Miss Timmins' School for Girls

by Nayana Currimbhoy

  I tied my hair, still damp and gleaming, into a tight knot between my ears and was drying out the wondrous dupatta, which I had used as a towel, near the patch of sunlight in the bedroom when Gaiky sat up with a start. He had a small, straggly mustache, and he ran his fingers through it. He fumbled to the door, popped his head out, and shouted for two cups of tea.

  He did not have to tell me to retreat when the servant knocked on the door. I popped behind a wall as he cracked his door and took the steel tray, his body blocking the servant’s curious eyes. A girl in the room might be better than a bird in a bush, but she was not for the household to see.

  We sat down like a civilized couple and I asked him as we sipped the fragrant ginger tea if I could meet Miss Nelson, the principal of my school.

  “Yes,” he said. “She is on the top floor of the hospital. Sort of like a house arrest. My mother said she is very quiet and polite, and always smiling. Come, I’ll take you to the hospital. I am quite sure she is allowed to have visitors.” He spoke English with a Marathi accent, his consonants thick and dipped in ghee, like mine. We felt instantly at ease with each other for that. The girls called it the vernacular accent, with easy contempt.

  We agreed that there was no need to let the household know I had spent the night there. “Why uselessly create tension?” said Gaiky, and so he left the room alone and went and stood outside his window holding up his arms to help me down, smooth as a princess.

  Sudden gusts of wind sent gray clouds scudding across the weak sun and shook the pink and orange bougainvillea that lined the stone path leading from Gaiky’s house to the square three-story hospital building. Raja followed us reluctantly, as though it were his duty. I was not afraid; I was not even nervous. I realized I was still stoned from the night before, from the Bombay Black, which was purported to have opium. I was aware of everything. Between each step I took, I saw the gray pebbles that parted to allow stray stalks of grass. A pale watery sunlight shone down on the families of villagers waiting patiently on their haunches in the hospital compound.

  “They bring their sick in by bullock cart and then sit around like this for days, waiting for them to get better. Or die, of course,” explained Gaiky. He summoned a thin mali in ragged khaki shorts who was watering the flowers lined against the building, whispered to him for a moment, gave him some money, and patted him on the back. “This mali has good grass man. Clean stuff. Somu always gets it for me. I think I should take it up as a side business. I could sell it to the white hippies in Poona, though of course they prefer hash.” He left me at the hospital steps and instructed a ward boy in white shorts to take me up to the gora memsaab.

  I thought I had an advantage when I went in to meet Miss Nelson. After all, I knew she had not killed her daughter. She did not know I knew.

  It seemed so far that no one had seen me up on table-land. It was my own personal hour, my borrowed hour. I would give it back when I was ready.

  I had to find out what Miss Nelson would do to defend herself.

  Her doors were shut. Even the window that opened onto the corridor was shut tight. I knocked on the door and got no answer at first. I waited a while—the hawaldar assured me that she was in there—and rapped louder on the glass pane. After a moment, I heard the tail end of the flush as she came out of the bathroom. I imagined her to be smoothing her dress, hanging her purse on the back of the chair—to see her is to see her purse—arranging her double layer of pearls, and then sitting erect and composing her face. It will be grave sorrow, I thought.

  “Do you realize that she controls the whole school with her three looks?” Pin had said to me one night after a Sunbeam dinner as we walked along the winding lane lined with sleeping houses. It was during the days of the long rain, and we were both huddled under our separate raincoats, walking with arms crossed tightly against our breasts so that the elbows did not touch the soggy raincoat.

  “She learnt it from my mother. The Three Looks: the smile that doles out praise, disappointment when expectations are not met, and grave sorrow when dispensing justice. No anger, never anger. And under it all, the mask of serene holiness. Control. I saw my mother teaching the bitch how to compose that face.”

  She turned so that we faced each other under the streetlight. With large golden drops of rain falling between us, she made the holy face for me, lips in a straight line with the corners slightly pursed to draw in the cheeks, eyebrows raised so the eyes appeared wide open.

  I remembered now how she had looked eerily like Nelson to me then—her mother, her mother, no wonder now, and to think of her two mothers at the dinner table eyeing her with serene sorrow. I saw my Pin as a tousled tomboy with bruised elbows, squirming between them. Between her sacred mothers. Growing up between the secret sacred mothers, my poor Pin.

  “Come in,” she said.

  I felt my first pang of panic when I saw that her face was puffed from weeping. I could look at nothing but the red rims of her magnified eyes as I walked towards her. She wiped her swollen nose and tucked the handkerchief in the sleeve of her pink pin-striped dress, which had pearl buttons running down the front and a collar with a red rickrack edge. I sat down across from her. She closed The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan.

  The hospital room was a standard one with the bed in the center and a metal nightstand. The only sign that it housed a prisoner, not a patient, was the two hawaldars lounging on a bench outside her door. There was a large wooden table by the window of her room with three upright chairs. She sat behind the table like a right-angled triangle, her back to the window.

