The girl, who is in critical condition at Poona General Hospital, has stated that she was dragged by the hair and kicked off the cliff of table-land, a plateau in Panchgani, by Miss Usha Raswani, also a teacher in the same school.
Miss Raswani, who had fled the school soon after the murder of Miss Prince, had taken to wandering around the village at night, it is reported. She has been apprehended and has confessed to the murder of Miss Prince. She has been charged on one count of murder and one of attempted murder, and is being held in Yerwada jail to await trial.
The second victim—whose name has been withheld in order to protect her status as a minor—was, according to her police report, lured by the accused up to table-land and then pushed off. It was the same spot at which the British teacher, Miss Moira Prince, fell off the cliff to her death. By good fortune the minor was rescued that night.
“We have to conclude that these are the doings of an insane mind,” said the local inspector. “It is as much for her own safety as for the safety of the community that she is being held without bail.” Inspector Dhananjay Wagle had previously detained two others for the crime: a local mali and the British principal of the school. The principal, Miss Shirley Nelson, has been freed, her passport has been released, and she has left for her native England this morning.
Miss Nelson had refused to make any comment to the reporters who had mobbed the airport.
And I was free. As free as the wind in the silver oaks.
Thirty-three
The Tuesday Sari
The whole school loved Nandita as they had never loved anyone before. She was a heroine, she had risked her life but solved the murder. Entire classes sent her individual handmade get-well-soon cards. Some third-standard girls sent her pictures of Jesus with inspirational poems. Teachers and matrons set up a sign-up sheet outside the staff dining room to ensure a steady stream of visitors, and her friends were allowed to miss school and go down to Poona to “cheer her up.” Her sisters went twice a week and were given special treatment.
Her spine was damaged, and the general opinion was that she would never walk again. Her father had brought in a Dr. Udwadia, whose name no one had heard before but who was now known through the length and breadth of Panchgani as the all-India authority on spinal neurosurgery. If he could not mend her spine, no one could.
Akhila was with me the day I visited her in the hospital. She was carrying a large number of little plastic-covered autograph books. “Now the whole of standard six has sent these books for her to sign. As though she has nothing better to do,” she grumbled, dropping one.
Akhila told me most of the story in Kaka’s taxi, where we sat facing the Pearsall ayah, who was her chaperone, and a young boy with two kid goats who continued to have a baa-baa contest all the way to Vai, where they thankfully got off.
“That day, Miss Mathews took us behind table-land for a walk, and we were sitting behind, you know, just below the first loop of the path that goes to the top, and we saw these two village girls walking down to the valley, both wearing Miss Raswani’s saris. The Monday and Wednesday saris. She’s had them since we were in standard seven. The Tuesday sari is that horrible yellow-brown one.
“So of course we charged down and asked them where they had gotten those saris. They claimed the saris were theirs and tried to walk away, but Shobha caught the hand of the smaller one, and said, ‘You stole them. We will report you to the police. You are a thief.’ The little one was so cheeky. ‘That’s what you rich people always think. We people always steal. Go, go to the police, I’ll show them where we found the saris.’
“We got them to show us instead. Behind a scrubby bush a little way down towards their shortcut path to their village, they showed us a black trunk. The girls had broken the cheap lock with a rock, it hung dented and loose. Inside we found four neatly folded cotton saris. The two silk church saris were at the bottom. ‘See, we didn’t even take the silk. Just took two saris from the top. We were going to wash them and put them back soon,’ they assured us.
“The rest of the trunk had petticoats and dressing gowns and some papers. There was one dirty torn sari wrapped into a bundle and pushed into a corner. It was her Tuesday sari.
“And she had disappeared on a Tuesday. And so, of course, we all got very excited. And then Nandita became all quiet. I knew she was up to something, because she stopped giving her opinions. We were all saying this and that, and she just nodded. At least if she had told us, this would not have happened.” Akhila then burst into tears.
We put on our cheery faces as we walked into the room, but Akhila cried as soon as she saw Nandita’s broad smiling face popping out of the brace she was wearing. Then we all started crying.
Her body would turn fat on top as she grew older in a wheelchair, I thought, almost choking with pity. I was glad I was not her, though I knew that she was the heroine, and I was not.
Everyone was crying a lot these days; it was a free-flowing kind of time warp. All three of us sobbed for a time, in separate sorrows. In the end, we hugged, she on the bed and I bending over her in an awkward way, wondering if she would ever make love.
But I felt the strength flowing from her body and knew that pity was the last thing she wanted.
And then we settled down on chairs, spent, and talked of unrelated matters and school gossip and Macbeth for quite a while, until it was almost time for us to leave. But I wanted to know. And I was not going to leave without asking the question.
I too had gone towards Raswani that day. I had just been luckier than Nandita. Look her in the eye and say what you want to say, I thought. Deformity we both know.
“Nandita, what made you stay behind like that?” I asked. Akhila was shaking her head vigorously at me from behind her friend, pigtails wagging, mouthing “no, no” and waving her hands in case I missed the other cues.
