“I need some clarity here. Why didn’t you just tell me, instead of sending me down alone first like that under a false pretext?”
“Mr. Blind Irani showed me the raincoats the morning after Pin’s fall. He had found them on table-land. The girls’ names were below the hoods. I knew Nandita, Ramona, and Akhila. I had taught them intermittently. I thought I would hold on to the raincoats for a day or two and see how it went down. Didn’t want to get the girls in trouble. And then I saw the same girls following us. I figured they might have seen you up there that night. So I thought I’d give them a scare, keep them off your trail, so to speak. So I did my sinister act.”
It hit me with the force of a thunderclap. “You mean you actually thought, Merch, all these years, that I committed the murder?”
He laughed then, for the first time in the story. “Don’t be silly,” he said. “Not all these years, just the first few days. Not that I thought you physically pushed her. I thought that you and Pin might have gone up to table-land after the rain stopped. I thought she might have slipped in some skirmish, and you might have panicked. Something like that. It was quite probable, you must admit.
“And you—so fragile those three days in my room. I felt I held a bird in my hand. And then you asked about guilt, you may not remember”—I remember, Merch, I remember everything—“but you turned as white as a sheet and got off the bed when I mentioned murder.”
“Wait a minute. Let me get this clear. So you did that purposely, you mentioned murder just to test me out?” I was getting slowly furious.
“Steady,” said Merch.
“But I talked about it all the time, and I mention it as a defining moment in my life. I assumed equal knowledge. And now I had to hear about your role in the affair from Akhila, of all people, and that too after all these years?”
“I wouldn’t call it a role. More of a cameo appearance, don’t you think? All I did was tell these two silly girls to stay out of it. And after it all came out, it hardly mattered. I even forgot about it.”
“You forgot?” I asked, unbelieving, because no one forgets those moments. Not even with all the dope. Merch, the Mystery Man. Now you see him, now you don’t. That’s what Pin had said to me on table-land the night she first kissed me.
“Did you know that all these years the girls thought you were the murderer? Because of that night. And they say Ramona went crazy because of that night,” I said, and then I felt I had been too harsh. “Must have been top-rate acting, that’s for sure.”
“I think Timmins School education nurtures this sort of nonsense,” he said.
I decided to visit the nonsense-nurturing school, even though I knew no one there anymore. Sister Richards had retired, the Sunbeamers had dispersed, and Shankar now owned a bicycle shop in the bazaar with Kushal. It was called Shankarson.
In the principal’s chair sat a dark, fat woman in a sari who could have been approaching fifty. I introduced myself to her. “Charulata Apte, I used to teach here a long time ago. During Miss Nelson’s time,” I said, wondering how much she knew.
She gave a start, clapping her hand to her mouth. “But this is the strangest thing,” she said. She was a Syrian Christian, pallu tucked around her waist, thick curls escaping her bun and framing her face, so she appeared harried. Papers were strewn in untidy piles on the leather-topped desk.
I remembered this room always hushed and hallowed. But today, sounds drifted in. I could hear the hum of the life of the school, and floating in on the balmy air came a distant cry of “baatli paaaper” from the street. And though the shape and size and the furniture were just the same, and from the window, when you faced the desk, you still saw the stairs leading up to the school bell, it had relaxed and become an ordinary room. The atoms and particles had readjusted themselves; they had forgotten the stern rule of Miss Shirley Nelson.
“Charulata Apte? Now that is the strangest thing,” said the new principal for the third time, beaming with excitement. She had a well-modulated voice and a Malayalam accent. “You just will not believe this. It is the strangest coincidence, but I just got something in the post for you just last week.”
I was staring at her, not saying a word.
The principal calmed herself and continued. “Oh, but perhaps you heard there was a letter for you. Yes, yes, silly of me. You must have been told. Looks like a lawyer’s letter, very thick. They may have tried to contact you in other ways, of course. But I am glad you are here. I asked in the prayer hall if anyone knew where to find you. No one knew anything, though of course all sorts of rumors began floating around. I even wrote to Sister Richards, she is with her brother in Deolali, but I haven’t gotten a reply. Of course, it’s only been one week . . .”
I came out of my trance.
“Yes,” I said dutifully, “only a week.” The letter must have generated great excitement in the school. Surely the scandals still loomed over the school, just as they did over us all.
She nodded her head vigorously. She was an energetic woman. “Only”—she pronounced it wonly—“a week, and really today wonly I was going to send a note to the Chitnis family address I found in an old book, to Kolhapur. I see lots of Chitnis names on the sports records in the gym. Must have been smart girls.”
