Miss Timmins' School for Girls

by Nayana Currimbhoy

  “I don’t know. They are sitting in the drawing room,” she said, pointing with her chin, and I thought she wrinkled her nose in disapproval.

  I went in to find Merch, Samar, and Shabir sitting stiffly on the triangle of plastic sofas. They looked very uncomfortable and very stoned. They had been sitting there for at least an hour, they said, and had consumed several cups of tea.

  Tai poked her head into the room just then. She was on her way to the hospital. The driver was waiting on the doorstep with the hospital tiffin. She beckoned me out of the room.

  “Who is that black boy?” she demanded, her face screwed in disgust. She pronounced it as “buoy.” She did not bother to lower her voice. She wore a purple nylon sari with swirling yellow patterns.

  I looked at the three of them with Kolhapur eyes. In Panchgani, they were unconventional. But here, in my strict middle-class household where the women all wore saris and covered their heads in front of their father-in-law, they looked absolutely scandalous.

  The black buoy was surely Shabir, who was the most outrageous of them all. He was very thin, very dark, and very tall, and dressed in deep-orange pajamas and a hand-dyed vest with a front pocket like the ones the servants wore. His curly hair was loose and strewn untidily across his face. He was nodding his head and smiling at his own private joke. He was smoking a bidi.

  “He is a sadhu, Tai,” I babbled hastily, trying to walk her towards the door. “See, he is wearing orange clothes. He is a Rajneesh sadhu. You know Ishwar kaka from across the street? Even he is a Rajneesh sadhu.” In truth, we had all been a bit shocked when our conventional neighbor with three grown daughters had one day turned up in orange robes and declared that he had become a devotee of Rajneesh, the controversial guru who condoned free love and was rumored to have sex orgies at his ashram in Poona. I imagined that clubbing Shabir together with a fat and balding neighbor might give him a measure of respectability. But Tai was not impressed. Her scowl remained intact.

  Samar was sporting a stained white kurta with jeans and thick village slippers. He had a small gold ring in his right ear. Merch was being manful. He was wearing a checked shirt, and had a pen clipped to his pocket. In spite of his glassy eyes, he was the most respectable and introducible of them all, and so I pointed to him. “This is Merch, Tai. He has come to give me some Panchgani news,” I said.

  Merch stood up straight and took one brave step towards us.

  “Oh, yes, Mr. Much,” said Tai, looking him up and down sternly.

  “So what do you do in Panchgani, Mr. Much?” she asked, her pitted face set in a thunderous scowl. Any young man who dared visit a Chitnis girl must be prepared to produce his credentials. And since no young men of this kind had ever visited a Chitnis girl, Tai was stacking the ramparts with hot oil.

  “Photography,” said Merch faintly, scratching his head.

  “A photographer?” she looked at me, taken aback. Her youngest brother, my uncle Anil, was a professional photographer. She was very proud of him.

  But she soon took it in her stride. “Ah, immature,” she said dismissively. “He must be an immature.”

  She waddled out, wiping her face with the polka-dotted napkin. I had no idea what she meant. Merch kept a very straight face. I watched my two worlds collide, not in fire and brimstone, as I had feared, but in comic relief.

  “Welcome to Kolhapur, Mr. Immature Much,” I said, smiling, happy to see them.

  We left the house immediately. I called to Ramu the servant not to keep dinner for me. Shabir had dropped acid, and he could feel it coming on. He needed a safe space. “Give me a good small-town spot,” he said. “I’ve been doing acid so long in the green meadows and rain. I’m looking forward to this.” We went to an idli house in the bazaar, but before our order came, Shabir announced that the lights were making him nervous. “Too intense, man,” he said. “And that yellow rice that villager was eating, it exploded in my face like a volcano. I think I could even be hallucinating.”

  We drove around the outskirts of the town and finally found a street with only three little bungalows bunched together on one side. One flickering streetlight stood guard in the middle of them. I sat in the backseat with Merch. Samar parked the car and lit a joint. I took three deep drags and passed the joint to Merch. My arm stretched across a lifetime before it reached him. We had always been three in the backseat, and today, I could not even see her face clearly in my mind. But I knew that her thigh would have been pressed against mine so that my breath came short and fast.

