Miss Timmins' School for Girls

by Nayana Currimbhoy

  “Miss, I wanted to ask you, do you feel someone has been watching you?” she asked.

  I did. After the How Green Was My Valley night, my skin crawled after dark. I was afraid to walk to Aeolia at night. The wind howled, the trees swayed, and beneath the sounds I heard the edge of a growl. And when the wind stopped, I heard footsteps and, once, a cough. I could not read because I did not want to leave the light on; I did not want her, him, them, it to watch me. I locked all the doors and windows and lay rigid in the dark, staring up. But I remember one thing: My blot was quiet. Some nights the mali beat his wife and I tried to find her screams reassuring, at least, for sounds of life, but then I began to hear other sounds and screams beneath them. Sometimes I slept at Merch’s.

  But I enjoyed the quiet, golden afternoons in Aeolia. I came back after school and I could work or read or dream. I took long naps from which I awoke to the evening sounds from the mali’s hut. I bathed, dressed—mostly in jeans—gathered my books, and left. I kept some clothes in a drawer in Merch’s bathroom.

  Shabir had said I was imagining it. “Aeolia is a little spooky,” he said. “We used to hear rumblings and rustlings. It’s on the windward side. Apparently it’s named after Aeolus, Greek god of the wind.”

  “Or it could be the schoolgirls, spying on you,” said Merch.

  “They are locked up in that school,” I said.

  “They did get out that night,” he pointed out.

  In the safety of the home team I sometimes felt I was imagining the whole thing. But now, I looked at Nandita’s face and began to feel she was laughing at me. I had assumed that she was on my side. Now I felt betrayed.

  Maybe Merch was right. They were spying on me because they fancied themselves detectives. I imagined the schoolgirls giggling as I changed and talked to myself, as I did so often these days. Or with Merch. Merch. Akhila had insinuated my relationship with Merch. How would she know?

  I saw a streak of red before my eyes. “So are you trying to tell me you girls have been spying on me?” I roared, not recognizing the voice that assaulted my ears as my own.

  “No, no, Miss, how could we? I know you are innocent,” she said, taken aback by my sudden lash of anger.

  Shobha was calling to her from the netball field. The Nandita calls became louder as Shobha and Akhila turned the corner near the water tanks.

  Nandita gave a resigned sigh. “It’s hard to talk with all these chattering girls. But I have so much to tell you,” she muttered.

  She started to walk away, and then stopped and turned.

  “It’s all around you, Miss, you must take care.”

  “What’s around me?” I asked urgently, deeply contrite now, verging on the pathetic. “What is all around me?”

  Death, I thought, she is saying death is all around me.

  Shobha and Akhila were upon us, not at all pleased to see Nandita consorting secretly with me. She turned to them with a placating air, walking towards them with her head tilted, arms outstretched.

  “Just look around you, please, Miss. I think you are in danger,” she whispered to me before she turned. For that moment, she was the teacher, and I, a thick-headed child.

  Akhila and Shobha did not even offer the statutory “Good morning, Miss Apte.” They just turned insolently and walked back towards the classrooms.

  That evening, i went for a walk to table-land. I reached the needle in time for sunset.

  I sat facing the cliff, as the Prince had done. I sat at the sharp cliff edge, my legs dangling in the void, just as she must have done on the night of her death. Ever since her death, I had wanted to go, but I was afraid to go so far. Today, though, the earth was dry and hard and safe, not slippery as on the monsoon night of her death.

  Table-land was empty. I heard no sound except an occasional puff of wind. The distant volcanoes glowed orange, then deep pink as the sun dipped behind them, and then silver in the light of the rising moon as I sat there, calm and Buddhist and untouchable.

  I was getting nowhere with the murder mystery, and my affair with Merch was at a dead end. I could see only three roads down from the precipice, each steeper than the next. I could leave Nelson, her Lord, and her lawyer to defend themselves and go home to Ayi until I was needed in court. I could stay on in Panchgani and try to solve my personal mystery: Was I being followed and watched, was it really the sounds of some sinister scuffling and scrambling I heard in the night at Aeolia, or was I going mad? Or I could go and tell Woggle that my first statement was a lie.

