Swear You Won't Tell?

by Vedashree Khambete-Sharma

  ‘Why not?’ Avantika snapped. ‘You have lots of practice, no? Being Mahira’s friend.’

  There were a few gasps from Aisha’s gang, the loudest, naturally from Mahira herself. Miss Shah raised her eyebrows.

  ‘Hawww, Miss!’ Mahira called out. ‘Did you hear, Miss? Did you hear what Avantika—’

  ‘I heard her, Mahira, I’m not deaf. Avantika … that was unnecessary. Apologize.’

  Avantika stared at her shoes. Her cheeks were burning with rage. Shweta had been baiting her all through the rehearsal and she had finally cracked. She was about to open her mouth to say sorry, when Aisha got up from her seat.

  ‘Miss, I don’t think saying sorry is enough. She can’t just insult another girl like that. You have to take her out of the play as a punishment.’

  Miss Shah looked at her steadily and spoke in a voice that seemed deceptively calm. ‘Excuse me?’ she said, ‘I have to? Did someone appoint you headmistress in the past hour, Aisha?’

  The girl smiled, in what she must’ve thought was a winning manner. ‘No, Miss. But—’

  ‘Then sit down and stay quiet. Avantika, are you going to apologize?’

  ‘Yes, Miss. I’m … sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.’

  Miss Shah nodded.

  ‘Good. Now apologize to Shweta and Mahira.’

  Avantika gritted her teeth. Just get it over with, she told herself. You know you shouldn’t have said it. It’s two words, get them out.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she muttered in their general direction.

  Miss Shah clapped her hands twice and said, ‘Okay, back to practice. Let’s take it from Earnest’s entry.’

  The rest of the rehearsal continued more or less peacefully, especially after Miss Shah pointed out that gentlemen in the Victorian era were not known for their excessive fondness for hugging. Shweta kept glaring at Avantika between scenes, but behaved herself when they were on stage. Towards the end of the second act however, she lost her patience.

  ‘What is wrong with you?’ she yelled. ‘Why aren’t you getting this line right? You haven’t learned your lines, na?’

  ‘I have! But you’re going too fast!’

  ‘No! You’re going too slow!’

  The dialogue in question was supposed to be said together by Earnest and Algernon, in response to a similar chorused line from Gwendolyn and Cecily. Aisha and Reema were managing to say their lines together just fine. Avantika felt a pause was called for after their line, but Shweta clearly didn’t share her opinion.

  ‘Miss, see Miss!’ she appealed. ‘She is hopeless, Miss!’

  She glared at Avantika, who met her gaze head-on. Miss Shah looked calmly at the pair of them. ‘I’ll be the judge of that, Shweta. Let’s take the scene from the top.’

  ‘No, Miss, she can’t act, she’s rude, she keeps arguing! Can’t someone else do Algernon’s role? Maybe Meenal? She’s not this bad, Miss.’

  A strange look came over Miss Shah’s face. ‘Meenal, yes,’ she said, almost to herself. ‘That’s not a bad idea.’

  Avantika couldn’t believe what was happening.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she asked Shweta in a furious whisper. ‘Why are you doing this to me?’

  ‘Avantika,’ Shweta said in the tones of someone trying to explain quantum physics to a turtle. ‘We need to win interschool and we can’t do it unless we’re the best. You want the school to win, na? Then you have to understand.’

  Avantika felt like she’d break into tears any moment. Not because she was sad, although she was, but because she was filled with a dark, impotent rage. She clenched her fists and took a deep breath. If she cried in front of Shweta and Aisha, for any reason, they’d win. She turned to Miss Shah, trying to stop her voice from shaking.

  ‘Miss? Should I come down from the stage?’

  Miss Shah gave her a puzzled look.

  ‘You’re mid-scene Avantika. Don’t be silly.’

  ‘But Miss … you said—’

  ‘Meenal, take over from Shweta, please.’

  There was deathly silence and then muttering broke out through the auditorium. Shweta’s face turned ashen.

  ‘Miss!’ she gasped. ‘No!’

  She looked frantically at Aisha, who was standing across the stage from her. Aisha nodded and turned to face Miss Shah.

