ end. It is time he was brought to justice.

  The core of the Panchgani Stores gang, which had the benefit of Taruben’s brilliant tea as they sat around on folding metal chairs in the back room, consisted of the owner of El Cid Hotel, a red-faced man named Rohington, the Dubashes of Dalwich House, and of course the Sheths themselves. Inspector Wagle was very busy collecting evidence, but he did drop by on his way home in the evening. Since the Sheths did not partake in spirits, he could not take his evening beer with them, and so he soon went home to his strange household: a wife whose former lover he had just sent towards the gallows, and a son who had his enemy’s blood in his veins.

  Everyone stared and moved away when the inspector’s wife walked into town. No one knew what she thought and no one dared to ask. She had withdrawn from the town after the affair. She had made not a single friend in Panchgani all those years. Instead, she spent her days at home, cultivating fragrant roses and jasmine and pink and white bougainvillea that crept along the arched garden gate of the Nest, so that everyone stopped to gaze at her garden before they turned towards the Muslim cemetery on their way up to table-land. You could see her garden from the left tip of table-land, hanging like an embroidered handkerchief halfway in the sky. As she walked down to the bazaar with a flower in her bun, the women thought of how she must remember those hot afternoons of pleasure, and felt a pang of sorrow for their own wasted lives. Some of the more charitable older women blamed the water. We have seen it before, they said wisely. When young women first come to Panchgani, desire explodes in their loins. But it dies soon and then the water turns bitter in their stomachs.

  Mr. Blind Irani found himself aligned with the mochi who owned Vidya Shoes and Slippers for Every Occasion, a small narrow shop across the street from the Irani Café; fat Kaka, the buddha behind the cash counter of Kaka’s Bakery and Eatery; and Hafeez, the M
uslim contractor who painted the red roofs of Timmins School every two years. And of course, Merch. But Merch was considered to be a fringe person and did not count.

  “The first three sentences of Mr. Blind Irani’s letter, right up till ‘It would be a crime to consider the case closed,’ are from the hand of Merch,” I informed the girls. “After that, the old man starts his ranting. You can see the difference.”

  “Wait, wait,” said Akhila, bouncing up and down, her new breasts jiggling happily in her blue-checked dress. “You know, it could have been the inspector. He might have pushed the Prince and then put the blame on Shankar. He finally found a way of getting rid of his enemy. Think how he must have hated him all these years. His house is right there, he must have seen Prince walking up, followed her . . .” She petered out as the many holes in the theory became evident to us all. How on earth could the inspector have known that Shankar would be caught bending over her? And why should he have to murder a white girl to get at his enemy, after fifteen long years?

  “We should write it down in our book anyway,” said Shobha. “After all, there was a motive.”

  Stranger things had happened, especially in detective novels. But I could see that the tale was too hollow to hold any truth. “No,” I said. “He was handed an opportunity and he took it. Simple as that.”

  We were sitting on the long green bench outside the senior classrooms, facing the abandoned throwball court that was overrun with electric green grass. Small fine clouds were passing through us as they moved over the mountain. We were chewing on stalks of khatta mittha bhaji, a juicy weed that flourished in the rains under the eaves of the sloping roofs. We were always looking for things to eat. In the summer we sucked the honey from the stems of the shoe-flowers.