You have taught me that my sin was not loving her. And for this, I must suffer, she had said to me in the hospital room, rubbing her hands in deep sorrow. Playing on my love for Pin, pushing the envelope of her sainthood, showing she was ready to be punished for a crime she did not commit. Hoisting me up on a pedestal for loving her daughter—you are special, she said to me.
She pretended to cry, but she was rubbing her hands in glee. She would say nothing, she would stay above the fray and make the marked fool clear her name for her.
As it turned out, Raswani did it for her instead.
Poor old Raswani, dying in jail, turned completely insane, not even recognizing Miss Henderson, who had visited her—Henderson told Nandita who told Akhila who told me over chicken chow fun. “It was so depressing,” Miss Henderson had said. “She was as mad as a hatter when she died.” And poor Pin, without a chance to straighten herself out.
All so that Miss Shirley Nelson could take her fat bottom back to England and dream of the mountain school that she had once ordered, a place where brown, bandaged teachers had padded around her like pets.
The Princes must have saved her. We’ll take her away, they could have told her father. We’ll look after her, and no one will ever know. We will adopt the baby and Shirley. Shirley will live like a clean woman in the world. You need never worry about her. No one is to know. We will never come back here, they might have said. The child must have always been wedged between them, though.
It was the loneliness that could have driven Nelson to do it, made her write the letter to me, the marked fool. If she did not tell, it must have seemed to her that she did not live.
I saw her playing obsessively with confession. I imagined her, night after night, writing confessions instead of praying. Many, many confessions, to many, many people. And then she burnt them. And now only this remained. This cryptic note, gothic as the act itself, a riddle that would always leave a little room for doubt.
I was pacing from bookshelf to balcony in a shaft of moonlight.
If I had comforted Prince when she came to me, if I had walked up to Pin at the needle, or waited until she turned to walk down and walked down with her, she might have lived. A whole different life, it would have been, for us all. Not better, necessarily, just different.
I felt my blot awakening. The blot and I had been at peace these past twelve years. It was mostly quite calm. It broke out and became red and sore and spread into my upper cheek sometimes, and then I rubbed it with Ayurvedic creams and mostly forgot about it. The blot, I thought, had waned. But now it began to prickle and then to creep and crawl and then to grate and it came back to me as if it had never left.
Baba had gotten me flannel mitts in the days of the cow-dung bandage. They itched my palms, I hated them the first night, but I could not take them off without waking Baba. My mittened fingers could not untie the naval knots that I refused to learn from him. And so I had to scratch my palms, and the outside of my bandage, on an anger and appeasement basis. I realized much later in the night that scratching my hands distracted the main itch. And so I began to put the mitts on every night—even after the cow-dung bandage was abandoned—and I curled up in my bed furiously scratching my palms. I managed to mostly eliminate night itches that year. Mostly, but not completely. I always slept with the mitts under my pillow. Until Panchgani. But it was desire that spread through my body then and sucked the juices out of the blot and left it dry and shriveled. Sleeping, but, I knew now, not gone. I found I was rubbing and rubbing and rubbing my blot in Merch’s moonlit room.
I shook Merch awake. I switched on the light, thrust the paper at him, and then snatched it away when I realized he would not be able to read it without his glasses. I read the poem aloud, twice, without comment or explanation.
“It’s all over now,” I said, lighting a cigarette, pacing up and down as he fumbled. “Can you imagine, after all these years? It’s all over now. And no one knows but you and me.”
Merch rubbed his eyes and reached for his glasses. He blew on each lens, polished both carefully with the edge of his nearly white khadi kurta, and then put them on and looked at me gravely. “What’s all over?” he said. “What?”
Glossary
Ayi: Mother.
Ayah: Maid.
Auntiji: The suffix -ji is tagged onto the ends of names or titles to denote respect.
Baba: Father.
Babalok: Children.
Badi Bhabhi: Older brother’s wife.
Banya: Businessman.
Beta: My child, used as endearment.
Bhabhi: Brother’s wife. Also tagged onto names of women to be used as a term of respect.