She fished out the envelope and handed it to me. She did not sit back down immediately, but stood watching, hands on hips, waiting for my reaction.
It was a substantial cream envelope, official and foreign, sporting a typed address and an important air. From Stephen J. Bender and Associates, Esq., London, England. I had never heard of them.
I mumbled my good-byes and swung out of the room, feeling the whoosh of air from the plait turning behind me like an absent limb. I heard seven times seven is forty-nine—that is how I always remember that piece of the multiplication table, from an upstairs window on a warm afternoon—as I floated off to the far throw-ball court, where I had met Nandita whole for the last time.
I tore open the envelope to find, inside, another envelope nestled within a crisp typed letter.
I was meant to read the wraparound letter first, get the outside story before the inside story, and so with shaking hands and a hammering heart, I did.
Dorothy Bender of Stephen Bender and Associates informed me that Miss Shirley Nelson had passed away on March 13, 1986. She had died in her sleep and been discovered two days later by neighbors who called the police. Among her papers was this letter, sealed and addressed to me. Ms. Bender continued:
Although all her affairs and papers were well ordered indeed, there were no instructions pertaining to the letter. But since it was in the box marked “Upon My Death,” and contained her will, directions for funeral arrangements, and other bequests, we feel that she intended it to reach you. We are sending it care of the school, assuming it to be the most current address she had of you.
Since we have no indication of the date when this was written, we cannot know if it will, indeed, find you.
The envelope, in Miss Nelson’s refined, even hand, was addressed to:
Miss Charulata Apte
c/o Miss Timmins’ School for Girls
Panchgani
Maharashtra State
India
I saw her on my first day at school. I heard her say the hard t. “We’ll look after Charulata here,” she had told Baba, putting her arm around me with a reassuring pressure to the shoulder. I had felt safe and warm under her wing.
Inside the envelope was one sheet of paper, a foolscap sheet in her looped, slanted handwriting, with a blue ink pen.
Three witches were called,
Three witches came—
The mother, the daughter, and the lover.
Three more witches arrived on the wind,
Drawn by the shining eye.
They came uncalled and left their robes on the mountain.
They stood unbeckoned beside the witch
Who held the needle that stitches earth to sky.
They took a spark from her fire,
Twisting the tale in their hands.
The blind messenger carried the robes back that night
Anointed in blood.
The marked fool would bear false witness.
I folded the page carefully, put it back in the smaller envelope, folded the second letter around it, put it back in the larger envelope, put it all in my purse, and walked out from the gap in the hedge past the paanwala to Merch’s room. I was glad to see that he was not there, but had left the key hanging inside the window that you had to push open.
I walked onto the balcony and sat on the mattress that had been dragged out for sunset-viewing, and read the poem again and again without any understanding, as if I were by-hearting a poem as a child.
It was hard to by-heart. It was clumsy. She could have done better than that, I thought at first, but then I realized she must never have been a writer. I saw her sitting in a gray-blue flat in some suburban spot near London night after night.
And then I curled up and drifted into a shallow sleep, thinking, I am the third witch, I am the third witch, I am in a story written by someone else. She was clever, to take me back into Macbeth.
I dreamt that as I sat across from her in that hospital room in Vai, the head of a snake popped out of her mouth and said in a saintly slithering Nelson voice, I did it dear, as she handed me the black-bound Bible.
It was as if I had known it all along. As if this had been the reality between us on that afternoon in Vai. The smell of the room came back to me intact, the smell of lavender water wafting from the handkerchief she held before her streaming eyes. And underneath, the strong smell of disinfectant masking the smell of decay and death.
I awoke with a square of moonlight on my face, the valley spread below me. Merch’s balcony was the same—it still held the two of us, suspended over the smoke of the burning pink petals—but the valley below had changed, like a slide in a viewmaster. The Krishna that had meandered thinly through Merch’s valley—it came out of the earth inside a cavern in old Mahabaleshwar—had been dammed and transformed into a glimmering glass lake. The envelope was under my pillow. I switched on the dim balcony light and read the poem again.
Merch was snoring softly on his bed. I folded myself on my balcony mat and lay shivering, staring at the majestic valley, my thoughts dancing in demented circles.
Three witches were called,
Three witches came—
The mother, the daughter, and the lover.
I was the third witch, the lover, that was for sure. Nelson had given me the family Bible that day in the hospital room at Vai; she had known that the Prince and I were lovers.
Three more witches arrived on the wind,
Drawn by the shining eye.
They came uncalled and left their robes on the mountain.
