Miss Timmins' School for Girls

  Twenty-six

  Far White

  I emerged from Nelson’s room with an all-consuming need to touch my mother.

  The boys were still sleeping, and I could not bear to wait. I asked Gaiky to call for a taxi to the bus depot. “I’m taking the bus,” I said, “I need to go.”

  “Chal, I’ll take you,” said Gaiky, and I followed him around in a daze as he spoke to various servants and ward boys and finally got into the driver’s seat of an ambulance. At the back were two benches facing each other. A family of villagers leading a stooped old man in a dirt gray dhoti climbed into the back. Gaiky motioned me to the front seat.

  “Do you ever put on the light and siren?” I asked.

  “Sure,” he said, and proudly turned on the weak red light and a siren that sounded like a musical horn. Few people showed any interest in moving out of the way as we drove through the rainy bazaar of bright blue dripping tarps, dropped off the locals at their home above a small shop made up of gunnysacks filled with wheat and dals and rice, and then arrived at the bus depot, where Gaiky left Raja barking in the backseat and obligingly procured me a seat in a minivan of pilgrims with red tikas and laddu-eating children returning to Kohlapur. I realized I was ravenous and accepted a fair number of bright yellow sweets.

  I was jangled and jittery from the meeting with Nelson. There was a death between us, her daughter, my lover, and so I understood that the encounter must be intense. But I felt it was more than that. I felt as though I had gone to battle and come out defeated, though I could not say why. I still did not know how she would defend herself.

  It was evening, and the temple bells were ringing when I reached Kohlapur.

  In Ayi’s room, the dark little night nurse sat in a corner chair, reading a romance under a metal lamp.

  I could see my ayi was awake because she was facing the wall and rubbing her feet together. It was a tic she had recently developed. I brought it up anxiously to Dr. Tendulkar, but he just shook his head. These days he always shook his head and sometimes even sighed. She had stopped talking completely, and ate only milk and bananas. She sat up on her bed, they put a napkin around her neck and peeled her banana. She would hold the banana firmly in one hand and the glass of warm milk in the other, taking big bites and washing each down with a sip. She turned her face if we put any other food in front of her.

  The nurses bathed her and dressed her in bright cotton housecoats and took her to the bathroom at regular intervals, and in the evenings we took her for a walk down the center of the ward. She walked on her own, slowly but evenly. You just had to guide her by the elbow. She brushed her teeth when you handed her a toothbrush with toothpaste on it, she lifted her clothes neatly and sat on the commode when you took her to the bathroom, and she insisted on washing herself. My vivacious and glittering ayi had become a zombie person who was always looking somewhere else. The light had been switched off in her green eyes. Sometimes she showed us that she was listening: She sat up or nodded her head vigorously, though it was never quite at the right time. I felt that she was trying, for our sakes, to take interest, but that she had none.

  The family powers had decided that it was pointless to leave Ayi in the hospital. She would be much more comfortable at home. They would keep a hospital ayah to take care of her. The large storeroom at the back of the house was being aired and emptied of grains and spices stored in ancient, immense glass jars. It was a somber, mysterious place with small secret places between the jars. I used to hide in its dark corners and dream big dreams when I was small. The jars were taller than me then. I called it the Ali Baba room. It was my favorite room in the house, but it would be a grim sick room for Ayi.

  Baba and I had not been consulted in this. In any case, we were too numb and limp to object. Baba seemed to be receding. He had left for Indore the day I left for Panchgani, saying he would return on the weekend. I knew he was uncomfortable in the Kolhapur house. He was a son-in-law and as per protocol he was treated like a visiting potentate, but the veneer of respect was very thin. In the strict hierarchy of the joint family he was one rung above Dipika the fourth sister’s husband, who played cards all day long and had never earned a single rupee in his life. Baba was stiff and withdrawn and very formal with them all. I wondered what he would do when Ayi was shifted to the house. I wondered if he would stop visiting her altogether.

