Miss Timmins' School for Girls

by Nayana Currimbhoy

“First, I kept standing there, and she kept giving me this cold, sharp glare. It was almost as if I was expected to do something. I couldn’t figure out what. So when the lunch bell rang, I started walking out. ‘Did anyone give you the permission to leave?’ she asked, and so I went back to my place and stood again for another hour.”

  I could see Shobha, tossing her head, slouching to her spot with a look of contempt on her face.

  “Did she ever say anything to you about it?” asked Akhila.

  “You know, we never even spoke after that. She would not address me by name. But I was always so aware that she was looking at me, and that day at the Scottish Dancing Competition, I swear to you, man, I knew she was looking at me the whole time. Her eyes were boring into me. I was quite flustered.”

  “You didn’t look flustered to me. I was right next to you, and my kilt was so loose and flappy. But you looked great. And you were strutting away,” I said.

  “Turned you on, did she?” said Akhila.

  “Idiot,” said Shobha, and blushed.

  I realized with a start that all those times on the netball field when they tossed their heads and stomped past each other, when we had thought they hated each other from that Saturday detention, they were actually flirting.

  “And then when Nelly came up that day to send you down to the dorm, did you see anything between them?” we asked.

  “Nelly walked in grave as a graveyard,” said Shobha. “She did not look at Prince, she walked to me, she raised her eyebrows in sorrow, and she said, ‘You can go now, Shobha.’ Prince did not look up from her book. Her legs were still on the table. She was leaning back on her chair, absorbed, not noticing Nelson. Nelson stood at the door of the classroom and watched me till I turned the corner.”

  “That’s all? You didn’t hear anything more?” asked Akhila.

  “You think I would walk away from that? Not a chance. I turned the corner and ducked into the art room. I saw Nelson walk to Prince, take the book away from her, and put it in her purse. Then she put Prince’s head to her bosom.”

  “You mean you actually saw them making out? As if. And all this time you did not even let out a peep about it?” we asked, scoffing.

  “Not exactly making out, of course,” said Shobha condescendingly. “Prince did not bury her head in Nelson’s bosom and start kissing or anything. In fact, she shook her head free. I mean, they could have kissed or something after that. I don’t know because I had to leave. Nelson came walking down the corridor, I thought she might have seen me, and so I ran.”

  “How could you leave the art room without being seen?” I asked her.

  “I jumped out of the window at the back. It’s quite easy. I did it once before with Raksha, when we went to steal the school bell for April Fool’s Day. It was quite easy, really,” insisted Shobha.

  I did not believe a word of it. She was making it up as she went. Surely she would have told us about it earlier, had it been true. I suddenly saw Shobha’s clay feet—I realized that she was a fibber. She would do or say anything just to get the spotlight back on her.

  The Prince had said, You bloody hypocrite, stalked out into the night, and gone to table-land to get drugs from Shankar. Nelly followed her and pushed her over the edge because she knew that Prince would not keep her secret anymore, and her perfect reputation would be tarnished forevermore.

  This was the logical story. It made sense. We had it all wrapped up. By the time the envelope fell out of my Hindi textbook, I had even put aside my quest for the letter from England that had made the Prince rush out into the raining night.

  I see it as my fault. I, who had been trained to concentrate on the details that other people missed. I had suppressed the thought of the letter. Luckily, it slipped out of my textbook onto the red stone step at my feet.

  I had the Hindi textbook, fresh from the hands of Miss Raswani, still on my lap. I must have been fiddling with it in an absentminded way—for of course Hindi revisions were the furthest thing from my mind—when it opened to the MariOrPiriKuri chapter and the letter fell out, still in its blue- and red-edged airmail envelope.

  We went to the plastic-covered table outside the dining room, and I copied the entire letter word for word into our murder notebook. I still have those pages today. I remember how I wrote that morning in blue ink with the smooth-nibbed Pilot pen that I loved, and the smell of Mallu the bearer’s stinky dishcloth on the plastic.

