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And then we consecrate Yasmin's religious,
teetotaling, Muslim house by pouring our golden Kingfishers into
glasses that have never held alcohol before. We play Abba's
Fernando
, Deep Purple's
Smoke on the Water
and Wings'
Band
on the Run
over and over again. We sing along, with Pat playing a
feverish air guitar while Jenny pretends to pound on drums, her
straight dark hair flopping along like Ringo's. Greyish blue
cigarette smoke fills the room while Jenny tries to teach me how to
blow perfect smoke rings. I shape my mouth into the perfect O as she
teaches me to, but somehow my rings look more like Cs or Ls. ‘Girl,
girl, girl,' Jenny says, shaking her head and displaying her
dazzlingly white teeth. A lazy, languid feeling climbs up my legs and
lodges in my stomach the more I drink. I feel ambition leave my body
so that I no longer care about anything but how to prolong this
mellow feeling.

This lack of ambition shows up in my grades. By
ninth grade most of the teachers are on the verge of writing me off
for lost and mummy is beside herself, reminding me that the board
exams that determine whether I graduate from high school are only a
year away. Dad repeats his threats of getting me a job as a packer in
a factory if I don't make it through high school.

But I don't care. For the first time, I am
discovering a world of pleasant oblivion, and it is a welcome respite
from the prickly, nervous-making atmosphere at home. Also, there is
the thrill of the four of us against the world, a kind of replay
ofButch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid , going out with our guns
blazing, going up in flames. After years of being the responsible,
sensitive child who could always be counted on to do the right thing,
I am revelling in being a bad girl and in becoming the kind of
teenager that adults worry about. Being a bad girl is more freeing,
liberating and infinite y more fun.

Soon, the boys are a greater distraction than even
the booze.

There are plenty of boys at Christ Church school,
which is a stone's throw away from ours, but Jenny turns her
nose up at them and says the are too young and immature for us. Of
course we agree, because when it comes to sexual matters, Jenny is
the undisputed leader. So Jenny hooks the rest of us up with friends
of her current, college-age boyfriend and there are afternoons spent
in dark movie theatres and much groping and touching and kissing.
Then, Patty discovers that a cousin of hers is the deejay at a disco
at Apollo Bunder and will allow us to spend Saturday afternoons in
there for free, before the night crowd arrives. The cousin invites
some of his friends and soon we pair up and dance a bit and then
there is some groping and touching and kissing. It never goes much
further than this, at least not for me, because years of propaganda
about the virtues of chastity and how men don't respect women
who give it up too easily and the importance of being a virgin when
you marry, all this propaganda has worked on me. Besides, the thought
of becoming pregnant is terrifying and everybody knows that good
girls don't use condoms. So I make it a point not to come
across as a tease, try to engage these boys in some conversation
between the petting sessions, though sometimes that backfires because
it is hard to go back to hot and heavy panting after you've
asked someone what they think about the Emergency.

My grades are also falling because of The Pact.
The Pact says that all four of us will try to get more or less the
same grades.

It says that each time one of us stops writing in
an exam, the rest of us have to stop writing also. This is how we
will prove our devotion to each other. I am dimly aware of the fact,
as I suspect Yasmin is also, that she and I have more to lose by
agreeing to this than Jenny and Patty. It is understood that Jenny
will eventually make her way back to the United States and that the
rest of Patty's family will soon be joining her brothers in
Australia. But Yasmin and I will stay in India and be part of a
mercilessly competitive educational system. We will have to make our
way to college on the basis of our high-school grades and everyday we
are bombarded with stories of kids who scored in the 99

percentile and could still not get admission into
the city's top colleges. But I put these thoughts to the back
of my mind and sign on to The Pact, although there are times when
some lingering flake of ambition makes me hastily scribble a few more
lines before I set my pen down when the others do.

But when I get a lousy score on a literature exam,
Greta Duke hits the roof. This time, I have gone too far.

Greta Duke has been teaching us history and
English since seventh grade. I was home nursing a cold the first day
that Miss Duke introduced herself to my class but when I showed up
the next day, the entire class was buzzing with excitement.

‘Wow, guess what?' Brenda burst out.
‘Wait till you meet this new English teacher, men, you'll
love her. She's not like any of the others. She is so funny
and…'

‘Yah, and she looks young and active instead
of like a shrivelled-up bora seed,' Anita added.

‘And she said Shakespeare was really sexy,'
someone else interrupted, a day-old amazement still fresh in her
voice.

‘Yah, she really said the word “sex”,'
Anita added. ‘Said the word many times actually.'

‘Hey, cool it, all of you,' I said,
superiority dripping from my voice. ‘Don't forget, she's
a teacher. How cool can she be?'

But I was wrong. Three seconds after Greta Duke
walked into the classroom, I knew that I was wrong. With her curly,
shoulder-length hair, the thick, silver bracelet on her wrist and her
bright-yellow dress that she wore shorter than most teachers dared
to, Miss Duke was different from the other, worn-looking, irritable
teachers we were used to. And when she opened her well-thumbed copy
of
A Midsummer's NightDream
and began reading from it,
Shakespeare's words suddenly came alive with colour and
passion. We had grown up hearing about Shakespeare, were intimidated
by the thought of studying him, but the way Miss Duke explained his
poetry, the bard seemed as accessible and contemporary as Nancy Drew
had seemed a few short years ago.

