If Raswani had disappeared, I could have been the last person in school to see her. She gave the letter to me and fled, fearful for her life. Made sense.
But she could very well have been killed. Nelson did not know the letter was out. She could have killed her for the letter.
“I am told that second murders are easier than the first,” said Akhila, as if she personally had tea and toast with first- and second- and third-time murderers.
The entire case lay wide open before us. How did Raswani get hold of the letter? Why did she give it to us? When was she murdered? Could Nelson have killed her? How could Nelson have killed her?
But we had little time to set about solving the case before we were whisked out of the school. We flitted like butterflies from one mystery topic to the next and came up with nothing on that gray morning before Ramona’s brother arrived in a creaky taxi from Poona and Shobha’s sleek father took her and five girls, including Akhila, in his gleaming Chevrolet Impala.
Twenty
The Melting Murder
My father drove up two days later with my mother beside him wearing a silk scarf to keep her hair down and a transistor playing Radio Ceylon held at her ear.
I had skulked around the emptying school for the two days, but discovered nothing new. We had prayers every morning, then two hours of sitting silently at our desks and “studying.” I read Ayn Rand. We were taken for crocodile walks every evening in three rows: seniors, middles, and juniors. The teachers and matrons were too busy placating the flood of irate parents to think of our moral or intellectual welfare, and certainly too busy to talk to me.
Soon after the arrest of Miss Nelson and the disappearance of the school’s oldest teacher, Miss Wilson developed her stiff upper lip. She kept her pleas to the good Lord pretty cut and dried, and whisked around trying to keep the truth at bay. “Until the true events come to light, we will refrain from conjecture and debate,” she announced the next morning after we had finished reciting the Lord’s prayer. “For the sake of the reputation of our students and our school, we will not discuss the events with the public. No reporters will be allowed in the school, and I have impressed upon your parents, and I do so again with you, to please refrain from loose talk during the holidays. The lawyers, the police, and your teachers will be able to do everything to get to the truth of the matter. We have had a difficult time these last few days, and I want you girls to relax and have a good time at home.”
She did not mention that four of the schoolgirls had been instrumental in the arrest of the principal. I was the only one of the detectives still around in those last days when the girls fell out of the school like milk teeth, but Willy did not call me up to her office and talk to me. She knew what I had done, but she showed no anger or emotion. It was during this time that she turned into Wilson the Just.
We spent that three-week September holiday after the murder in Bombay, Akhila, Shobha, and I. We spent the days in Shobha’s posh flat overlooking the Oval Maidan, eating onion bhajiyas and hot fried potato chips made by her fat cook Deoka, who had been with them since Shobha was four years old. He lives to please me, especially now, said Shobha, tilting her head proudly. We knew that now meant after her mother had left her, and asked no more. We were allowed to have as many Cokes with ice in tall glasses as we wanted.
We told our parents we needed to be together every day of the holidays to study for our exams. And we did sit around and use the tools of our trade. We dissected the events and the words around them like frogs in Miss Mathews’ science lab. We used deductive logic, inductive logic, and, as Akhila later pointed out, we used seductive logic. With the juices bursting out of our bodies, our pimples, our periods, coarse curly hairs sprouting on our nipples and chins, we tried to divine the actions and motives of Raswani and Nelly, those two old women who had lived cheek by jowl for so many years.
The murder holiday was like a rest stop in the path of the scandals. It was after the murder of Prince, after the disappearance of the Hindi teacher, after the popping of the first scandal. It was while the world still thought that it was a fact that Nelson had murdered her blood child that we sat around hugging pillows to our breasts, and spinning and whirling and stretching the story as we sucked ice cubes from the frosted glasses of coke.
We wrapped up the story of Prince’s murder and moved on to Raswani after the newpaper reports of September, 12, 1974.
ACCUSED PRINCIPAL DOES NOT DENY MURDER CHARGE
The principal of Miss Timmins’ School, Panchgani, has not denied the charges leveled against her. Accused of murdering her biological daughter Miss Moira Prince, Miss Shirley Nelson, who is currently being detained in a room in a mofussil hospital, has refused to make a statement either denying or admitting to the crime. Her only words before the Satara sessions magistrate prior to being taken into judicial custody were, “His will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” She has not spoken since. She has refused to retain counsel. Reporters were informed that the State of Maharashtra would designate a lawyer if no one came forward to take up her case.
The report went on to say that a local man, Shankar Tamde, who had been held for questioning, had been released.
The Indian Express quoted Nelson as saying, “I am in a great strait: let me fall now into the hand of the Lord; for very great are his mercies: but let me not fall into the hand of man.”
The story had now become front-page news. The entire country seemed to be following the dark tale of the two British women who had played out their twisted history atop this remote rain-washed mountain. The Naxalites set fire to an abandoned church in Gauhati, in the state of Assam, protesting missionary presence in India.
It was all so surreal, for we felt inside it and still so far removed.