  I bent over her and smoothed the straying white hair from her forehead. She did not turn, and I could not see her face in the dim light. The nurse looked up from her romance and beckoned me with urgent gestures.

  “I have some news for you.” She arched her heavy penciled brows and looked towards Ayi, indicating that it was something she did not want her to know.

  She held the room door shut, and we stood outside in the bright white light corridor, where a fat orderly in a dirty dark-green uniform was doling dal onto steel plates. “Last night, your mother sat up in bed and asked for you,” she said. “Very quietly. She called me to her, and said, ‘Get Charu.’ I telephoned your family, even though it was 4 a.m. I have seen enough patients suddenly come back at the . . .” She hastened on when she saw the terror in my face. “Your auntie”—she put her arms out to indicate that it was the fat one—“came, and in the morning they phoned your school, but you were not there. We told your mother you would come today. The day nurse said she is waiting all day.”

  No wonder I had felt that urgency in Nelly’s room. Ayi had been calling me.

  “I was asked to tell you to phone your family immediately when you come in,” she said. “Everyone will be so relieved.”

  But I did not phone. I lay down beside Ayi, got under the blanket, and stretched out beside her. She turned, and her face was as calm as the face with which she woke me in the mornings for school. I buried my face in her soft pillow breasts, and sobbed my heart out for at least an hour.

  I would like to rewind the night and remember that I lay awake in her arms and she stroked my hair and imparted words of kindness and wisdom that I could use as torches through my life, but the truth is that I fell into an exhausted slumber from which I awoke drooling on the pillow in the dead of night, curled, my back to her, with an urgent need to pee and a bone-dry mouth.

  I came out of the bathroom and saw her lying on her back, asleep. I watched her breathe for a while, and then shuffled to the spare bed across from her, not wanting to wake her. This was the first night I felt she was near me again. Her spirit is coming back, I thought.

  But I was wrong.

  The next day, she stopped getting out of bed. She receded deeper into herself, and did not follow us with her eyes. I could not always be sure that she actually saw me. It was not technically a coma. It was as if she inhabited a twilight world. I phoned Baba to come back from Indore.

  I usually went to the house at night, but once or twice I could not bear to leave her, and I slept in her room. I don’t remember Baba talking to her. He sat beside her all night, reading, patting her from time to time. I slept intermittently. It felt like a deathwatch.

  Baba sat rigid through the day on the bench outside the room, his face set in a tight, grim mask. The family thickened, for by now most of the sisters had arrived, some with children in tow. I had barely spoken to him since the day he told me his sordid tale of withdrawing from the navy after being accused of smuggling, although I did believe he was innocent. I could hardly bear to look at him. I had by now begun to invest the last night with deep portent and felt that Ayi had asked me to forgive my father. But I felt only contempt when I saw him sitting there like a sucked slice of lemon. It was because of him that Ayi wanted to die. I would never let a husband decide my life like that, I thought. But she had no choice. No forgiveness was possible. I could only feel anger toward him now. Ayi would have to understand.

  It was a few days later, on a mellow afternoon with the first slanting sunlight of approaching winter, that I heard the second part of
my father’s tale.

  The household had awoken from the afternoon slumber and was preparing for the evening gossip session at the hospital. In the visiting daughters’ room, I came upon a clutch of women wrapping their saris. Lumpy hips and fat thighs showing through thin petticoats, drawstrings being tied tight around balloon stomachs, blouses being buttoned over bulging cotton bras with bad elastic. They were standing in a semicircle for a slice of the mirror on the cupboard door, their backs to me.

  With sudden tears I remembered how I had sat cross-legged on the bed and watched in awe as my ayi swirled and swooped and in five minutes produced the perfect sari. All my life, I thought, all my life I have watched her. I felt faint with fear of a life without her, and had to sit down and put my head between my knees to bring back some blood to my head.

  And then their voices came into focus. They had not noticed me.