  ‘Miss…,’ began Aisha.

  ‘Do you want me to find a new Gwendolyn as well, Aisha?’

  Aisha shut up, although she looked like she was just itching to say something.

  ‘The play is in four weeks and we’re staging a comedy,’ said Miss Shah. ‘That means there shouldn’t be any drama, onstage or off it. Thank you for the casting suggestion, Shweta. You can step down now. Meenal, take up her position, please.’

  As the bewildered Meenal came up on stage, Shweta stormed off, close to tears. But she didn’t leave the hall. Instead, she joined the rest of Aisha’s clique in the audience, who instantly began murmuring their condolences. Avantika tried to ignore the venomous glances they were shooting in her direction.

  ‘Avantika. Avantika?’ Miss Shah’s voice cut through her distraction, ‘Let’s take it from your entry. Places, everyone.’

  Avantika stepped off-stage, passing Aisha as she did so. The girl gave her a cold look and whispered, just loud enough for her to hear, ‘You just wait now.’

  Avantika simply shook her head. She was getting really tired of these needless mind-games. She went through the rehearsal pretending everything was fine. It wasn’t really her fault that Shweta wasn’t in the play anymore. And as it turned out, that wasn’t a very big drawback for the production. Meenal’s comic timing was loads better than Shweta’s and she had a good memory for her lines. Besides, her chemistry with Avantika was decidedly less awkward and that showed in their comic give-and-take. Miss Shah nodded approvingly at the end of the rehearsal and was giving both the girls notes on their performance, when Avantika noticed Aisha walking towards Shweta.

  The two walked a few steps away from the rest and there was a furious exchange of words, in the course of which Shweta began to look increasingly horrified. At one point, she shook her head frantically, but Aisha held her hands in her own and whispered something to her that made her calm down. They both looked towards Miss Shah and finally, Shweta nodded. Aisha gave her an encouraging pat on the back and walked away. Shweta took a deep breath and walked towards Miss Shah.

  ‘Miss … can I talk to you alone, please?’

  ‘You can. But you may not. I have to go to my next class, Shweta, and I’m sure you have to too.’

  ‘Can … ma … could … we talk after school then, Miss?’

  Miss Shah gave her a brief glance, as if trying to read her mind. Then she shrugged. ‘All right. Come to the 7B classroom when you’re done. I’ll be correcting papers there.’

  Shweta nodded meekly and left. Avantika figured she’d try to butter Miss Shah up, but she didn’t see it working. And that was the last thought she had on the matter for a while.

  The next few weeks passed in a blur of rehearsals and schoolwork. And the following month, the St Agatha girls proudly lifted the shiny golden trophy for Best Play at the interschool dramatics competition. Miss Shah took her cast out for ice-cream to celebrate and Avantika wished every Friday was as delightful as this one had been.

  Her happiness, like all happiness, was short-lived. The following Monday, Miss Shah didn’t show up for her usual English class. Her replacement—Miss Hardikar—was brief in her explanation. Miss Shah was on leave. Yes, it was sudden. No, she didn’t know when Miss Shah would be back. Yes, maybe it was a family emergency, now could everyone please turn to chapter seven in their textbooks? The girls whispered among themselves and the whispers grew. Miss Shah was ill. No, she was on vacation in Seashells. No, she had eloped with an electrician. One girl went around telling anyone who’d listen that after getting a particularly bad grade in her English unit test, she had wished that Miss Shah would disappear and look, her wish had come tr
ue!

  But it is the nature of news to travel and the nature of salacious news to travel faster than light, so before the week was out, the news was: Miss Shah had been suspended because a student had complained that she had touched her inappropriately. Gasps went up in the corridors of St Agatha, after all the necessary phrases had been looked up in a dictionary. The poor girl! So scary! But who was the poor girl who had made the complaint? The teachers certainly weren’t saying. All that could be said for certain was that Aisha and Shweta couldn’t stop grinning these days.

  Ten

  ‘Shweta! Wait!’