Shobha’s bedroom had a balcony that was level with the top of the palm trees that circled the Oval. The monsoon winds came in from the sea at high tide, and buffeted them around so that when we were lounging on her bed, we could see the bent trees swishing their branches like tails. In the evenings we could see children taking pony rides at the bandstand.
We imagined the sequence of events. On the night of the murder, while Shobha, reading Lolita with a torch under her blanket, heard the scream torn from the soul of the poor Prince, Raswani watched from the other side, and with her mad white eye glued to the chink where the wall met the wood of the door between the rooms, she saw the Prince fling the letter at Nelson, and saw that Nelson did not pick it up to read it, for of course she knew the fact that it contained, had lived in fear of it all these years.
Raswani saw the Prince stalk out, and soon after, she saw Nelson snatch her purse and walk out into the night. She could see the airmail envelope on the table, nearly within her grasp. She knew the bolt on the door between the rooms was loose. You could jiggle the door and drop the latch. And so, while we were running down from table-land and Nelly was saying her last prayer before pushing her daughter off the edge of the cliff, the Hindi teacher went into the room she had watched secretly for so many years, and with shaking hands she snatched the letter and ran back into her room.
She could have read it right there in the room. She could have stood over the desk, read the letter, and left it there so that Nelson would never know she had seen it. Then it would have been a different story. But maybe she was nervous, standing in this inner chamber; maybe she did not have her glasses; maybe she expected Nelly to burst into the room any minute. And so she took the letter and retreated to the safety of her room. And did n
ot put it back.
How shocked she must have been when she read the letter—perhaps she had lain rigid in her bed, tossing it around in her boxed brain. And as more time passed, it grew harder for her to get up and go back into the room to return it.
When Wilson announced the death of Prince, the horrible truth must have been clear to Miss Raswani. Perhaps she had even seen Nelly come back to her room later with signs of the deathly deed fresh upon her. Perhaps her clothes were tattered, since it was a known fact that there had been a struggle before the Prince’s body went hurtling over the cliff. Raswani could have heard her washing her white pajamas in the sink at night.
But she did not tell the inspector. She did not tell anyone at all, not even Willy, because she was going to protect her beloved Nelson, whose face she saw instead of the Lord’s when she prayed at night. Why should she suffer so much? Hadn’t she suffered enough? Hadn’t we all suffered enough? Raswani was really the most simpleminded of the Timmins teachers—nobody with an ounce of intelligence could teach like her—and so we gave her a simple construct. We figured that she saw them as the sinner and the saint. Nelson, who had hidden her love child and then committed murder, was the saint, and the brave-hearted Prince was the sinner because she made love to women and did not hide it.
“The twistedness of this logic is truly horrendous,” said Shobha in her imitation Indian Jamsetjee Ram accent, nodding her head from side to side.
“Nelson must be her only real contact with humanity. I bet you no one else has even liked her,” I said.
But if that was her motive, we asked each other, biting into salted buttas on the windy ledge of Marine Drive and watching the sea thrash out the last of the current of that long, wild monsoon, if she wanted to keep that secret locked in her soul, why did she give the letter to me, the letter that implicated her beloved Nelson? Why did she give me the secret letter after hiding it for a whole week?
He is testing me. That was the first thing she said when I informed her that the three of us had seen Nelson that night on table-land. I saw now that she must have taken my words as a sign from her God. I was her messenger from God, sent to tell her not to hide the truth. We had seen Nelson on table-land. I had told Raswani that day in her veranda that we would have to tell Shobha’s father. Raswani must have known that the questions would begin and the story would soon unravel.
Into Thy hands I commend Thee, she had said, like the good Christian that she was, as she slipped the letter into the book with only a glancing hint. Leave it to the Lord, she must have thought. If He wants the truth to be known, He will reveal it to them. And she had gotten it out of her hands, for she had felt so tainted and so guilty with the letter in her room—after all, she had been a thief in the night, breaking into someone else’s room and stealing. She had kept reading and rereading the letter and shoving it to the bottom of different drawers, so when she had finally decided to put it into the Hindi text, she could not find it at first.
She knew the story would unravel, and she wanted no part of it. That is what I believed then.
We agreed that Miss Raswani, who had been such an integral part of our edifice of fear, could have ordered a taxi, called the driver down for her bags, sneaked out from the gap behind the hockey pitch at dawn, and disappeared forever, as in a respectable Agatha Christie novel. Or she could have been killed.
We were aware that there were still mysteries at hand.
We wrote in our murder notebook. It was our last entry. I must have been responsible for that “ergo.”
Proposed Order of Events on Table-Land on the Night of August 27, 1974
10:45. Girls reach table-land. They do not go near the needle, but wander around.
11:30. They see Nelson and Prince near the needle.
12:35. The girls are back in school.
Somewhere between 12 and 1, the boys see Apt running down.
Ergo: She probably went up before 12.