  She seemed too overcome to speak.

  I wanted to leave her. I wanted to turn around and run back to Gaiky’s safe room. But no, I thought, with my nails digging into my palms: This is a step on which I must fall down, or else overleap.

  She must be waiting to get clearance from the mission in Scotland to get a lawyer to defend herself. I must find a way to ask her.

  “How are you?” I asked, and wondered what on earth I could say next.

  But she took the decision out of my hands.

  “I was waiting for you,” she said, as if she were sitting at her desk in the principal’s office.

  “Me?”

  I felt she had just opened the door to my soul and seen the jars of guilt and packets of fear stacked inside. I felt as fluttery as a schoolgirl summoned to her office for the most heinous of crimes, such as cheating, stealing, or meeting a boy behind the senior dorm. Me? Why would she be waiting for me?

  Maybe she had seen me up there after all. Maybe she thinks I killed her daughter after she left.

  She seemed not to notice that I was faint with fear. “The Lord has prepared me for a messenger today,” she said. She was calm and smiling down at me

  OK, so that was better. She wasn’t waiting specifically for me. She was waiting for a visitor; it just happened to be me. The earth went back to spinning along its prescribed course.

  Behind her I could see terraces of emerald-green paddy fields going up the foothills.

  “All of my life,” she said in a grave, measured tone, “my morning Bible reading has been a staff that guides me through the day. I usually follow a pattern from my prayer guide. But now”—she smiled very briefly as she alluded to her circumstances—“I go to the Bible and read wherever it falls open. I feel closer to the Lord’s wishes.”

  Today, she said, it fell open on First Chronicles 21:7.

 
There was a silence in the room. A shaft of sunlight burst through the window and fell upon her like a halo. I saw motes of dust dancing above her head.

  I waited for her to read it, but she seemed hesitant, fingering her Bible. Then, wiping her nose firmly, and with a hint of her principal voice, she said, “Would you like to read it for me, Charulata?”

  “You need to go to the beginning of the passage. Start from here,” she said, turning the book towards me. The pages were thin and beautiful as onion skin. On a shelf to the right of her was a bottle of Marmite, a bottle of Mala’s jam, and a tin of Amul cheese.

  “How much should I read?” I asked her.

  “Till the message is complete,” she said, her hands folded in front of her.

  I read.

  And God was displeased with this thing; therefore he smote Israel.

  And David said unto God, I have sinned greatly, because I have done this thing: but now, I beseech thee, do away the iniquity of thy servant; for I have done very foolishly.

  And the Lord spake unto Gad, David’s seer, saying,

  Go and tell David, saying, Thus saith the Lord, I offer thee three things: choose thee one of them, that I may do it unto thee.

  So Gad came to David, and said to him, Thus saith the Lord, Choose thee

  Either three years’ famine; or three months to be destroyed before thy foes, while that the sword of thine enemies overtaketh thee; or else three days the sword of the Lord, even the pestilence, in the land, and the angel of the Lord destroying throughout all the coasts of Israel. Now therefore advise thyself what word I shall bring again to him that sent me.

  And David said unto Gad, 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.

  So the Lord sent pestilence upon Israel: and there fell of Israel seventy thousand men.

  I decided that the passage was complete and stopped reading.

  Nelson spoke with an effort. “I struggled within myself all these days. But now I know. I must put myself in the hands of the Lord,” she said in a soft and steady voice.

  I was quite breathless and shivering. How was it that her God was giving her these specific messages? And if she had not killed Pin, what need was there for the Lord to send her pestilence and kill seventy thousand men?

  I must control my wandering mind, I said sternly to myself. She had read this passage to herself this morning. And now she had made me read it. She was in the hands of her Lord. All fair and fine.

  So what was the significance of a messenger? Was I Gad? Did have a direct line to her God? If so, I had not noticed.

  And furthermore, why had she not been surprised to see me popping into her room? It seemed like I had been in this room forever. I saw her as a big black spider, saying, Come into my parlor.

  I wanted to reach across her desk and grab a wooden ruler and rap my head smartly. Stop. Stop. Stop. She knows nothing. She’s probably had slews of Timmins teachers coming to see her every day.

  But I was appointed a messenger.

  Maybe it was all for my benefit. She had made this whole thing up for my benefit.

  But I heard Merch’s mocking voice in my head: “And how could she be expected to know that you were about to drop by to her hospital room in Vai?”

  No, all pure accident. I felt as if I were in another dimension. Everything was happening so, so slowly. The smoke from the hawaldar’s bidi drifted through the window, whole minutes went by between each curl.

  I looked at her, hating her for the first time. That rock-solid armor of saintliness.