  No one said anything. Samar turned the Rolling Stones louder. Shabir got out of the car and walked around the empty street. “I’m seeing the light now,” he said sagely as he passed the car, his long, lean face lit in a beatific smile.

  “Your pupils are dilated,” said Merch.

  LSD was something you read about, or heard the Beatles sing about. I did not think it was something that anyone I knew had actually experienced. Maybe they had all done it. Maybe they had even done it on a night when I was with them and not told me. I had imagined that a person on acid would look somewhat like a street drunk, staggering and stuttering. But Shabir was quite calm and coherent. It was as if he were watching a good movie.

  Suddenly he climbed back into the car, convulsed with laughter. His springy black hair bounced around his head as he went up and down, slapping his thighs. We could not get a word out of him for some time.

  “Amateur,” he uttered as he gasped for his last breath. “She meant amateur. You could see her brain turning. That black bouy Much could not possibly be a professional photographer.”

  “But black buoy was not Much. It was you,” I said. Shabir laughed harder.

  “Too Much,” said Samar, snorting. “Too Much. Mr. I. Much. Nice name.”

  “He could be a minor poet,” I said.

  It came to mind because he had said it to me once. In his room, I had found a book titled Minor Romantic Poets of the Nineteenth Century. The rain was splashing merrily on the roof, the light in his room was sweet and yellow. Shabir and his girlfriend, Raisa, were on the bed, kissing. Samar, his wife, and the Prince were playing Scrabble. The Prince was stooped and restless. She had a bad mood sign on her head, and so no one spoke to her. Samar seemed to be winning, but everyone was waiting for Pin to do a triple word using J or X. And then she would probably produce a small, shy smile. Merch was rolling a joint, changing the music, and making tea. I picked the book off the shelf and was leafing through it. I knew Merch loved poetry; he said it was the purest of the fictions. Distilled. But still, who would actually buy and read a book that held only minor poets? I was thinking, astonished, when I heard him behind me.

  “Minor poets are special. I would be quite content to be a minor poet,” he said, his brown eyes shining with pleasure in the dim light.

  To be included in scholarly and obscure anthologies, I thought, and found that I had said it out loud in the car. I was used to keeping my thoughts to myself.

  We decided to call him Much forever after. Much and the Black Buoy. We began to laugh. And every time there was a lull, one of us would start again. We laughed feverishly, bent over, holding our stomachs, lurching in and out of the car, which stood with doors all wide open like wings, just outside the circle of lamplight. A light went on in a bedroom of one of the bungalows. A curtain was held back for a minute and then dropped again.

  Friends could die, family could fall apart, but we could sit in the night on a dead-end road and fill out with laughter. Perhaps I could live through anything, I thought then.

  We stopped laughing as suddenly as we had started. And the gravity and gloom that we had held above the laughter settled upon our heads. Samar stepped out of the car. The air closed in around him and became a solid mass of sadness. Merch and I turned and faced each other. The Stones should have been playing “Ruby Tuesday,” but they were not. Merch had leaned over to the front seat and tur
ned the volume down. It was too dark to see his face, but the whites of his eyes gleamed. He lit a cigarette and passed it to me. Then he lit one for himself and took a deep drag. His movements were slow and deliberate.

  “Do you want to know?” he asked, his voice hoarse, intimate.

  No, I did not want to know. I had an affair with a woman, and now she was dead. She was an intense woman, perhaps she was a mad woman. Perhaps I had loved her. But now she was dead. She fell off a cliff on a rainy night. She must have jumped just after I left. But I could not have her back, not for all the perfumes of Arabia. I could still have my mother back, though, if I hoped and dreamt and prayed and cared.

  “Yes, I want to know,” I said.

  All that time with Pin, I had been desperate to get her deep dark secrets out of Merch and jealous that she did not see fit to confide in me. But now, I was afraid.