Somewhere between 12 and 1, the boys find Shankar bending over the dead body.
Whichever way you came down from table-land—unless via the cliff, like the Prince—you had to pass the municipal park.
Apt could have gone up after Nelson left. Between the Apt and Nelson, I would say Nelson was the murderer. She had the motive. Shobha presumed that Apt was the last person down. And she and Merch together had pushed the Prince off the cliff because of some tensions in their supposed love affair.
“I spoke to Dushant today,” Shobha announced on the last day of our holidays. Her boyfriend had been in some backwater family factory town during his break and was just back in Bombay. “Dushant told me that the boys have decided to report Miss Apte to the authorities,” said Shobha, looking archly at me.
I wanted to warn Miss Apte. I wished there were some way to tell her that a trap was about to be sprung, but I had no idea where she was.
BOOK THREE
The Blot
Charu
Twenty-one
Mr. Much
Sometimes I look at the women with their hands folded on their laps and wonder. I see them on Sunday evenings, sitting by the sea with their husbands, their children building castles in the sand. Packing school lunches in the morning, puja after bath, mother-in-law frowning, and sex without a sound. Yes, I could have done it, and my shell could have been my pillow.
I was in Kolhapur, and my mother was in hospital. I spent the days in her hospital room in an anesthetic state of mind, wondering idly about my life, as though it were happening to someone else. I ate heavily from tiffins full of delicious freshly cooked food sent to tempt Ayi, and then I slept for two hours in the extra bed.
At night, in the visiting daughters’ room with random aunts lined up beside me, I could not sleep. A knife-thrust of desire would carve a big round hole in my stomach, so that I would have to turn over and stuff pillows under it. I wanted to make love to Pin again. Just once more. I wanted to kiss her for a long, long time. She would pull out, smile into my eyes, give my blot a nibble, and go back into my mouth again. I could feel her teeth on my face. I wanted to bite her and scratch her and twine my legs around her. I wanted to leave small marks on her white velvet body. Just once, just one candlelit night more I wanted. I wanted to love her with abandon. I would drift into a shallow sleep and wake up under the mosquito net with hot blood jumping in my veins so I could not lie down. I would creep out of the room and roam around the courtyard, studying the slate tiles in the moonlight.
Walking into the house from hospital one evening, I found Gopika, a middle aunt just arrived from Jalgaon, slurping tea with my grandmother in the kitchen. Gopika always maintained that everything was better in Jalgaon. Her sons were taller, her daughters were fairer, the milk was better in Jalgaon. Everyone called her Jalgaon Masi.
“They tell me Shalini is much better now,” said Jalgaon Masi, “but of course I haven’t spoken to Tai yet.”
“Yes,” I said, “Ayi is better. She is in a stable condition.” Ayi was now out of intensive care, off all the machines, and out of danger. She was officially out of her coma, but was still very vague and distant. She was ensconced in a large private room on the top floor of the hospital, attended by a day nurse and a night nurse. But she wasn’t connecting the dots yet. She wouldn’t speak for days, and then, suddenly, would let out a torrent of dark jumbled fragments mainly about her childhood. We were not sure if she recognized us.
Dr. Tendulkar told us gravely that her brain could have been damaged, since it had been deprived of oxygen.
“But we will watch her for a while,” he said. And so we watched her. We took tur
ns, Tai, Baba, and I. Baba slept the night with her, Tai did the evenings, and I sat with her through the day. I sat by the bed and held her hand, I combed her thinning hair, and tried to feed her tomato soup and toast, though she would have none of it. I looked into her eyes, and I was sure she was resting. One fine morning, when I came in, she would say, “Charu beta, get me my knitting, it is on the shelf. No, not there, over there.”
The official story was that she slipped into a coma as a result of a reaction to some new medicine for her thyroid problem. The suicide attempt was sealed into a tight family circle; even the younger generation was not to know. We called it the Episode. It had been a week, but we still did not let visitors into her room, for fear of what she might say.
The house went into emergency footing. One car was a hospital ferry. Streams of family members came and went, carrying meals and snacks and fruit and twice-boiled water, thermos flasks of tea, clean towels and sheets and freshly ironed saris and kaftans. The benches outside the hospital room were always filled with gossiping relatives. Dada came every afternoon at 3:30, dressed in his spotless white pants and shirt, on his way back home from his air-conditioned office at Chitnis Transport. The old man would sit outside her room on a straight-backed chair and glare into the distance for exactly ten minutes. And then he would get up and leave. The brothers came in the evening. The sisters began to gather.
“And oh, yes, Charu, there are some people here to see you. From Panchgani,” Jalgaon Masi said, blowing into a perfectly poised saucer as I walked out of the kitchen.
I had heard nothing since the day I left Panchgani. During the day I ached for Ayi, and at night I wept for Pin. I was thankful for the rhythm of the hospital. I decided never to go back to school.
“Who?” I asked, my voice high, my heart throbbing in my temples.
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