  Avantika ran behind her as Shweta strode down the corridor. ‘Look, can’t we just get over what happened and—’

  Shweta stopped suddenly and turned around. ‘You think I’m an idiot? You think I’m going to fall for this whole surprise reunion act you have going on? The only reason I even came to the canteen with you was because I didn’t want to make a scene in front of my juniors! I know you’re not here for some stupid article, Avantika. So please shut up and go away.’

  She began to walk away again. Avantika sighed and followed. ‘You’re right. I’m not here for a story.’

  ‘Then why are you here? And don’t lie.’

  ‘Okay.’

  And with that, Avantika gave her a quick recap of the events that had happened since she went to Aisha’s house for the interview. ‘I have to know what happened to her. I thought … maybe you know something that … I dunno.’

  Shweta stopped outside a dirty beige door marked ‘Radiology—No Entry Without Permission’ and turned to face Avantika. ‘I know a lot of things you don’t. Doesn’t mean I’m going to tell you any of them.’

  ‘Shweta, please, this is important. Tell me how you knew it was Laxmi’s body in the morgue.’

  Shweta’s face darkened. ‘Oh really? It’s important? Guess what? So was that play!’

  ‘Oh come on,’ Avantika rolled her eyes. ‘Not that again. It was just a bloody play.’

  ‘To you! To you, it was just a play. To me, it was a chance to show my mother I could act! To convince her to let me become an actress after school!’

  Avantika blinked. ‘W… what?’

  ‘We had a deal, my mom and I. If I won the Best Actress prize in the interschool competition, she’d help me become an actress. We were talking about me going to Trinity College, London. Do you understand what that means?’

  ‘I… don’t—’

  ‘No. You don’t. It was the chance of a lifetime. And all I had to do was win that prize. You know, even if I hadn’t won it, even if she could’ve just seen me act, seen how good I was, I’d have had a shot. But I didn’t even get the chance to show her.’

  ‘Look … I’m sorry … but—’

  ‘Are you? Why? Don’t be!’ Shweta gestured at the dirty corridor with a bitter smile. ‘Look where I am today! And it’s all thanks to you!’

  She pushed open the door to the radiology room and slammed it behind her without another word.

  Avantika stood there, looking at the closed door for a few seconds. Then she pinched the bridge of her nose and shook her head wearily. Suddenly, she felt tired. Tired of running around behind people she thought she had left behind in the past. Tired of being polite to people she didn’t want to be polite to. And tired of running against dead ends everywhere. She sighed and began walking away from the door. Behind her, someone was shouting.

  ‘Medum! O, Medum!’

  A few seconds later, she felt someone brush against her purse. A middle-aged ward boy had sidled up next to her, his khaki uniform stained in places with betel-nut juice.

  ‘How much to call you, Medum?,’ he said in Hindi.

  ‘What happened?’ she asked in the same language.

  He lowered his voice.

  ‘You were saying something about the morgue?’

  She looked around. There was only one man sitting on a bench at the far end of the corridor. He appeared to be dozing, his head against the wall.

  ‘I needed some information about a body.’

  The ward boy scratched his ear and gave her an appraising look.

  ‘You are Dr Shweta’s friend?’

  Avantika sized the man up. He was of average height and had the wiry built of someone who eats little and does a lot of manual labour. Under his khaki cap, his hair was hennaed orange, but the orange was flecked by grey. She hadn’t seen him in the corridor while she was talking to Shweta, but then, she had been too preoccupied to notice. She decided he must’ve heard enough of their conversation, to form his own conclusions. Their tones, if not the language, must’ve been illuminating enough.

  ‘No,’ she said.

  He grinned, revealing tobacco-stained teeth in various stages of decay. ‘Me also,’ he said, ‘But still I will help you. For Gandhiji.’

  Avantika frowned. Gandhi? People still did things in his name? The man noticed the confusion on her face and clarified.

  ‘Gandhiji, medum. Anything anyone does in this country, it’s for him only.’

  She must’ve looked utterly clueless at this point because the man actually laughed. ‘Arrey what, medum? Whose face is printed on a hundred rupee note, haan?’

  It was filthy behind the hospital. Avantika covered her nose and mouth with a tissue and waited impatiently among the discarded syringes, IV drips, half-empty strips of pills and other hospital refuse.

