Book Read Free

Miss Timmins' School for Girls

Page 27

by Nayana Currimbhoy


  But I allowed the heavy mantle of responsibility to blow off my shoulders as I sat atop the world with Merch. We decided to go on a bilingual journey. Every word and phrase we said would mean something in two languages at the same time. We laid out our phrases like a road map: far white luggage, we could say, after hey bug. What lovely, we could exclaim after we passed paddy fields. And if by chance there was an accident, we could say “tout le monde” (which means “broken head” in Marathi).

  “Prepare the car,” I told him gaily as I gathered up my things. “We will depart at dusk.”

  “First stop, Casablanca,” Merch called after me as I climbed down the steep stairs and walked to school alone.

  There were three Ambassador cars parked in the school compound. Fathers and mothers and ayahs holding baby brothers were milling around.

  I came upon Miss Wilson leading a plump dark man in his forties out of the Principal’s office.

  “Oh, how nice to see you, Miss Apte,” said Miss Wilson. “I do hope your mother is better.”

  She turned and introduced me to the man. “Mr. Bhansali, meet Miss Apte, a new teacher. She has been teaching English and English literature to Nandita this past term.”

  Mr. Bhansali held out his hand, and when I tentatively offered mine, he pumped it with purpose. The school was pale and shrunken around his vigorous male presence.

  “Nandita has a gift for language,” I said, feeling I needed to enter the conversation.

  “Thank you. She will be pleased you said that. She thinks very highly of you,” he said, and then turned to Miss Wilson.

  “And please, do let me know if there is anything more I can do. I have complete confidence in Miss Nelson, and in all of you,” he said, his voice smooth and reassuring. “As I told you, I can use my contacts if necessary.” His smile was measured, like his daughter’s.

  “I will stop by the police chowki and speak to the inspector and will bring Nandita back for questioning,” he said. “But of course, that may not be necessary.” And then he winked at her. Miss Wilson, quite unused to being winked at by grown men, flushed and let out a nervous giggle.

  The school was as chaotic as a beehive without a queen. Grave groups of parents were being escorted down the stairs and through the corridors and dorms by white teachers with red faces and brown teachers with white faces. They were fielding anxious queries with terse, tense statements. The girls, unbound, were squealing and jumping between them, tearing around the school in urgent, excited tangents.

  I had pictured myself receiving the school news from Miss Henderson with the comfort of tea and Shrewsbury. But when I peeped into her dorm, I saw that she was otherwise engaged. I caught sight of her face as she was placating a father. He wore a white bush-shirt with blue diamonds embroidered down the sides. His black hair was gleaming and as polished as his shoes.

  “I put my daughters here because I want them to get good convent education. Speak good English, you know. But we have to live in this society. I cannot have them exposed to scandals,” he said, gesticulating with both hands, truculent as a turtle.

  “Mr. Shah,” said Miss Henderson severely. “We are not a convent here. You should know that, with three daughters here. We are not a Catholic school. This is a Protestant missionary school. We are not nuns, I’ll have you know.”

  Mr. Shah looked confused for a minute or two, but then he got his bluster back.

  “These foreigners think they can come here and disrupt our ways,” he said contemptuously. He seemed to have forgotten that he himself had placed his daughters with these foreign women to learn their foreign language and culture. To his credit, he had perhaps never thought of the culture.

  “We are all very upset about these events, Mr. Shah, and have tried to shield the girls. That is why we requested that you pick them up,” said Miss Henderson. Her face was puffy, her eyes swollen and red-rimmed. The corners of her lips were lifted in a strained smile.

  “But of course, if you feel you have lost confidence, there are many other schools in Panchgani, you know, even a Hindu school. Perhaps your family would be more comfortable in Sanjeevan. It is behind Sandy Banks. They have holidays for Diwali and everything,” she said in the severe voice she used with girls caught whispering after lights out.

  Mr. Shah was furious. “Are you trying to tell me to take my children out of your school?” he bellowed.