They stood unasked beside the witch
Who held the needle that stitches earth to sky.
They took a spark from her fire,
Twisting the tale in their hands.
The blind messenger carried the robes back that night
Anointed in blood.
The schoolgirls were the additional witches, who left their raincoats on table-land. They were the twisters of the tale. They had gotten hold of the letter and broadcast it to the world.
The blind messenger was Mr. Irani, who had found the raincoats and given them to Merch.
There was no mention of Raswani. She was not any of the three witches, and neither was she an additional witch, because she left no robes on table-land.
I had heard through Divya Moghe that for the past few years the ex-principal of Timmins had become reclusive and lived by herself with many cats. It was rumored that she had gone quite mad, although there was no substantiating evidence to support this theory. There was a trace of madness in her poem, but it rang true. It was an allegory, written and rewritten over the years. Every word had a meaning.
The murderer was the anointer of blood on the robes. But would that mean that the schoolgirls killed her? Or was the anointer indeed the Hindi teacher, who remained nameless? But why mention everyone else except the murderer?
The marked fool would bear false witness.
Maybe Raswani was the marked fool—marked as in marked by fate. But then her role was that of a witness. She was not the perpetuator of the crime.
Or it could be me. I was marked. Obviously I was marked.
If I was the marked fool who would bear witness, then Nelson knew I was there behind the rocks, watching her. She went up and petted Prince and walked down for my benefit.
I did it, she had said to me in my dream. And this is what she was saying to me with this poem.
She had trumped me, and she wanted me to know it, albeit after her death.
I saw the night again. I imagined Nelson as she walked up to table-land in her daughter’s shadow. With one step, she loved her, with the other, she hated her. Left foot, she wished she was dead, right foot, she wanted to hug her to her bosom until the day she died.
Her daughter would not turn to her. She did not look back, even though she knew the secret mother walked behind her. With the raincoat flung over her shoulder like a cape, she walked with big steps and stood arrogant beside the needle.
The secret mother waited. I imagined the turmoil within the principal’s breast—the saintly mother of perpetual succor fighting the secret mother, the sinner mother. She knew only one could live this life. If the sinner were discovered, the saint must die.
Tomorrow, it would be over. Her daughter would tell everyone the truth, and she herself would be forced to flee the school disgraced.
Or she could kill her, tonight.
Surely, that is how it happened that night.
She sat still, letting the thought settle into her head. She would walk up from behind, she would give her a quick shove. They would think she slipped. It was for the good of all. It would bring order back into the world. For what good would it do for her, Shirley Nelson, to live disgraced when she was so good and strong in this garden she tended? Her daughter was just a thorn, asking to be cut.
And then the clouds parted, and the principal saw the schoolgirls under the needle. And then, as she knew they would, she saw them stop in their tracks as they saw their principal. She did not look up, and she heard them turn and run as generations of guilty girls had run when she turned her blind eye.
She felt the life drain out of her, knowing that she could not do it now. She could not commit this act that she could not even name now that the girls had seen them both. She knew that all she wanted was here, in Panchgani. She knew how strong and true it was, the urge to have her daughter dead. She should arise and walk back. But she did not have the strength. She felt as if she were grounded to the rocks by roots that pul
led at her from the cave inside the mountain.
And then she knew it was fate when she saw the marked girl behind the jagged rocks that circled the needle. She knew that her witness had come. She arose and walked slowly up to her child and blessed her, and then, with a blind eye to the marked witness, she walked down the hill.
She turned as she came to the bushes by the lake. It is fate, she thought, as she waited. It is in God’s hands now who lives and who dies. I am His instrument.
If the Prince and I had walked down the road together, perhaps the principal would have lain dead beside the cave that night. But I played my part, I turned and walked down alone, and Miss Shirley Nelson pushed the child of her loins off the cliff.
She could be a secret mother now forever. No one she knew would ever know how she was connected to the Prince. She felt she walked down the aisle to meet her new clean life.
But the story had begun to leak even as she turned the corner to the municipal park. The letter had left her room. With this turn, the stakes were higher. She was now to be exposed as a secret mother and a murderer. And so she stayed in her room all day and all night, waiting to steal the letter back from her neighbor, the Hindi teacher.
But the letter, slippery as an eel, swam away, and the story became the front-page news. And now she wanted to live. Now that the First Sin had burst forth into the sun, it was revealed to her as moth-eaten and musty. Now she wanted to live. Survival trumps self-image.
And so she took me into her hands. She picked me up like a pink plastic doll, she used my love for Pin to wind me up. In the hospital room she played the martyr.
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