  “I did see something on table-land that night, Inspector Wagle,” I would have to say.

  I have always had a natural tendency to lie. My first lies began with the blot, little subterfuges to protect my own separate world. They blossomed into bigger lies when I loved Pin, necessary deceits but deceits still, because my love was sinful to some, though not to me. I could be nostalgic about them now. They were little lies; there was no loss of life or limb or fortune attached to them. My first lie was of that night on table-land. My first black lie. And I was stuck with it.

  Imagine if I went up to Woggle’s office—or perhaps I should knock at the Nest on the way down. What if Yellow opened the door with a long plait and a flowered yellow housecoat, and when Woggle came out in his torn T-shirt, I said, “Inspector, I lied. I cannot lie any longer, for I lie awake at nights and need to take shelter in drugs and sex and rock and roll. I cannot lie anymore because my lie might take an innocent person to prison for the rest of her life. I was up on table-land, and I saw Nelson leave while Prince was still alive.”

  “And why did you lie in the first place?” he would surely ask.

  To protect my parents, to protect myself. Because I did not have the courage then. I thought you would think it was me.

  He might just believe it. Or he might not.

  I could be a bent Baba or a broken Ayi for the rest of my life.

  Or I could get lucky.

  I was in a trance when I turned to go. “This is good-bye, Pin,” I shouted into the void, but the wind snatched my words away.

  I had run into Merch in the bazaar on the way up. He had walked around the bend in the road past the municipal park with me. We sat down beside a tree while he discreetly and casually rolled a small joint he called the travel special. We did not ask each other anything, where we were going or what we were doing. “Come by later,” he said. “Samar will probably be there.” I said I would.

  To this day, I cannot say for sure if it was because I was lost in intense stoned thoughts and swung too fast to bring my legs off the edge—but I am not Pin the surfer, I am Charu, squeamish about heights—or if it was because I was given a small sudden shove by ghostly unseen hands. Either way, enthralled by wide vistas and a winter sunset, I tumbled off the cliff.

  I took one long deep breath in the abyss. “They say she died near a cave called Devil’s Kitchen,” I heard Tai say to a circle of mourning women, her face grim. My scream echoed back up to me as in my dream. But by the next breath, I was perched on a ledge, with the emptiness around me. I did not look down.

  I shifted my weight on the ledge, dislodging rocks that bounced all the way down to the valley. My slipper came off my foot and hurtled into the abyss. They will find it broken outside Shankar’s den, just as they had found her body, I thought.

  I knew I could not crouch like a goat in the wind forever. There was no other ledge in sight. No way to clamber up or down the steep rock face. Did Pin hang here suspended between life and death before she fell and broke her head? Did she feel as calm and clear as me?

  Above me was a slanting shaft of the black rock face carved jagged with wind and rain. I found I could stand on the ledge and lean against it. I rubbed my face against the sun-warmed rock, and even though I was on a tiny cleft of the volcano, I felt safe. I put my ear to the rock and heard the echo of the wind inside the hollow mountain. I put my
mouth to the cleft and sucked its secret air. The ancient air whirled into me, spinning through my body. I felt I could fly.

  I realized with a surge of joy that I had stumbled upon the “missing” hole on the roof of Devil’s Kitchen. As my eyes opened to the darkness, I could see a tunnel inside the cleft. I hoisted myself up with strength I never knew I had, and got my arms and my head into the gap.

  No wonder the schoolgirls had not found the “other side” of the hole in the cave. They had searched the surface of table-land, when in fact it was over the cliff’s edge! Surely I was in the hands of my emergency god, because I had fallen on the one ledge that actually had an exit. It is fate, I thought, I will crawl through the tunnel and end up on the folding chairs in Shankar’s den.

  But it was my hips that came in the way. Typical Indian figure, wide pelvic girdle, good for childbearing but terrible for crawling through narrow tunnels. I found myself wedged with my head and shoulders out at one end, and my legs wriggling into the void.

  All the panic crouched in my stomach pounced into my throat and I screamed, “Bachao, bachao, bachao. Ayi, bachao, save me mother, save me. I was screaming for my mother in the comfort of the mother tongue. My head scraped the roof, dislodging a family of bats who flew around in circles screeching. I had no hope.