  Poor Miss Henderson took a step back, and stuttered, “No, no, I only meant—”

  Mr. Shah drew himself up. He was the same height as Miss Henderson, perhaps even a bit shorter, but he seemed to tower over her, becoming suddenly a powerful man. I saw the white side retreating across the chessboard in disarray before my very eyes.

  “You may tell me to take my children out of the school if you want,” he said, nodding his head vigorously from side to side. “Yes, you can go ahead. Although they are very good girls, I will take them out. You can tell me that.” He paused for breath before the punch line. “But kindly refrain from telling me where I can or should put them. I would advise you not to do that. I will put them in a Hindu school or a Muslim School or a Christian School—wherever I like. But that will be my business.”

  I felt it was kinder to leave Hendy then. All these men in the school. Never had there been so many men in the dorms.

  I walked all the way down to the hospital and found Sister Richards sitting in her dispensary rolling cotton swabs, listening to Radio Ceylon. Sudden gusts of wind blew a patter of rain on the tin roof. I realized that the hospital was an outpost of the school, as surely as the school was an outpost of the empire. No male voices penetrated the enclave. The only sign of the chaos that reigned abroad was a red flask on the dispensary table.

  “I always felt it,” Sister sniffed. “Felt there was something fishy about your precious Miss Nelson. Too saintly. I’ve seen the world. When you go through a war, you know a thing or two.” She eyed her flask longingly, but decided against taking a sip.

  “No wonder that child acted up,” she said, twisting her lips. “With that kind of mother. Keeping her here, not telling her.”

  “But Sister, Miss Prince didn’t even know that Miss Nelson was her mother,” I said, trying to reason with her.

  “Don’t you believe that, child. She could feel the pull of her own blood,” said Sister, taking a discreet sip from her flask. “Blood always knows.”

  Sister must be right. It made sense. No wonder Pin could not leave the school. No wonder she hated Nelson so much. I saw Pin bound in a lasso and dragged through the dust behind Nelson riding an irreproachable white steed. Everything seemed to be coming at me from a distance. I wanted to grab the flask and take a swig of rum and wipe my mouth with the back of my hand.

  “Are you staying here now?” called Sister as I walked towards my room.

  Yes, I was about to say, for that was what I had planned. But the smell of the room brought back my yesterday self. I smelled little Charu Apte, the bobbing virgin, in a tight chudidar. “No,” I shouted out in a voice whose vehemence and loudness surprised me. “No, I am just taking a few things for the holidays,” I said, more placatingly. I sat on my bed.

  The room looked just the same as it had on the first day. I had done nothing to make it mine. Just makeup on the dressing table, books on the shelves, and a bright counterpane that my ayi had sent in a neatly wrapped parcel, together with a bottle of pickle that had leaked onto a corner of the counterpane. Though I sent it to the dhobi three times, the smell of methi inserted itself into the room forever after, dueling with the disinfectant and dirty socks.

  Two hospitals, I thought firmly—even two hospitals is one too many. I got up with a sudden burst of energy, pulled out my black metal trunk from under the bed, and began to throw my things into it.

  One might, like Clint Eastwood, prefer to die beside a fast-running river, but the truth is that all the big things happen in
a cesspit of bright lights, disinfectant, and pain. You are born, you give birth, you die, all in a hospital. And furthermore, everything happens in threes. Three witches below, three gods above. The Holy Trinity; Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva. The world is held aloft by the magic number three. It was fitting, then, that the season of my rebirth was a three-hospital monsoon, although I would have preferred if fate had granted me three palaces.

  The first was the hospital of desire, this room, where my body first awoke to passion; the second, the hospital from which I had just left the sweet shelter of my mother and walked out into the world alone; and the third, Vai Hospital, where Miss Nelson was being kept in custody. The role of this last one is harder to know. It keeps changing still.

  I swept through my room like a maniac. I threw my books, my clothes, my towels, my sheets, my photos, my letters into the trunk. Then I took down the small brown suitcase from above the cupboard and put in a few things I might need in Kolhapur. I shoved the trunk under the bed and locked it, deciding I would come back for it another day; in a week, perhaps.

