Miss Timmins' School for Girls

by Nayana Currimbhoy

  “We’ll cut it out of newspapers or books, like they do in the movies. Fast unto Death for Death of Daughter.” Shobha raised her voice as I entered the room.

  “You’re a mean one, Shobha,” said an admiring voice from her gallery.

  I was glad not to be teaching the likes of Shobha anymore. I enjoyed teaching eleven- and twelve-year-olds. Especially Hindi. I felt I was pouring a warm bath as I read them short stories. They entered Hindi class in a defensive crouch, their senses jammed by Raswani’s brutal teaching. When I read “Shatranj ke Khiladi” from Premchand ki sarvasesht kahania, the entire class, including the South Indian girls who had probably not understood a word, sat in pin-drop silence for a full minute after I finished it.

  But there was still an occasional detention duty, since they were so short on staff.

  I don’t remember why Shobha had detention that day, but she was clearly intent on goading me. First she passed notes, then she threw notes across the room, then she started whispering, and then talking loudly, until I had no choice but to respond.

  “Shobha, stand up now and get out of the room. And do not bother to come back.”

  Shobha stomped out. But she stopped just outside. She turned around and faced the class with a smirk on her face. The class began to giggle.

  “I said I want you out of the class.” My voice was quiet now, and controlled. Commanding, I hoped.

  “But Miss, how can I leave a detention room? If you throw me out, I won’t have done my detention. And anyway, Miss, I am out of the class. See, here is the class line, and I am on the other side.”

  What to do now? I stared at her malevolently for a few minutes, my hands itching to slap her.

  Shobha construed my silence as victory and decided to play to the gallery. “This line will be my boundary from now on. I will not come into the class. I will stand outside here and imbibe your wisdom.” Her eyes were insolent. “I will be like Sita, Miss. This will be my god-given boundary line.” The class was roaring.

  I was wearing one of my tight chudidar sets stitched by Rathode of Rathode & Sons in Indore, and I felt ugly and ungainly, which made me see a deeper shade of red. My blot was blistering, scarlet.

  I walked up to her, went really up close to her, so she could smell my breakfast-eggs breath, and stood with my legs apart, hands on hips. She was about an inch taller than me, with mango breasts and almond eyes.

  “You will go right now to the library. You will get two order marks. One for disrupting the class and the second for talking back to a teacher. And now you will go to the library and spend the rest of the detention there, reading chapter six of A Tale of Two Cities.”

  Shobha’s smirk took on a pasted quality as the muscles in her face became tight. She stood there, not wanting to show a weakness in front of the class.

  “If you do not turn around and leave now, you will get a third order mark for disobedience.” I liked my newfound voice. It was smooth and icy.

  “You can’t give me three order marks for the same thing. It’s not allowed.” But her voice had a waver, had a question at the end.

  “You just watch me,” I said, standing almost right on top of her.

  She turned to leave. But before she walked off, with her back to me, she muttered just under her breath. “You did it. We know.”

  “What did you just say?” I asked, putting my hand on her shoulder and turning her around roughly to face me.

  “Nothing, Miss, nothing at all.”

  “Look at me,” I said, I lifted her chin and held it in place. “You better watch what you say, you stupid little schoolgirl. Or you will regret it later.”

  There was complete silence in the detention room for the rest of the class, and I relished every minute of it.

  “I’m sorry about your mother, Miss,” Nandita said one day, falling into step beside me as I walked up the winding way around the school building to the staff room. It was called the winter way, because it was used only in the winter. In summer and monsoon everyone used the long covered steps that ran through the center of the school.

  Nandita looked at me gravely. She wore thick glasses with square plastic frames. She walked in silence for a few steps, pushing her thick fringe away from her face. Then, suddenly, in a rush, she said, “Miss, you’re . . . You know, you’re different this term. Everyone says so.”

  “Well, Nandita, a lot has happened in the last two months,” I said. My world had changed. I felt I was a woman on a windy plain in some ancient epic.