  Maybe she knew I was on table-land that night. Maybe she knew I had seen her leave. And she was telling me she would put herself in the hands of God because I had not come forward to defend her. But there was a flaw in this thinking. If she knew I saw her leave, why not just come out and say so? Why not point the finger at me? I could well be construed to have a motive, once the sordid truth came out.

  But the thoughts were slow and spluttering like ketchup coaxed out of a bottle. If she saw me see her leave, then she thinks I went up to Pin after she left. She thinks I killed her daughter.

  I began to see the room closing in on me. Behind that mask she hates me. Just as she hated Pin. No, if she hated Pin, then why should she hate me for killing her? She loved Pin, she loved her not, I was pulling out petals from a flower, she loved her not, she loved her. I felt her burning eyes, I thought of her hands itching to squeeze my neck. I felt goose bumps up my spine.

  And then, in slow motion, her face cracked open, and from underneath, a soft, slug-like face emerged. It was something in the way she screwed her lips.

  To my utter and complete horror, she burst into tears. “Even that night, on table-land, I could not hug her,” she said, and covered her face and wept, her whole body racked with sobs.

  It was like watching a mountain melt into a lake.

  I kept staring at her like a dolt, frozen. I looked at her and began to feel sorry for her. But I could not bring myself to stand up and pat her or anything. Better not to.

  How must it have been for this woman, all those years, seeing her daughter grow, not telling her, not a sign from any of them? And then, whispers in the night, while they thought Pin slept. Surely, I thought, the world was divided into two: those who had simple, strong, growing families, and those whose families twisted and bent further with each generation. We were the twisted lot, Pin and I.

  The secret mother must have stayed with them in Nasik during all Timmins holidays, and maybe as she sat in the evenings and watched her daughter skating fiercely in the fading light, she dreamt of how she would tell her. I will wait until she is a woman, she might have thought. I will tell her on her wedding day, she might have mused. But as Pin grew with venom and tore her path of rebellion, Nelson resigned herself to her role. She could not cast her out, for she believed this was her lot, this her punishment for the sin of letting a young man in a tight uniform make love to her. But she could not tell her, either. Her child would remain a thorn in her side. And her deepest, darkest secret.

  But the secret was out, and her daughter was dead.

  Her sobs stopped as suddenly as they had started, and Nelson nailed her mask back on.

  I wanted to leave, but not before I solved the mystery of the messenger. I fidgeted, hemmed, and then I plunged into it.

  “But, but Miss Nelson, what message did I bring to you?” I asked, my voice melting like ice cream.

  “I have my message,” she said. She seemed to be looking over my head at some hallowed light or something. “You have passed it on to me, unknowingly. All these years, I thought it was her; having her was my sin, I thought. But now I know this. You have taught me that my sin was not loving her. And for this, I must suffer.”

  I glimpsed Pin’s prickly evenings. How hard that world must be, with two unhuggable mothers.

  Suddenly, I wanted to hug my mother. It was a physical need, as strong as my desire for Pin had been. My warm, soft, huggable ayi. I wanted to get up and leave and wake the boys up and make them take me to Kolhapur right away. It was this urgency in my limbs. I remembered the smell of Ayi when I came home from school; I remembered how her soft green eyes always lit up when she saw me.

  I stood up to leave.

  Nelson walked with me, still clutching the Bible to her chest with both her hands. She may not have taken the purse with
her, although I can’t be sure.

  At the door, she turned to me and handed me the Bible with both hands.

  “This was left to me by—” She floundered and flushed a deep, deep red. She stopped for a moment, adjusted her curls, and then she said carefully, with a patina of calm on her face that even Jivibai could have wiped off with a careless duster, “I would like you to keep this Bible.”

  “Maybe you can read it sometimes,” she said, and paused and locked her eyes into mine, “and think of us.”

  That’s it, I thought. This is the reason she is making all this fuss over me. Not because she knows I was there on table-land, but because she knows I was more to her daughter than a friend. She knows we were lovers. She must have watched her daughter like a hawk. But I felt no shame. We were in a bigger moment, after all, concerned with life and death.

  “Charulata, I know that you are wiser than your years. You can see more than other people, because you are different,” she said. “My father always told me that in this life, one must watch out for special people. I know that you are one of them. You have suffered. And you can feel the suffering of others. You have an empathy and power beyond your years. You have a gift, and you must use it well.”

  She hooked her eyes into mine. They were deep and charismatic. “But some things in life we must all learn the hard way. One day, you will understand that.”

  She gave me the Bible because I had loved her daughter, and she had not.

  I nearly told her then. But I saw Ayi emerging from her coma and then falling back, or worse, coughing dramatically as in a Hindi movie and swooning to her death upon hearing that her daughter had been accused of the murder of her lesbian lover. My mother, I informed ghostly Pin firmly, is more important than yours. I knew she agreed with me a hundred percent. “Let her fry,” I heard her pert voice whisper in my ear, like a demented ghost of Banquo.