  “Miss Nelson was arrested for Pin’s murder,” said Merch, slowly, pausing before every word, like a man jumping stones across a gushing stream. “They went to the school and arrested her today, I wanted to tell you before you read it in the papers.”

  I always remember what I said in the face of this earthshaking news.

  “But how did you find me?” I asked, because that was what I had been thinking all evening and waiting to ask.

  Maybe he was relieved to talk trivia, or maybe he sensed that I needed to nibble around it. He launched into a lengthy story.

  “I knew you were in Kolhapur, so we went to the Chitnis Transport office in the old city first and told the gatekeeper that we were looking for Miss Charulata Apte. A khaki peon came to the car and said Senior Sir wants to see you. The others waited in the car, and I went up these narrow stairs to this small air-conditioned office. This regal sort of Dalmatian was slouching beside the desk, but sat up straight as soon as I walked in.

  “Your grandfather ordered tea for me. He looked me up and down while I drank, then he said, so you want to see Charu? I was kind of hypnotized. I just nodded. He told the peon to get into the car and take us to the house. The Dalmatian got up and trotted behind us all the way to the car, wagged his tail twice, and went back. As if the old man had sent his deputy to say good-bye.”

  Merch was talking, and I had broken up into a hot and seething mass.

  “But why Miss Nelson? Did someone see her on table-land?” I asked in a squeaky voice verging on hysteria.

  Merch looked at me thoughtfully. He seemed to be about to say something. But he lit a cigarette, instead, and practiced smoke rings. I realized I had not made the most appropriate of responses so far.

  I lit a cigarette too. Someone had seen Nelson and Pin on table-land. Whoever saw her could very well have seen me. But it seemed as if they had not. I could have told Merch then of how my role was threaded through that night. But I was used to being a secretive soul. I rubbed my blot instead.

  “She told me she considered jumping from that very spot,” I said.

  “But Woggle insisted it was murder. Too many signs of struggle, clothes torn, and all that stuff.”

  “It’s all so bizarre. Arrested Nelson. Didn’t she deny it or something?” I asked, aghast. “She must at least have denied the murder charge. She’ll get a lawyer, she’ll deny it. Why should she push a girl off a cliff?” I knew she could not have done it. I had seen her walk down with her purse dangling jauntily in the crook of her arm.

  “But wait,” said Merch. “It gets better—or worse. I suppose one should say worse. The girls found this letter that proves that Nelson was her biological mother.”

  This time my response was appropriate to the enormity of the news. I clapped my hand to my mouth in disbelief, I ran my hand through my hair, I broke into a sweat, I let out a high-pitched sound. Who would have imagined that her hated Nelson was the one who gave birth to her?

  “And what about the parents who died in the bus accident?” I stuttered, still unbelieving.

  “It seems the Princes had adopted her and did not tell her. They never told her she was adopted. That’s why she hated them all so much. The whole time she was growing up they did not tell her anything. She found out she was adopted just this year, and that too in a roundabout way. She felt they betrayed her. All three of them. Made her live this lie. ‘If I was adopted, so what? Why not tell me?’ she said, and of course she was right. She was bitter about it. She said she felt somehow dirty, like a hidden wart or something.”

  “You mean she knew that Nelson was her mother and you knew that too?” I asked, astonished.

  “No, no. Pin did not know that Nelson was her mother. Not then. A few months ago she had told me she was adopted. She found out after her parents died,” said Merch. The Princes had made Nelson the executor of their wills, and it was Nelson who was responsible for sorting through their papers so Pin knew nothing except what she got as her inheritance. Apparently they had left her a cottage in England and some money, and she was always dreaming of going there.