  “I found a boy for her, poor boy, dark, but good family—we have to think of our girl, after all—but when they heard the name of the father, they did not even phone me back,” said Tai with disdain. She was at the pleat stage, pallu standing like a flag atop her stiff breasts. “I can’t bear to see that man sitting in her room with that deceitful face of his.”

  “To this day, I don’t understand why Dada never even looked into the family background,” said Jyotika, a middle sister who was leveling the circle of her sari to the floor with her bare heels.

  “Can’t you see it is eating him up? The poor man, he will destroy himself like this,” said Jalgaon Masi. Dada had shrunk and withered before our eyes in the days since the Episode.

  “And now we are stuck with that girl.”

  “She’s looking terrible. So thin and dark.”

  “Dada is going to leave some money for her,” said Tai. “Can’t expect him to take responsibility for her.”

  I hated them. I hated him too, but I hated them more for hating him. I thought suddenly of the order of my mother’s inner drawer. The silver watch that Baba had gotten from abroad would be on top of the hankies and, beside them, a round blue plastic bowl containing three keys: one to the safe in the cupboard, one to the bank safe, and one extra key to the front door. In fact, our whole ordered lives had radiated out from that drawer. I saw it shatter in slow motion before my eyes and felt a surge of anger.

  I strode into the room, stepped into the center of the circle in front of Tai. “I know why you hate us,” I said. “All of you.” I turned and looked at the women around me in various stages of undress, their eyes boring into me.

  “You hate us because she loved us. Your precious Shalini did not love you, she loved us. She was always trying to shield us from your blows. It was all of you. Judging her, judging us, and shaking your heads.” It is you who are responsible for her condition, I thought, and then to my horror I burst into tears.

  Tai stepped up and engulfed me in her viselike grip. But I pushed her away.

  “Even if I needed help, you all would be the last person on earth I would go to,” I shouted back, turning suddenly to English and knowing it had come out wrong.

  This was not the creeping, crawling Charu that they knew. They were all silent for a moment. The industrious ones took it as an opportunity to get more of the mirror.

  The decision was being made as I ranted. It must have been a signal that jumped from one face to the other: She should know now.

  And so they circled me and told me about my father. Like the stories they had told us children while peeling potatoes in the evening light, stories of sainted wives and brave warriors and capricious gods, they told me how my father had been disgraced because he had been caught having an affair with the wife of the Admiral.

  “We did it out of respect for Shalini. We never told you anything. But it is better that you know. A man like him should have been proud to have won a girl like your mother. But no, not him.”

  Tai and Jalgaon Masi told the story, the others formed the chorus.

  “That too, she was the wife of his superior. That man was like a father to him.”

  “Having an affair with a woman old enough to be his mother. Chi. How could Shalini even hold her head up after that?”

  I remembered her, the wife of the Admiral. She smelled of talcum powder and foreign perfume, and left a red mark on my cheek when she kissed me.

  “A dirty filthy scandal. How your mother could sleep near him all these years, I don’t know. And you should have seen that woman. Painted face, wearing sleeveless blouses. Brought shame on the whole family.”

  No wonder Baba left a wide and gaping hole in the story he told me on the park bench. No wonder the Admiral had unleashed public disgrace and humiliation—it was a viper he had nurtured in his bosom.

  I saw a new Baba, Baba the bachelor boy. He was ten years older than Ayi, thirty-one when he married her. Before he met Ayi, he must have spent his evenings at the U.S. club, where the navy families gathered. He must have had four whiskies and used his charm upon the women. A ladies’ man in a crisp white uniform, single and charming. He must have grown used to this life.

  “And not only that—he went out with cheap women. People saw him in hotels with secretary types with skirts and short hair,” said Gopika with pursed lips. Tai gave her the look, and she bit her lower lip and shut up.

  “And remember all that gossip about the foreign woman? She came forward and said the child was his? Remember that?” piped up badi Bhabhi, who had been pleating quietly behind us all this time.