Bhajiyas: Fritters.
Bhakris: Flat bread.
Bidi: Cheap Indian cigarette; tobacco rolled in a local leaf.
Brahmin: The highest caste in the Hindu caste system.
Carom: Board game played by four people.
Chal: Come on.
Channa: Roasted chick peas, eaten as snacks.
Charas: Grass, pot.
Chas: Buttermilk.
Chi: An exclamation denoting something gross. Like “yuck.”
Chowk: Courtyard.
Chudidar: Indian dress consisting of long tunic and tight pants.
Dal: Lentil curry.
Diwali: Hindu New Year.
Dupatta: Long scarf worn over Indian outfits.
Dhobi: Man who washes clothes.
Dhoop: Evening cleansing of home with incense.
Gajra: A string of fragrant flowers, worn in hair.
Ganja: Grass, pot.
Ghat: Mountain range in western India.
Hawaldar: Policeman.
Hindi: Indian national language.
Idli: Puffed rice cake, a south Indian staple.
Jhansi ki Rani: The queen of Jhansi, famous for her valiant role in India’s first war of independence against the British in 1858.
Katori: Small steel bowl.
Kerala: State in southern India.
Khadi: Rough, homespun cloth.
Kheema pau: Mince and bread.
Khichdi: Rice and lentil, overcooked until it is soft and mushy.
Kokam kadhi: Sour curry.
Kurta: A long, loose shirt with embroidery in front. Traditional Indian clothing worn by men and women.
Maharashtra: State in western India (Panchgani is in Maharashtra).
Maharashtrian: A person whose mother tongue is Marathi.
Mahtari: Old woman.
Majli: Middle.
Malayalam: Language spoke in Kerala, a state in southern India.
Mali: Gardener.
Marathi: Language spoken in the Indian state of Maharashtra, in western India.
Masala Chai: Spicy tea.
Methi: Particularly pungent smelling spice used in pickles.
Nani: Maternal grandmother.
Pallu: The end of the six yards of sari.
Paan: Betel leaf with condiments, chewed after meals.
Police chowki: Police station.
Paanwala: A person who sells paan; stalls selling cigarettes, sweets, and paan are a fixture of every town and village in India.
Parsi: A small, distinct community in India consisting of worshippers of Zoroaster who migrated from Iran.
Puri: Fluffy fried bread.
Puja: Hindu prayers.
Rajesh Khanna: Film star who was very popular in the 1970s.
Rani: Queen.
Sari: Indian national dress.
Shivaji: A hero who used guerilla warfa
re in the Western Ghats in the seventeenth century.
Sita: Wife of the god Rama in Hindu scriptures. Was captured by the demon god Ravana because she did not stay within the bounds of the “line” drawn by her husband.
Supari: Sweet betel nut, sold in small packets and chewed like gum.
Sigri: Brazier with coals.
Tuck: Boarding school word for snacks.
About the Author
NAYANA CURRIMBHOY grew up and attended boarding school in India before moving to the United States in the early eighties. She lives in New York City with her husband and their teenage daughter. This is her first novel.
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Credits
Cover design by Emin Mancheril
Cover photograph © Robert Harding/Masterfile
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Louis Simpson, “As Birds Are Fitted to the Boughs” from The Owner of the House: New Collected Poems 1940–2001. Copyright © 1955, 2003 by Louis Simpson. Reprinted with the permission of BOA Editions, Ltd., www.boaeditions.org.
MISS TIMMINS’ SCHOOL FOR GIRLS. Copyright © 2011 by Nayana Currimbhoy. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition July 2011 ISBN: 9780062092243
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Currimbhoy, Nayana.
Miss Timmins’ School for Girls : a novel / Nayana Currimbhoy.—1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-06-199774-7
1. Young women—India—Fiction. 2. Brahmans—Fiction. 3. English teachers—India—Fiction. 4. Girls’ schools—India—Fiction. 5. Bohemianism—Fiction. 6. Panchgani (India)—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3603.U7748M57 2011
813’.6—dc22
2010035526
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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