  “But it feels like—I don’t know how to say it, but it feels . . . oh, I don’t know, Miss. You seem like a different person.”

  Nandita had the ability to chat with teachers as one adult to another. I knew she must be referring to my most recent episode with Shobha. Nandita was right. The detention-room drama had the dregs of Prince. Raging Anger was Prince, not me. Charu was silent, stoic, and suffering.

  But no point in getting into that. I was pursuing my search for the Hindi teacher.

  “Nandita,” I said. “It was you who got the letter from Miss Raswani, right?”

  “Yes, Miss, it was me,” she said

  “What made her give it to you just like that?”

  “I felt she knew something, and so I went and spoke to her,” she said with quiet pride.

  “Nandita, well done. No one else could have done it,” I said. I meant it. Raswani must have let her guard down, with Nandita so reasonable, so quiet.

  “And the next day, she was gone, correct?”

  “In fact she disappeared the same day. I was the last person to see her, I think.”

  “Did she appear to be frightened?”

  “She seemed defeated. I don’t know if you know about the incident of the day before. She could not control the girls in the gym. She walked out while the girls clapped and jeered. We were always terrified of her. But that day, she walked out with her head down. I saw her face. It was the same look she had on the day she gave me the letter. Like she had lost her roar.”

  “You girls,” I said. “Where do you think she is now?”

  “Now that we know the terrible truth about Nelson, mostly everyone thinks she might have killed Raswani. Because of the letter. It is logical to assume that Nelson thought her secret was safe as long as no one knew about the letter, and so she killed Raswani. She didn’t know that Raswani had passed on the letter to us.”

  “No fingerprints, no signs of struggle in the room, and no body,” I reminded her.

  “I don’t know, Miss,” said Nandita. “Who knows how efficient these Poona police are? No better than Woggle and his gang, I bet.”

  Nandita would have been more guarded if she had been with Shobha or Akhila, who were quite wary of me. As it was, she seemed eager to share her knowledge.

  “You could be right,” I said. “You think her body could be lying hidden under a rock?”

  “Or a cave, maybe,” said Nandita. “It’s hard for us to get out of this place, but I wish I could.”

  “Well, you obviously managed to get out before,” I said in a supercilious tone, asserting my teacher self.

  “Yes, Miss, but you know what I mean; I can’t just roam around like you,” said Nandita, quite unfazed.

  She seemed almost as eager as me to solve this mystery. We should team up, I thought.

  “Actually, I agree with you,” I said. “I have been snooping around. I even went into the Devil’s Kitchen two days ago. I saw nothing. No torn clothing, no bones, no smell of rotting flesh.”

  With Shankar no longer running his den of vice, Devil’s Kitchen had an abandoned air when I went there two days ago, on a sunny afternoon. It was windy, but the rock hollow was quiet and dry. The cave must have some aperture somewhere, because it had a diffused glow. There were five metal folding chairs and an upturned box with a couple of half-burned candles, and an outsi
ze overflowing metal ashtray engraved with the words “Tekchand and Sons Water Filters.” You entered a wide mouth and then turned to the right, where you were sheltered from the elements and from prying eyes. In one corner was the bar, a plank of wood raised on boxes, with a lantern at either end.

  Devil’s Kitchen, witch’s needle, at first I thought that these were internal Timmins names made up by imaginative girls at midnight feasts. But then I saw a guidebook on Panchgani (“Come visit the Kashmir of Maharashtra, with its sylvan forests, its panoramic mountain views, its salubrious climate”) that touted these as places for tourists to view the surrounding vistas, along with Baby Point, Parsi Point, and Sydney Point, the last of which I presume was named after an intrepid British explorer in a solar hat who hacked his way to the hill with the help of a bunch of natives carrying folding desks and foreign newspapers.

  “All this Devil’s Kitchen, witch’s needle. I mean, who came up with these names?”

  Nandita smiled and shook her head. “Don’t know.” She had a very white, even set of teeth. “It’s so out of Macbeth, isn’t it miss?” she said, shyly.

  “Have you been to the Devil’s Kitchen?” I asked.