  It was three in the afternoon. It was the right time to go to Willy. Or even Woggle. I should go to the Woggle and tell him what I saw.

  I was tired suddenly, exhausted from the travel and turmoil. I had become lethargic and used to afternoon naps. I lay down and fell into an indolent sleep. It was evening when I awoke. I lay in bed in the gathering gloom for a while, considering my options.

  It would do me no good to be blamed for a murder I did not commit. Once I said I was there, I would have to explain what I was doing. And if the affair trickled out—which it no doubt would, whispers and rumors and what was she doing up there in the middle of the night with that notorious woman, and yes, we saw the two alone in the hockey pitch, no doubt Ayi would die. She was hovering between life and death as it was. This would probably give her a big push to the other side. The Kolhapur gang would blame Baba’s bloodline. I imagined Tai’s face screwed up in disgust, saying, “The apple does not fall far from the tree.”

  But my silence would mean that Nelson would be the culprit. And she was innocent. Only she and I knew this. I should go and meet her in Vai, I thought. I should find out how she plans to defend herself.

  I changed into a saffron kurta Pin had given me one day when I walked into her room drenched. It was a man’s kurta, cut wide and short. I had washed it and kept it on the chair, meaning to return it. But now, no need, I thought, as I slipped it on and took a look at my flared hips in the mirror. Maybe in her clothes I can be as bold and heedless as she was. On the other hand, that might just have gone and got her dead.

  Twenty-five

  The Secret Mother

  No one asked me anything when I landed up in Merch’s room that evening clutching my brown suitcase, though they were all there, Samar and Shabir and a boy with dirty feet who had smoked a joint with George Harrison. No one ever asked me anything. That was the beauty of being with them. I blithely believed that they knew nothing. I believed that they never spoke about me behind my back. I considered myself to be smooth on the outside; I thought I was sliding in and out of things, leaving no aura behind.

  I had left the school and rushed to Merch’s retreat, thinking on the way that maybe I should ask Merch for advice. He is a wise man, I thought, and so much older, almost thirty.

  But Merch was edgy, nervous, pacing around the room, not meeting my eyes. Usually I would look up at him and almost always find his eyes on me.

  The rest of them were discussing ways of getting a fresh supply of drugs, now that Shankar’s den of vice was no more.

  “Rajneesh Ashram is best,” said Shabir, and so they decided to drive to Poona that very night. I was worried about Ayi and had been planning to return to Kolhapur by the morning bus. But this was too good a chance to lose, I thought. I must strike while the iron is hot, I must meet Nelson right away.

  “Can you drop me off at Vai,” I asked, “since it’s on the way?”

  “Why Vai?” they asked astonished.

  “I’ll take the morning bus to Kolhapur from there,” I said. Vai was the junction town at the foot of the valley, with a large, thronging bus station. “No, no,” they said gallantly. “We’ll take you. We’ll go to Poona, we’ll pick up the dope, and then we’ll drive you to Kolhapur.” They were most enthusiastic. I knew this meandering trip could take days, or weeks.

  “At least let’s start with Vai,” I said.

  It was already late when we were ready to depart. We were all stoned. We stopped for tea as often as we could. After each chai halt, we all smoked a joint. I cannot remember the name of the boy who had smoked a joint with George Harrison, because by the time we reached Vai, everyone had started calling him Hari & Son. They said they would call him Hari for short. Hari, who was trying to distance himself from the Beatles, pulled out a Jethro Tull cassette from his orange backpack, which he had bought, he said, from a foreign hippie in Colaba. I was very much in awe of him and hardly looked at him. I sat at my usual window, now with Merch’s thigh pressed close, as we lurched down the winding ghat road in a mystical Tull trance.

  Merch sat next to me, but we did not talk at all. That night after her death, we had gone to table-land and sat beside her rock. We wept bitterly, but it seemed to me that we had not spoken at all. I do not remember even looking up at him; I remember only that I felt almost safe, with my head against Merch’s bony chest.