  And then I saw a pinwheel of light and heard footsteps echoing their way towards me. There was hope!

  It was a man, holding a candle. In shadows, he looked like a gorilla. Large, hunched, shambling. He was smoking. He peered up at me in astonishment.

  I explained my predicament as best I could to the unseen hulk between the swirling bats. He stood as if glued to the spot below me for what seemed a lifetime, and then he stubbed his cigarette and said, “Thamba,” wait. He left and returned with a lantern and a metal chair. He stood up on the chair, reached his giant arms out, and pulled with considerable might, grunting. I wriggled and squirmed and then in the end came flying out like a projectile. I fell on top of him, he fell off the chair, and we were flat on the ground, I on top of him. He smelled of sweat and bidi smoke. I was torn and bleeding and barefoot.

  It took me a minute to recognize him. It was Kushal Wagle, the scandal-ridden youngest son of Janaki Wagle, the younger brother of Pinkie and Yellow.

  We limped into the den and sat on the metal chairs, facing each other. In the days when I was accepted into the bosom of the Wagle family and sat out in the veranda with the inspector, I saw Kushal rarely. He had a room in the front of the house that he used as his fortress, venturing out only to forage for food or make a phone call. He was sulky and never bothered to look at me, or at anyone else. In those days, of course, I did not know of his paternity issues.

  Kushal put the lantern on the table in the center of the den and lit a cigarette. He had thick lips and a chubby, pimply face.

  My hair was at half-mast; I knew I must look like a witch. I was shaking. I wanted to ask him for a cigarette, but I knew that would be too shocking.

  “Hello, how are Pinkie and Yellow?” I said instead, thinking it was best to go to the common ground to create some comfort in this, the most bizarre of meetings.

  “You don’t know Pinkie and Yellow, do you?” he said very rudely.

  “Well, of course I’ve heard about them so much from your parents,” I said. In the shadowy light, I felt he leered at me.

  “Do tell your mother I miss her kokum kadhi,” I added. Wanting to remind him how well I knew his mother.

  I spoke in Marathi, as I mostly did with his parents. But he answered back proudly in English.

  “Oh, yes, yes, you know my parents,” he said. He took a large swig from an unmarked bottle containing yellow liquid and then sniggered. “All of them.” I realized he had been sitting in the cave alone, drinking country liquor. He was clearly drunk.

  In all of the scandal stories swirling around town, they discussed how the inspector felt about rearing the son of his enemy, or how his wife managed to hold her head up in the bazaar. No one had spared a thought for poor Kushal, except to examine the tilt of his head, the shape of his jaw, or the color of his skin, in order to judge who his father was.

  The lamp threw an immense, wavering, genie-like shadow on the cave wall.

  My throat was parched. “Do you have water?” I asked

  He took another swig and passed me the bottle. “Only liquid here tonight,” he said, and now there was no doubt about it, he was leering.

  I refused, though I admit I was sorely tempted. Never, my mother had dinned into me from the day I could hear, never let yourself be alone in a room with a man. They cannot always control their natures, she usually added, lowering her voice.

  The leering man rested his elbows on his knees, hunching forward towards me. “Very soon, I’ll have it all going again. I’ll have drinks, and even your charas ganja.” He spoke the words “charas ganja” in a contemptuous manner. “The old hawaldar, he has promised to get me some of it. You tell those pussy friends of yours—ya, tell those friends to come next week. I will supply all their bad habits.” He winked at me.

  “Shankar and Son. I should put up a sign outside the cave. That’ll show them. That’ll show Inspector Wagle. One prick, and he will burst like a balloon.” This was Kushal’s rite of passage—choosing his father. He was sitting there alone in the dark, scheming of casting his lot with the lowly servant.

  I decided it was time to leave. I was shaken up and barefoot, and it was a long way back. First, a clamber down to the dirt road, and then a long and winding walk to Aeolia. I had been hoping to get Kushal to come with me, and perhaps go to the Nest, which was much closer, and get a police car. Or at least a pair of slippers. But Kushal was drunk and mean. I realized I was better off on my own.