  The envelope was addressed to “Miss Moira Prince, Miss Timmins’ School, Panchgani, India” from “Jonathan Birkett, 17 Balfour Road, London, England.” The postmark was from August 2, 1974. And it was written exactly like this:

  Dear Moira,

  Forgive me for not being in touch sooner. You must think I had forgotten about the promise I made to you at Christmas. Let me assure you that nothing could be further from the truth. I too am eager to complete the picture of our family history, though of course I know that your quest is more essential.

  I meant to go during the Easter Holidays. But Camilla has been rather unwell, and the care of the children fell solely onto me, and that prevented me from going. That should not have prevented me from writing to you, I know, but I confess I felt guilty—I knew, after all, what it meant to you, and how anxious you must be—and so I kept telling myself that I would write after I had accomplished my task. Or at least when I could tell you with confidence when I would actually go to Norfolk.

  Now that the school is finally closed for the summer holidays, and Camilla is much better—she sends you her love, and hopes that you will come for the holidays again this year so we can get to meet our newly discovered cousin, and our children can have an aunt, for we are both only children, you and I—I had the opportunity at last to drive up to Little Snoring. I spent three days there, digging into records and talking to people. I must tell you it is a wonderfully picturesque little village a few miles off the coast. I am sending you a photograph of St. Andrew Chapel, which is a wonderful medieval church.

  I am surprised that you had never even heard Little Snoring mentioned once in your home, since that is where your parents lived for many years before they went off on their mission to India. But of course, once they decided to keep your adoption secret from you, they must have had to bury that whole part of their lives.

  But why do I rant on like this, when you must be so eager for the results of my search.

  According to the village records, there were three girls born on November 20, 1946. If you do have the correct date of your birth, then we have struck gold, since there is an unwed mother on the list:

  Amanda, born to Charles and Mary Linn

  Margaret, born to Innis and Martha Naar

  Charlotte, born to Shirley Nelson

  As you see, there is no mention of a father for Charlotte. I did try to do some digging around, you know. I spoke to the pastor of the Presbyterian church, told him about my aunt and uncle who became missionaries, but he was a young man, and was either unwilling to talk or unknowing of the adoption, which is very possible, because these things were done very informally in those days, as you know. He said none of the names were familiar to him. So I am sending you a copy of the birth certificate, in case it might help you in your search.

  I discovered that there was an air force base near the village during the war, which might go a long way towards explaining the circumstances of your birth. The war, the handsome boys in uniform, might have driven the village girls to distraction; I hope you do not mind me saying so.

  And though I have taken so long to get this far, let me assure you that I am most willing to help you locate Shirley Nelson—although it is possible that she may be married and have a different name.

  We are all still in a state of pleasant shock, but so glad that you tracked us through the card. The sisters exchanged cards on a regular basis. Your mother—adoptive mother, I suppose I should say—used to v
isit us every four years or so, when she came on furlough. She always came alone by train for the day, we had tea together, and then the two sisters used to lock themselves into the room and murmur.

  We sent your parents Christmas cards with our family photo every year. They always sent a card too. I waited for the envelopes and stuck the stamps in my book and looked at them often, the maps of India in different colors. Your parents never sent photographs of themselves. My mother said because it must be hard to take photos in those primitive places. But now I can see that you were their secret.

  We are all eager to find out where this journey leads you. And once again, please do call upon me if you need my help. I hope that we can continue to be in touch. Camilla and I have begun to harbour fantasies of visiting you in India.

  Jon

  And so it turned out that Raswani was not so daft as I had supposed when she said her last words to me, the Saturn ring melting around her pupils. In fact, she had been diabolically clever. Show it to that silly child, your friend Akhila, she had said. Tell her to revise her favorite chapter. And coming to think of it, MariOrPiriKuri could be construed as Akhila’s favorite chapter.