  “Chup,” said Tai in her most authoritative voice. “Those were all just rumors. No need now to bring them up.”

  “Did Ayi know all these years?” I asked.

  “Everyone knew, by the end,” said majli Bhabhi with a sniff, tying a tail of false hair into a bun at the back of her head.

  “But Ayi forgave him,” I told them.

  “But that was Shalini’s mistake. Always forgive and move on. But you can tell that she did not forget. She should have left him right away. I went and told her, before she left for Indore. Dada said this could be her home, and yours.”

  I saw how we might have been, my ayi and me, staying on the edges of the big house, the daughter, and the daughter of the daughter, of a failed marriage. I would have to be subservient to my cousins, and Ayi would have to peel the potatoes in the evening as the Bhabhis fried bhajiyas.

  “I am glad she did not,” I burst out. “I am glad I did not have to grow up in this cruel place.”

  “Let her be,” I heard a Bhabhi say as I stormed off. “Naturally, she is upset. Poor girl.”

  I walked towards the little market at the end of the road, my blood curdling at the thought of this wizened man, my own father, consorting with flabby women and prostitutes while my mother waited at home with me.

  My Bombay father was always going somewhere. I remembered the house, dark and full of shadows in the evening, lit only by the kitchen tubelight and the dim light of a table lamp beside the sofa in the bedroom where my mother waited for her husband to come home for dinner, the picture of wifely duty. He often arrived after nine. She would not eat until he did, and so she was always in a bad mood. Or at least that is what I thought then, because Baba would put me on his knee and say, “You must tell your mother. A modern woman does not need to wait for her husband. She should take a half-hour nap in the afternoon and eat dinner with you. That way she can be rested and happy when I come home.” He would say this loudly, while my mother sat in a huff on the sofa in the drawing room, where the lights were now bright. Sometimes she refused to eat and would go to bed in tears. Sometimes I could hear Baba shouting from the bedroom. In contrast, the Indore house was always calm, at least on the surface.

  There was only one photograph from my parents’ wedding, a black-and-white image of them going around the fire. She is leading, looking down, tense, smothered in garlands and jewels. It is Baba behind her who shines, his face be
aming like the sun, confident, radiant.

  I saw the sailor tall and lean, his white hat on the nightstand as he dallied with the Admiral’s wife. Deep, delicious afternoons of desire. Like Pin and me. But instead of Pin, I suddenly saw Merch, of the lean and lanky body.

  I understood then. Growing up, I modeled myself after Ayi. I would be like her—once the blot was gone—wise and graceful and as ordered as the inner drawer. But in actual fact, it was Baba and I, we were the ones cut from the same silk cloth. Given to the temptations of the flesh. Wanting more than was put on the plate.

  I must have walked for an hour. The outside of the walk is a blur. I remember staring at a display of push-up bras, I remember wandering around the field across the street, where the madwoman who was said to have lost her son in a bullock-cart tragedy ranted. But the inside of the walk has stayed with me to this day. I felt that my mother was with me. She told me all the things she wanted to say to me that night. Courage, she said. Be braver than me. Be stronger than me. Be happier than me. Of course, she did not say be more beautiful than me, since that would never be possible.

  I did not wait for the family carpool to gather, but took a rickshaw to the hospital, and found my father alone in the room, napping on the armchair beside her bed.

  He looked grave and distant, like a minor manager in a transport company. We walked around the large playing field near the hospital. It was filled with brisk evening walkers and game-playing boys shouting “Out!” The word echoed in my mind until it found its logical place.

  “We must get Ayi out of here,” I said. “We must take her back to Indore.” After all, we knew that people could stay in comas for years, and then suddenly come out and lead perfectly normal lives. The household was abuzz with case histories and stray stories of a similar nature.

  “She should be with us, yes,” said Baba.

  “Let us have no truck with them. No truck with the Chitnis family,” I said, and burst into a semi-hysterical giggle. Baba looked at me with concern, and then finally cracked a smile.