  “Long ago, when we were in junior school. Before Shankar began to use it, we sometimes went for Saturday walks around the back of table-land to the cave. Once, we went exploring to find the source of the light. Right at the back, there is a hole and you can see a patch of sky from it.”

  “So then, someone could be on table-land itself, and if they knew how to find the hole, they could slip into the cave?” I asked, astonished.

  “The hole is high up, and it seemed very tiny. Like a slit, really. Perhaps a small child on the shoulders of a very tall man could climb though it. And jumping down would be impossible. In fact, after we saw the hole, Tara became obsessed with the cave for some time. She and Ramona had this elaborate prison-break plan where they were going to get a ladder—don’t ask me how—and prop it against the hole, and then one day when we went to table-land they would slip through it, run away from school, and live in the cave until the end of term. We were eight or nine then, I think. For some time after that, whenever we went to table-land, we would look for the hole on the surface where the cave should be—but, you know, we have not found it to this day.”

  “Panchgani is a strange place, no?” I said.

  “Don’t really know any other, Miss,” she said, shrugging her shoulders. “I’ve been in this school since I was six and a half.”

  “Is it hard? I mean, I know so many of the girls hate being here.”

  “I just know that it is the best option for my family, so I don’t mind,” she replied matter-of-factly.

  Sometimes, I thought Nandita was the oldest soul in the whole school.

  Since I wasn’t teaching the seniors anymore, I did not go past the prayer hall and the big banyan tree, but up the stairs to the middles section, which was perched above the prayer hall.

  Akhila came upon us as we turned the corner.

  “Good morning, Miss Apte.”

  “Good morning,” I said.

  “So, Miss, you found a place to stay?” she said, smirking. There was a nip in the air, and the girls wore navy-blue pullovers over their blue checks. I presumed Miss Manson was still vigilant, and their bloomers were elasticized to the perfect degree, plump thighs forming puffs of flesh on either side of the tight elastic.

  I ignored Akhila. I turned to Nandita. “I hear Ramona is not back this term. What is the matter with her?”

  “She is disturbed because of all the things we saw, you know, that night,” began Nandita in a measured tone. By the way that she paused significantly before “that night,” I knew she was considering her approach. I waited, and we walked a few steps in silence.

  But Akhila was not a patient girl, and she blurted it out. “She says she saw Miss Prince’s ghost, and it told her she had to leave the school.”

  Why would I imagine that she had visited only me? She might have visited half of Panchgani, for all I knew.

  “Ramona is a nervous girl,” said Nandita, embarrassed, giving me a sideways glance, trying to judge my reaction.

  “So has she left the school, or is she coming back?”

  “We don’t know,” said Akhila.

  “I think she will be back soon,” said Nandita stoutly. Nandita tied her green belt too high on her waist, wore her socks long, just below the knees. I saw something of myself in her, an adult facade that I wanted to rip apart. I wanted to tell her to stand on the big swing outside the snuggery and take it so high that it went parallel to the sky, before it was too late. And that is how I often see her in my mind, her dress blowing in the wind, her hair flying, her knees bent to take the swing as high as it could go.

  We walked in silence for a while. Ramona was the weak link, I was thinking. She’s the one who has seen the most. I should talk to her.

  “Did she say she actually physically saw Miss Prince?” I asked.

  “No, but . . .”

  “And did anyone else, any of you see her?”

  Nandita told me of the scream, and of the night when they called her spirit. I realized that they assumed I knew of this scream. I had not heard even the faintest of rumors.

  “Who heard this scream?”

  “Everyone heard it,” said Akhila. “You can ask anyone.”

  “Well it’s for sure all the girls in Willoughby and Pearsall heard it. So the matrons and teachers around them must have too. The hospital is too far, though. We asked the mumps girls, and they didn’t hear it,” said Nandita.

  “And even you thought it was the ghost of Miss Prince? If only half the school heard and the teachers in Sunbeam didn’t hear it, then it was physical, not ethereal, no?” I asked, lifting my eyebrows at Nandita the Sane.