  Throughout the term, Akhila and Ramona had put up their hands in Hindi class and inevitably asked some dumb question designed to make Raswani say the word again.

  “MariOrPiriKuri. Yes, I told you before. You will have to revise the chapter again,” she would say. She said it in a juicy way, slapping her lips together as though she was waiting to eat her dal chaval. The chapter was a vapid outline of the life and achievements of Marie and Pierre Curie, but their names had been butchered in our phonetic national language, and Raswani would say them as they were written. She must never have heard of the Curies, we gloated. Not a scrap of information must have entered her head since the turn of the century. We kept thinking she would catch on, and correct herself and say Pierre instead of Piri one fine morning, but she did not.

  In our personal Timmins history, Marie and Pierre Curie were more famous for opening up the Great Panchgani Scandals than they were for their Nobel Prize–winning discovery of radium. And they are known forever as MariOrPiriKuri.

  No birth certificate was found in the envelope, and there was no photo of the village church. We did not know how Raswani had gotten hold of the letter, or why she had now given it to us. We were too shocked to care.

  Nelson was the mother of Prince. All this time. A child born in sin under our very noses.

  No one knew, not the rest of the Holy Trinity, and certainly not poor Prince. Nelly, our upright principal who was so fair with us all, had kept her secret love child right in front of our faces. And how callous she had been with her own child. Now that I thought about it, they both did have the same strong jawline.

  We knew we had solved the case. We shook hands with each other—“Well done, Sherlock,” “Elementary, my dear Watson”—and brimming with power and confidence, we decided to walk out of the school in broad daylight and go boldly to Inspector Woggle on our own. There was no time to waste.

  As we were leaving the front gate, Ramona suddenly wanted to go to the bathroom.

  “Hurry up; I’ll go down with you,” I said.

  “No,” she said, “I might take some time. I have my chum. I think you should carry on.”

  “Don’t ditch now, Ramona,” we begged. “You saw her on table-land. You were one of the three. And three witnesses are much stronger than two.”

  “I am sure to meet Merch. I do not want to meet him,” Ramona said in a small, despairing voice. “So why don’t you all just carry on and tell the Woggle your story and show him the letter. I can be called later, if they need me.”

  “And what does Merch matter now?” we asked her. “He is nothing. The case is closed. We have proof of the motive, and we have proof that Nelson was at the scene of the crime. What do you think, Ramona? You think he is just lurking around the bazaar waiting for you? Come on, one hardly ever sees him even.”

  So she came along with us, but we should have known better.

  The mist lifted as we walked through the bazaar, and a soft ray of light pierced through the clouds for a moment, lighting up the puddles. The world looked suddenly fresh and clean. We could smell the end of the monsoons. We felt it was an omen, a good omen. When we got to the police chowki, we were told that the inspector was busy. And so we waited on the slatted wooden bench in the veranda.

  “What about Apt?” asked Shobha. “What should we say? Dushant saw her running down. She was technically at the scene of the crime.”

  “But we didn’t see her. If Dushant saw her, Dushant should say,” I said.

  “As if he would lie,” said Shobha, flouncing.

  “That’s not the point, is it? The point is that Dushant himself was breaking rules, so he has to decide what he wants to tell and what he doesn’t. We are not the witness, he is.”

  Shobha opened her mouth and then closed it. She could not argue with that.

  My instinct was to keep the Apt out of it. I had no idea what to make of all the love triangles the girls were drawing, but to me, Apt seemed so soft and innocent, I was sure her role was incidental. I wondered where Dushant really saw her. If he saw her near the municipal park, she could have been walking home from the Sydney Point road. There were a whole bunch of houses out there. No point in bringing her into it. This murder had long and twisted roots. Nelson, who I had thought was fair and kind and wise, had an evil side. She did not want to be the mother of Prince, much as my own mother did not want me. From the time I was little, I noticed the revulsion on my mother’s face when she looked at me—she wondered where I had come from. As though it were all my fault. My fault for being short and fat and hairy, my fault for breathing. I was suddenly all choked up with tears. I was sure now that Nelson had killed her daughter.