  And now, today, he would not meet my eyes. But those first days were jagged and bittersweet with death—as Merch later put it—still perched on our left shoulders. I did not even find it strange. I did not speak to anyone at all. Not that it mattered. I liked this about being stoned.

  We emerged out of the mist at 2 a.m. to find that it was not raining at all in the valley, and that there was a dim light burning outside the trucker’s chai stop on the outer edge of Vai. We parked the car and honked and honked for service, and then at last we got out of the car to find the night-duty boy stretched asleep on the counter itself, his red-checked gamcha spread over his face.

  He sat up and squinted up at us with bloodshot eyes.

  “Khalas. Khatam. Nai hai,” he said petulantly, seeing that we were not his regular brawny truck drivers but effete city kids. “It’s over, go away,” he said. The boy, who was sprouting his first beard, sank back on the counter as if it were the most comfortable bed in the world. He soon let out a contented snore, the cloth of the gamcha blowing in and out of his open mouth like an accordion. We stood around and watched him. A dim bulb burned above his head.

  We smoked another joint while we wondered what to do.

  “Let’s check up on Gaiky,” said Merch. “He might be able to help us score some grass here in Vai.” I had heard Gaiky thrown into a few conversations, but had never met him.

  We awoke Gaiky by throwing stones at his window until he popped his head out, his teeth gleaming white like tubelights. We tiptoed quickly past his deaf boxer, Raja, who barked halfheartedly just after we were safely in his bedroom. Gaiky’s parents, Dr. and Dr. (Mrs.) Gaikwad as per the sign outside the garden gate, ran the gleaming Vai Hospital and lived in a large bungalow close to it. Gaiky had a whitewashed corner room overlooking the garden. He was the blackest boy I had ever seen; his skin was shiny, blue-black.

  Tai should see him, I thought. Surely the original, or virginal—as the boys had recently been saying in a Tamil accent—black boy. The boys were now spending all their waking hours together, since Raisa was pregnant in Poona and Samar’s wife, it seemed, had fled. Gaiky was wearing a cream-colored T-shirt that had “Indiana University” written ac
ross it in small chocolate-brown letters. I was told he went to college in Poona.

  It was past four o’clock, and I could not smoke anymore. I lay down neatly curled at the corner of a mattress, covered myself with my dupatta—it was a red cotton, I remember—and fell asleep, hearing their chatter from afar. I awoke with a start at nine the next morning to find the five boys asleep, fanned out on Gaiky’s large, high four-poster bed like the petals of a decaying poinsettia.

  In the spare, echoing bathroom, I tied my hair in a tight knot, poured five mugs of cold water on alternate shoulders—head standing straight up as Ayi had taught me—and felt somewhat better after I had an intense, silent five-minute sob. Ayi said she had bathed with cold water even in the Kolhapur winters because Gandhiji had advised the youth of India to do so. He must have done so to discourage sloth and sexuality from arising in their loins.

  I had slept in Pin’s kurta, and now, not wanting to go out to the car to get my bag, I put it back on and smoothed it out with my palms. I had begun to put kohl in my eyes, and a red vermilion tika as large as a coin on my forehead. It was Pin who suggested that I start putting on makeup, though I had not done it while she lived. “Bring out your eyes and make a big tika to balance your blot,” she said, though she herself kept only a bottle of Johnson and Johnson baby oil on her dressing table, which she used to slick back her hair, and which we had used one Sunday afternoon to massage each other with long, languorous strokes, making ourselves as slippery as slabs of butter when we made love. And now here I was, drawing a round dot in a strange man’s bathroom, wanting to tell Pin that she had been absolutely right. It was a bolder face that I was presenting now. I had always tried to get all eyes off my face, not knowing that the blot would suck up all the energy thrown at me like a black hole if I let it.

  It was time to meet her mother. Her secret mother.

 

‹ Prev