  There was an unpleasant smell around the place, part chemical, part organic. If you had to come up with an exact equation, it was probably one part expired paracetamol, three parts human urine, but concentrated and amplified till it felt like it was all you would be able to smell, now and forever. But maybe she was being overly sensitive. Maybe you just had to get used to it. Like the two young ward boys who were leaning against the hospital wall a few feet away from her. They didn’t seem to mind the stench, but the foul-smelling beedi they were sharing probably out-stank every other odour. Every couple of minutes they glanced her way, with expressions of curiosity mingled with half-concealed lechery.

  She wondered if doing this in the morgue would’ve been less icky. But Ganesh, the ward boy—and it struck her as ridiculous that a middle-aged man should be called a boy—had insisted she wait here.

  ‘Nobody will say anything, medum, but why to take chance?’

  So she waited, checking Facebook on her phone and trying to ignore the fact that her last meal had been the gingery tea with Shweta. Ganesh came out of a side entrance a little while later, empty-handed, not looking even slightly furtive. Her heart sank. He didn’t look directly at her, but instead, shot an authoritative look at two ward boys.

  ‘What, you don’t have work or what? Get inside!’ he barked.

  The two shot him insolent looks, but one extinguished the beedi against the wall and put the dog-end behind his ear. Avantika watched them leave, whispering to themselves and sniggering humourlessly behind Ganesh’s back.

  ‘You didn’t find the file?’

  Ganesh made a sound that was presumably a laugh.

  ‘File? For unclaimed body? That also in government hospital? This is not America, medum.’

  He pulled out two folded off-white papers from his pocket and handed them to her. Avantika unfolded them to find two identical letter-sized morgue forms, with headings in English and Marathi.

  ‘There were two bodies last month that nobody came for,’ Ganesh said, scratching his neck. ‘Dr Shweta asked about one of them. I don’t know exactly which one so I got both forms.’

  Each form had a space for the attending doctor’s name. She could just about make out the word ‘Kakkar’ in the loopy signature on one of them. She frowned. How could an obstetrician double up as a forensic pathologist? One job involved birth and yes, okay, sometimes death. And yes, ObGyns must be dab hands at stitching people up, what with all the C-sections they perform. And it was a government facility, but there still had to be some protocol, right? Even here, in the Hospital of Horrors, there must be some rules, ri
ght? She turned to the other form. And frowned.

  ‘There is no signature,’ she said, more to herself than to Ganesh, who heard anyway.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Here,’ she held out the form. ‘Shouldn’t there be a sign, from the doctor who did the post-mortem?’

  Ganesh gave her a wary look, then looked around casually. Avantika reached into her purse and pulled out a five-hundred-rupee note. She folded it deliberately and put it in the pocket of her jeans. Ganesh’s eyes followed it, then rose to meet hers.

  ‘Doctors are busy people, medum,’ he said, rubbing the back of his neck. ‘They don’t always have time for these things.’

  ‘These things meaning signing forms?’

  ‘Sometimes dirty jobs are left to those who are used to doing dirty jobs.’

  ‘Dirty jobs like—?’

  He gave her a blank stare.

  ‘Cleaning vomit, washing bedpans, mopping blood in operation theatres, changing bedsheets that patients have crapped on, opening up patients nobody has claimed—’

  Avantika felt queasy. She took a deep breath and held out the form with Shweta’s scrawl.

  ‘This one has Doctor Shweta’s sign, though. How come?’

  Ganesh looked beadily at her. ‘So many questions you are asking, medum. How come?’

  Avantika thought fast. She could always lie, make up some stuff about a personal vendetta against Shweta. That would probably go down well. Or she could tell just him she worked for a newspaper. Would that spook him out? Him, a man who had seen more blood and gore than the props department of the Saw franchise?

  ‘I’m a reporter,’ she said, watching his face. ‘And I think this person,’ she pointed to the form, ‘may have been my friend.’

  Ganesh’s face had taken on a guarded expression at the mention of the word ‘reporter’. Now he sneered.

  ‘So many friends of one girl? Dr Shweta also said this only. To the Dean. She said this is my very good friend, I don’t want anyone else to do post-mortem. Special request and all.’