  “But Miss, we didn’t know about Miss Nelson then, remember? Everyone was confused. The Upper Willoughby girls insist it was Miss Nelson, and the Lower Willoughby girls swear that they heard it like a growl growing out of Miss Raswani’s room. So we thought we would consult higher authorities, as it were. Shobha, Akhila, and I decided to do a planchette. I never really thought anything would happen,” said Nandita quietly.

  All three of us continued to walk, looking down at our feet on the red mud path. “Do you believe that it was really her? I mean, do you think the ghost of Miss Prince really visited Ramona?” she asked.

  “Yes, I do,” I said softly and saw a lightening in her opaque eyes.

  Akhila was fidgeting in the manner of schoolgirls who are about to say something they’ve been storing up. Usually something you don’t want to hear. Finally, as we approached the staff room, she blurted it out.

  “Miss, maybe Dr. Desai has some more rooms above his dispensary, you could stay there,” she said, stressing “there” and giving me a pleased look as though she had popped a big round sweet into her mouth. I saw Nandita nudge her furiously.

  “I have had enough of the smell of disinfectant, thank you,” I said, and lifted the pink curtain and walked into the sanctuary of the staff room where no student was ever allowed to set foot. But I heard what they said as they walked past.

  “I should have asked, ‘Does Merch smell of disinfectant?’ That’s what I should have done,” said Akhila.

  “Why didn’t you just shut up, you idiot,” snapped Nandita. “You spoilt it all.”

  “But you were supposed to bring up Merch, we agreed.” Akhila was saying with a rising tide of disgruntlement. “We were supposed to warn her of the danger. What is the point of rehearsing it”—and then to my disappointment they walked out of my range of hearing and Nandita’s soft reply was only a mumble. I turned around with flushed cheeks to see Miss Munim, the art teacher, leering at me with raised eyebrows and a foolish grin. I had no time to think because the bell rang.

  Eleven-year-olds still crowded around you a
nd wanted to tell you about their days. They hadn’t reached the dueling stage yet, and you could let your guard down.

  Divya Moghe of standard six had become something of an acolyte. “We never knew Hindi could be so much fun, Miss,” she said. She always offered to carry my books to the staff room, and she always chattered on at full speed, trying to stuff as much into the walk as she could.

  The day after my conversation with Nandita and Akhila, Divya was very subdued as she walked beside me carrying sixteen brown-paper-covered Hindi notebooks that I was taking home to correct. “Nandita wants you to meet her in the far throwball court right now. She says it’s urgent.”

  “Did she say why?”

  “She does not want anyone else to know.” Divya looked at me gravely. I wondered how much of the story she knew. “I think it’s to do with the mystery. She says she wanted to tell you yesterday, but Akhila got in the way.”

  I was on my way to little lunch in the staff room. Little lunch was 10:35 to 10:45. For the girls, it was the only meal left to choice. They could go down to the pantry and get a banana if they wanted. Sometimes there were two glucose biscuits, and on rare occasions, when Miss Cummings felt bountiful, there were two glucose biscuits and a banana, and word would spread quickly and there would be a line outside the pantry. For the teachers, there was a large pot of tea, a tray of Marie biscuits, and a bowl of bananas or small sour oranges.

  I loved little lunch. The kitchen in Aeolia was a dark dank outhouse with a Primus stove that took me more than twenty minutes to light. On teaching days I would sit down in the staff room and drink two cups of tea, have a variable number of Marie biscuits, and end with a banana. In winter, they often had small, sweet elaichi bananas, of which I often ate two. Women I had barely exchanged more than two sentences with last term, such as the oily history teacher, the wife of the superintendent of St. Paul’s who taught some junior class, and Mrs. Paranjpe, the ex–French teacher who chewed paan, sat down next to me and engaged me in small talk now that I had acquired this aura of mystery.

  Meeting Nandita during little lunch would be a considerable sacrifice, but I knew it was for my own good, and so I went and found her leaning against the stone wall that bounded the school