Nandita’s voice took on a dry, neutral tone. “I thought at that time that she was not the murderer. I was quite sure it was someone else. I thought she ran away because she was afraid for her own life. When we were examining her trunk, I saw something move behind a bush, and I thought it just might be her, watching us. Raswani had confided in me once; I thought she liked me. I thought if I waited for her alone, she would come to me. I could get her back, and then they could talk to her. She knew everything and was afraid, that is what I thought.”
And then she said, as she would have to for the rest of her life, “I could only do it alone, don’t you see? Raswani would never come close otherwise.”
We were all quiet after that. I wished I had not made her go through the pain again.
Nandita turned her face away from me. She nodded to Akhila and closed her eyes.
“She is tired,” said Akhila, smoothing her brow. “We should go.”
Outside the room, Akhila was reproving. “Don’t you know you are not supposed to ask her about it?” she said to me sternly.
“No one told me anything about that.”
“Well, you aren’t,” she said, huffily. “Now you have gone and upset her.”
“But don’t you think she thinks about it all the time? Maybe she wants to talk.”
“We have been told not to. By those who know better. Her father and the doctor have said that it will hamper her recovery. Miss Wilson called our class to the drawing room. Her father was there, and he spoke to us. Now that Raswani has confessed, he said, there is no need for anyone to ask her any more questions about it. For now, at least.”
On the way back, in Kaka’s taxi, with the school’s chaperone ayah snoring beside us, and a newlywed couple bound for Vai whispering coyly in the front seat, Akhila could not lose out on the glory of telling the rest of the story.
It seems that, on their way down to school, Miss Mathews had broken the girls up into small groups and
sent them to collect tadpoles in jars from the little brown puddles, for use in her science lab. And no one noticed that Nandita had slipped away.
They realized they had lost Nandita when they reached school. The girls went up and told Miss Wilson about the trunk and their missing friend. There was no Timmins car, so Miss Wilson and Miss Manson had borrowed bicycles from Shankar and Mallu the bearer and cycled up to table-land, the entire senior school crowding at the gate to watch them sail away into the evening.
Nandita had been finally discovered on an outcrop of rock halfway down the cliff, lying like a broken doll.
Nandita gave her police report. She stated that Miss Raswani had pushed her off the cliff. And then she said no more. Nandita had not told anyone the details of the incident. She refused to talk about it. Traumatized. That was the new word all the girls were using. Nandita had been traumatized and never talked about what happened on table-land.
“But that’s what bothers me the most. Nandita is so cautious. What made her so reckless that day?” I said.
“It’s because of you. She was so intent on saving you. She was blind to her own safety,” said Akhila with an accusing look, the resentment she had harbored all day bubbling up to the surface. “It’s all your fault.”
“Come on, Akhila, do you really think I would want Nandita to be hurt because of me?” I asked. Akhila shrugged and turned her face and stared sullenly out of the window as we shuddered up the ghat.
The residents of Panchgani collected funds to buy the demented Hindi teacher soap and fresh milk in jail. Most agreed that these were the actions of a deranged person. A few said it was Raswani giving up her life for her idol, Miss Nelson. Everyone was relieved that the case was closed.
And I. I packed my bags and left for Bombay as I had always dreamt I would. I did not return to Panchgani until twelve years later, in the summer of 1986.
Epilogue
Chinese Lunch
CHARU
I first came across the concept of the “doughnut truth” in Ada. When I learned of the schoolgirls’ sinister meeting with Merch on table-land, I wondered if Merch had given me Nabokov’s novel all those years ago so I would know about the hole he had left inside the truth.
We were at Kamling restaurant, Akhila and I, shielded from the molten heat of May by deep air-conditioning. We were meeting after twelve years.
Akhila had called one morning when I was ready to leave for college, books under arm, bag on shoulder, tiffin packed.
“Miss Apte? Miss Apte, this is Akhila, from Timmins. I used to be Akhila Bahadur in those days. Remember?”
I really wanted to put down the phone and be gone. I knew I would be late for class.
Much to my surprise, I was leading an almost respectable life at thirty-two. I was teaching in a Bombay college, I was rearing my child and tending my father. Except that I had no husband.
Ayi lived on for ten years after I left Panchgani. She gradually became somewhat more alert, recognizing us all, saying small words, and laughing at everything. She put on a lot of weight and was like a jolly Buddha. I finished my master’s degree, married a rather inconsistent and unsuitable co-student, and had a daughter. We visited Ayi and Baba in Indore as often as we could. When we were coming, she would wait at the window holding out a toy she had bought for Uma. Uma would be looking up as soon as we got off at the train station. “Is that the window, is that Nani’s window?” she would whine at every corner, until we arrived and she would charge up the stairs and leap into Ayi’s arms. Ayi died in her sleep in 1984, soon after my husband and I parted ways, and Baba moved in with me. He was very active in his retirement, having set up a complete regimen for himself, which included picking up Uma from school, buying fresh vegetables and meat every day, and a brisk evening walk of exactly five miles. I thought of us as a happy family. The Panchgani gang had dispersed, though we still met from time to time.
The white light of summer was blasting into the little room. I began to feel the sweat prickling on my upper lip. I had never been that fond of Akhila. “I’m late for class . . .” I began.