  Two hawaldars sat on their haunches smoking bidis, which they crushed as soon as the inspector yelled from behind the closed door. “Send the schoolgirls in,” he said in Marathi. We tumbled into his room, the four of us, self-important and bloated with our news, only to find Merch sitting on one of the two chairs facing the inspector’s large worn wooden table.

  I remember the stab of fear I felt when I first saw the back of his head, with his straggly hair tied in a low ponytail. He said nothing, just looked at us with his customary expression of mild curiosity. But when he lit his cigarette, I saw that his hands were shaking.

  We handed the letter to the inspector, still in its envelope. The Woggle held it up and read it, emitting small whistles of sounds as he moved through the words. Then he looked up, and we wondered what he would do.

  The inspector had thick oily hair, slicked back. There were two beads of sweat heading down both sides of his plump cheeks. “This is very important evidence,” he said, fanning his face with a slightly grimy handkerchief. “Now we have a possible motive. A very good motive. But a motive does not make a murderer. We have no reason to connect your principal to the fall in the middle of a rainy night. The only person present at the scene of the crime was Shankar. And that makes him the main suspect.”

  I had a feeling Merch was at the inspector’s to report seeing our raincoats at the scene of the crime. But he said nothing.

  We told him our tale, Akhila, Shobha, and I talking in turn as we were trained to do, still standing in front of his desk as we were used to standing in Nelly’s cold office. We told him about the letter, the fight, and our walk on table-land, where we saw Nelson sitting a few feet away from Miss Prince. We put Nelson, with her motive, at the scene of the crime.

  And that was how the principal of Miss Timmins’ School for Girls came to be walked out of the school in the afternoon, surrounded by policemen.

  The inspector walked ahead of her, his two hawaldars behind. The news spread through the school like wildfire. “She is not in handcuffs,” shouted Rajvi Tandon, “but she is surrounded.” Eve
ryone—girls, teachers, and servants—stood around in gaping groups as she sailed past, looking proudly into the distance. No one said good-bye. In fact, no one said a word to her. Miss Wilson walked by her side, wiping her red nose.

  The police jeep was parked under the banyan tree. Before stepping into it, Nelly turned to the crowd that had followed her up. “Miss Wilson will guide you through this. I have entrusted the school to her at this time,” she said, and gave Willy a reassuring pat on her back. Willy mustered a strong face, but turned around and walked back into her room as soon as the battered jeep left the school compound.

  The disappearance of the Hindi teacher came to our attention the next morning. I do not remember if we were informed of her departure at prayers or even if there were prayers that morning, though of course there must have been.

  The rain had started up again, and a sad, slanting drizzle created a hypnotic pattern of crowns on the stone steps. We were all forced to cluster in dorms and damp corridors and soon everybody knew that the Willoughby ayah had found Raswani’s room empty.

  We wondered where she went, for we knew that she had no home. The most plausible rumor about her life was that she grew up in a Christian orphanage and had lived her entire life in missionary-run enterprises. We imagined her to be a virgin.

  She left no note of explanation and no forwarding address. We wondered how she left. How did she carry out all her bags and belongings since the servants declared that none of them had helped her?

  So just as one mystery was solved, another came into view. Just as it became clear that Nelson had murdered Prince, we began to imagine that we could prove she had also murdered Miss Raswani, for that was the sequence of events we had expected from the beginning, and the one that Ramona had predicted. There is always a second murder.

  Now you can relax, Ramona, we said. The second murder is done.

  Events were falling into the pattern of a classical murder mystery. The first murder is committed to hide some terrible truth. The second, to silence the person who had chanced upon either the terrible truth or the terrible act itself. And Raswani had most definitely happened upon the terrible truth.