  I got up to leave. I smoothed my short hair and straightened my clothes.

  “Thank you, Kushal,” I said. “You saved my life. I am eternally indebted to you. I slipped off the edge of the cliff and fell on a ledge. And miraculously, I found the tunnel. I could have been stuck in that wretched hole forever. That would have been a fate worse than death. It was my good fortune that you were here tonight. I am in your debt.”

  “Then you should return the favor,” he said thickly, and reached out and caught my arm and jerked me onto his lap before I had a chance to react.

  “Come on, don’t act so proper. I see you talking loose in the bazaar with those boys. I’m sure you service them.” I felt a large hard lump rise through the bottom of my thin cotton salwar.

  He pulled my hair and held my face just below his. I was glad for my short hair; my tail would have been torture. With the other hand, he was groping my meager breasts. “Ha, you think I don’t see you? I saw you going up and down at night from my window. I see you all the time. I see you everywhere. You better be nice to me, or I can get you in hot water. Very, very hot water. You better be nice.”

  The Sword of Innocence was too tarnished to wield. I would need another weapon.

  I relaxed my ramrod-stiff body. I put an arm on his shoulder.

  “Fine. Then be a man and do it properly,” I said. “No need to pull and tear. Let me teach you. First, light me a cigarette.”

  He looked confused, not sure he could trust me. But he was a boy of sixteen, and his vanity got the better of him.

  He took out two cigarettes from the packet near the ashtray. I pulled one from his hand and threw it across the cave. “Only one,” I ordered. “I’ll show you how we can smoke together. I’ll exhale into your mouth, and then when we kiss the smoke will swirl between our mouths. We keep blowing it back at each other. You’ll see how nice that feels.” I grinned at him. I had never done this myself.

  He gave a foolish smile and lit my cigarette. He began to breathe hard, his eyes glazed with anticipation. He opened his mouth. His breath was noxious.

  I took two deep puffs of the cigarette to steady my nerves, and the
n I plunged the lighted end onto his tongue, twisting it hard, hoping it would leave a permanent scar. I jumped off his lap and ground my elbow into his still-hard groin, and I ran out of the cave while he was howling in pain.

  I scrambled down to the dirt road. I heard him cursing me in Marathi, but thankfully, he did not follow me.

  Thirty-one

  Merch

  After my terrible confrontation with fat Kushal, there was only one place to run to. I knocked against his door, praying, and he opened it and took me into his arms.

  Merch had quiet eyes and gentle hands. He did not roll me a joint as would be his custom, but produced a dusty bottle of Black Dog whisky and gave it to me and knocked down a large peg himself, neat. My feet were scratched, my clothes were caked with volcanic dust eons old, and I could not stop my hands from shaking or my teeth from chattering.

  I had a long, long bath by myself, and when I came out, he asked, “Another whisky or tea and omelet?”

  First whisky, then tea and omelet, I said, and when he came to me with the clinking glass, he took my head and held it against his stomach as he passed my chair. I liked the way he could run his hands through my cropped hair. His hands felt warm and big.

  As he bustled around in the kitchen, I lit a cigarette and sipped my drink and decided that I had to trust Merch with my story.

  Merch is easily the best listener I know. I started with my night on table-land and the descent of Nelson, and went on to the attempted rape. I told him that I had lied.

  I do not think he said a word during the whole confession. If he did, I do not recall. I studied his face for signs of shock or dismay, but I instead I saw a gleam of light. “I’m glad you finally decided to trust me,” he said, finally, after I had grown silent.

  He had known all along. And he did not love me any less.

  “Those days everything was so intense, and then, standing in front of Woggle, I thought it would kill my parents. I felt that Pin was right beside me, she was telling me to deny even being there on table-land. I felt so confident, somehow. I felt I could dig around and find out what happened that night, you know, talk to everyone in school, uncover all those old secrets, and get more than those sakaram detectives ever would. In Macbeth, Banquo says, ‘I must become a borrower of the night, for a dark hour.’ I kept justifying it to myself later, saying I was merely borrowing that dark hour, and I would return it later.”