  “Then some old greeting card that was sent long ago and lost in a circuitous sea route or something came for the Princes to Nasik, and was finally redirected to Pin. It was from her mother’s sister’s family in London. Pin told me she had been completely stunned to see a photograph of this young man and woman and their blond child fall out of the card. There was a chatty letter from a man called Jonathan Birkett addressing her mother as Aunt Martha, saying he hoped they would keep in touch, though his mother had died. Pin figured this must be her mother’s sister’s family. She had heard childhood stories of her mother growing up—in Dartmouth or some town with a D, she said, I can’t remember—with her younger sister, but that was all. No adult stories of this sister or her family were ever told. Pin said it blew her away. She told me that when she first got in touch with the family after receiving the card, they thought her story was a hoax. They insisted the Princes had never had a child. So she went to London last winter. Her cousin, this Jonathan, told her none of the relatives had heard of her. Can you imagine, they had kept her a secret from their own families? She told me she spent sleepless nights wondering why they had done this.”

  “And so, how did it unravel?”

  “Pin and her British cousin finally pieced it together and realized the Princes must have adopted her as a baby while they were living in Little Snoring during or just after the war. Jonathan was not even sure they were missionaries at that time. But he was five or six, he said, when his mother’s sister and her husband left suddenly for India. Since his mother was dead, there was no way to verify anything.

  “Poor Pin,” I said. “In a strange country, all alone. She must have felt terrible.”

  “She said she was glad. The usual Pin hard-shell talk, I suppose, but she said when she found out she was not their biological child she was actually relieved. She said she had always felt she had no connection to them.”

  “But do you think she even suspected that Nelson was her mother? If she felt so different from the Princes, do you think she felt some connection to Nelson? Her anger makes so much sense then,” I said. Is that what she was thinking, I wondered, as she played with my hair and seemed so lost in thought, and would rise abruptly and say, let’s go.

  Merch shook his head, said nothing.

  “But who saw the two of them on table-land in the middle of the night?” I asked.

  “The schoolgirls, you know, Nandita and some others.” I had not seen the schoolgirls, so I supposed they had not seen me.

  I am glad I was so stoned that night. It sort of cushioned the news.

  But why had Nelson been arrested? Had she confessed? Why should she confess? How could she have done it? It was hard for me to keep all these parallel and intersecting events in place. I began to feel breathless and dizzy. “Did Nelson confess to the killings?”

  “Well, I mean, what’s there to confess? All the pieces fit together. She was seen every step of the way: Pin got a
letter from her cousin revealing that Nelson was her mother. She rushed out into the night, she went to Nelson’s room, one of the girls heard the two of them fighting from her dorm. She heard Pin sobbing and storming out. Nelson followed her to table-land, where other girls saw her sitting on the rocks behind Pin. They did not know if Pin even realized that Nelson was there. Pin was found dead with signs of a struggle.”

  There are some steps that are still dark, Mr. Much, I wanted to say, but kept quiet.

  “So you mean she found out on the day of her death that Nelson was her mother?” I asked. Hold me safe and tight, she had said, but I had not. Her world had turned more cruel that very night, and she had come to me. I had sent her to her mother empty and wounded.

  I thought of her face when she walked into my room and put her hand inside my blouse on that last night. She must have just found out. Must have walked straight to me. I had betrayed Pin twice that night. In my room, and again on table-land. A third time the same night, and I could well be St. Peter of the Bible, I thought bitterly.

  I was sweating. Soon I was out of the car, head over the side of the road, vomiting. I threw up everything I had ever eaten, and then some more, and was retching and hiccoughing and sobbing for long afterwards.

  It was Shabir who efficiently pulled off my vomit-stained dupatta and held my hair back from my face while I bent over puking my heart out into the ditch. He stood over me, pointing in awe at things I had eaten.

  “Psychedelic. This tomato haldi combination, you should see it,” he called over to Samar. Samar declined. This was more intimate than I wanted it to be and I was embarrassed at first. But he was so kind and casual and matter-of-fact that I began to feel quite calm, and allowed him to comfort me.

  “Your vomit has a Brahmin smell,” said Shabir.

  When at last I could hold my head up, he went to the car and came back with a thin checked napkin and a bottle of water. After I was done washing and wiping, he fished around in his front pocket and produced a packet of supari to suck on.