And then I remembered her face framed in Mahrukh Tunty’s bra.
One cup was fitted to her head, as snug as a swimming cap. The bra was hooked and hung down to her chest like a demented necklace, the second cup pointy and erect over her left ear.
Mahrukh Tunty’s huge round breasts have since gotten her on the cover of Playboy magazine, and made her famous through the length and breadth of India and beyond. But in those days, her mountain breasts were a legend only in Panchgani.
Mahrukh was very proud of her breasts then, and happy to parade the evidence. She was prefect of the lower dorm in Rowson House, and she regularly had her minions hold the voluminous underwear over the sigri in the veranda. The center never dried in the monsoons.
On an afternoon of deep rain, I came upon girls gathered and roaring as if around a cockfight. In the center of the circle were two heads in the two cups of Mahrukh’s brassiere, bouncing on their haunches towards a stretched skipping rope. The bra strap was fastened at their chins, and they had one arm around each other’s shoulders in a lunatic version of the three-legged race.
They scattered when they saw me, and somehow only Akhila was left beside the burning coals, the lacy cup still fitted to her head like a cap, her pigtails popping out from underneath.
“Look Miss. Monsoon swimming,” she said, her black eyes dancing. I smiled and walked on, waiting to tell Pin so we could both roll with laughter on her bed.
“Of course, I remember you Akhila,” I said, warming to her.
“I saw you at Breach Candy the other day, you had a little girl with you. I waved and called, but you did not see me. I think you were trying to catch a taxi outside Premsons. And then, strangely enough, I ran into Divya Moghe, just out of the blue at some function. We began talking, and she told me she is doing her Ph.D. under you. In Kalina, she said. It must be fate, I thought. First I see you, then I hear about you. I got your number from her. I knew I had to meet you.”
Akhila and I agreed to meet for lunch at Kamling restaurant a week later.
I smoothed my sari and sat down across from Akhila at the corner table she had chosen. Her hair was tied up in a high ponytail, she wore a printed salwar, and looked plump and matronly as a mother of two has every right to be. There were big single diamonds in her ears and on the third finger of her left hand. Her thickened features appeared to me as flimsy as a cardboard mask, for I could see the impudent grin of a fourteen-year-old beneath it.
“I somehow remember you with shining lips and oiled lashes,” I said.
She burst out laughing. She still had naughty eyes. “Vaseline,” she said. “I put large globs of Vaseline on my lips and eyelashes that year. I felt glossy, like a model. Punita Parikh told us that Vaseline made eyelashes grow. So we all started doing it. But I was obsessive. I kept a bottle in my desk and would lather it on between periods.”
“Did you know that Raswani died?” she added.
“Yes, in jail, a year ago. Or was it six months?” I still got bits of Timmins news from Divya Moghe.
“But do you really believe that Raswani killed Prince?” she said, putting vinegar and onions on her sweet corn soup with the blue glass spoon.
We had all believed it at that time. We had wanted to believe it. Because we all knew Raswani was mad enough to kill, and we knew she needed to live in custody. And we wanted the case solved, all of us, for our own different reasons. Doubts were discussed only behind closed doors.
When could
Raswani have climbed up the hill, where could she have waited, and how could she have come down unseen when it was clear that an unseemly number of Panchgani residents were on and around table-land that night?
“Is it a promenade like Marine Drive or something?” said the judge, who had never been to Panchgani, not finding it as bizarre as it really was.
For a time, I was obsessed.
“No,” I said to Akhila. “It does not feel right. In fact, if you want to know, I don’t think she was up there at all that night.”
Akhila was shoveling chop suey into her mouth with boarding school urgency. She nodded vigorously. “I agree with you,” she said. “But not Nandita. Nandita is a hundred percent sure that Raswani killed the Prince that night. She has it on the authority of that time when she spoke to Raswani and Raswani gave her the famous letter. She says that Raswani revered Nelson and finally lost her mind and killed Prince to save her. And then tried to killed Nandita, because she thought Nandita had guessed the truth. And you know how Nandita can be. I am even afraid to open my mouth and say anything.” She rolled her eyes up towards the red pagoda lights hanging from the ceiling.
I did know how forceful Nandita could be. Nandita who swept through the corridors of power in her fast foreign wheelchair, Nandita the smart lawyer in a handloom sari, Nandita the champion of the crippled, whom she was now agitating to be called handicapped.
I wrote a chapter for her book Deformed (Oxford University Press, 1981). It was a very clever anthology of deformity. I was one of the ten women whom she persuaded to write about their personal bodily defects. There was a woman with buckteeth that flared right out of her lips, a woman with a club foot, a woman who was trying to commit suicide and had been rescued and was now scarred, a blind woman who had remained a spinster and sat mostly alone in the back room of her brother’s house, and so forth. Each chapter contained a photograph of the deformed as an adult and, when available, as a child. Some of the chapters were “as told to Nandita Bhansali.” Nandita’s own story brought up the end. She started out with her fall and her crippling, how her worst childhood nightmare became real, and how you find new strengths, but she quickly broadened the discourse to the need to legislate to protect the weaker sections, this being the duty of any modern society that considered itself humane.
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