‘Well, what do think?' she asked a
short while later, looking up from the book. ‘So do you brats
like Shakespeare?'

‘Yes, miss, yes,' we answered in a
chorus.

Miss Duke flashed us a mischievous, toothy smile.
There was a small gap between her front teeth that made her look like
a naughty teenager. ‘Aw, you all just like him because of all
the sex and romance.'

We looked scandalized. Imagine a teacher talking
so casually about sex. And actually making a joke about us liking
sex, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. ‘No
miss, no miss,'

we protested. ‘That's not it at all.'

‘It's the language,' I said.
‘It's just so beautiful.'

Greta Duke looked at me as if noticing me for the
first time.

‘You're Thrity, aren't you? I've
heard a lot about you,' she said enigmatically. The other girls
looked from one of us to the other, jealous at this special
acknowledgment. I shifted in my seat, not knowing how to interpret
her words.

‘Or what,' I answered automatically.
But then it had to be acknowledged: ‘All of you were right.
She's fabulous.'

By ninth grade, about the time when my grades are
tumbling like Newton's apple, Greta Duke and I have become best
friends. She is the only shot of vigour and youth in a school where
the nuns in their white habits and the invariably bespec-tacled
teachers look more like fossils then live human beings.

Unlike the other teachers—and even some of
my more conventional classmates—Greta Duke is not scandalized
or intimidated by my flights of fantasy and my talk about youth
power.

I keep threatening to come to school on a Saturday
and paint yellow daisies all over the walls, talk about launching a
coup against the nuns and taking over the school. Every chance I get,
I organize signature petitions protesting all grievances big and
small. The mad Parsi is alive and kicking and now she has added some
political catchwords like ‘revolution' and ‘sit-in
strike' to her vocabulary.

Greta Duke's response to all of my rantings
is one of bemusement. One day, encouraged by my efforts to lead the
entire class into signing yet another petition against a particularly
cruel nun, I fling open the doors to the teachers lounge and burst
in, my face flushed with excitement. Miss Duke is sitting at the long
wooden desk while Mr Narayan is sitting at a corner desk. ‘The
youth revolution is here,' I yell and then wait for a response.
Mr Narayan looks at me open-mouthed, his yellow eyes wide with
anticipation.

Miss Duke looks up slowly from the papers that she
was grading. ‘Good. Let me know when it leaves,' she says
evenly.

I exit the teachers' lounge duly chastized.

But now that my grades are tumbling like Jack and
Jill, Miss Duke decides it is time to get serious. ‘You listen
to me, you little brat,' she says one evening. ‘You have
a fine brain and you're wasting it. I'm not like the
other teachers—I've never had any problems with you being
friends with Jenny and the rest of that lot. I know in many ways
they've been good for you. But when all this business begins to
interfere with your schoolwork, well, then it's time for me to
speak up. From now on, you are going to stay behind after school and
sit in while I tutor the other girls. I want you to start showing up
at the library after school.'

I protest as the role calls for me to do but
secretly I am thrilled. When I break the news to Patty and Jenny,
they look surprised but then Jenny shrugs her shoulders and says she
hopes I can still occasionally spend an evening with them.

When I tell mummy about my conversation with Greta
Duke, she looks startled and then worried. She comes to school the
next day and talks to Miss Duke in hushed whispers about how dad's
business is not doing well and how we simply cannot afford another
tutor.

‘But madam, Thrity must've
misunderstood,' Miss Duke protests. ‘I didn't say
anything about money. In fact, I'm not even going to spend much
time on her. I know she will automatically pick up what she needs to
just listening to me coach the paying students.'

And so I spend my evenings in the school library
sitting at the table and pretending to not listen while Miss Duke
teaches and grills the assortment of six or seven students whom she
tutors after school hours. Once, I am sure she sees me stuffing back
the pack of Gold Flake that was sticking out of my uniform's
pocket but if she notices the cigarettes, she doesn't
acknowledge my smoking habit or lecture me about it. Jenny and Patty
walk by sometimes and I know they're headed to Yasmin's
home for a beer and sometimes I'm jealous but what surprises me
even more is how often I'm not. Because I am enjoying this
atmosphere of learning and despite my studied disinterest I am
thrilled when after all the paying students can't answer a
question, Greta Duke turns to me with a silent, quizzical look and I
casually blurt out the answer. On such days, if we are walking home
together, she lights into me. ‘Did you see how you answered
that question today when none of those other duffers could?'
she says in her deep voice. ‘You think I'm not watching
you, girl, but I see everything. Even with you gazing out of the
window all the time, even with half of you living in God-knows-what
fantasy land, you still absorb more than any of them. Just think what
you could do if you applied that mind of yours.'

I say something self-effacing or smart-alecky but
from the inside, I am singing. Greta Duke is the first adult I have
ever known, who, even when she is criticizing me, makes me feel
special and cared for. Unlike my mother's criticisms, I never
leave Miss Duke's presence feeling small and ugly.

Rather, she makes me feel as if all of my
shortcomings are born out of choices I have made so that I don't
have that doomed, desperate feeling around her. After all, if I've
made wrong choices, I can also unmake them. Even when she is
exasperated with me, I can tell Miss Duke likes me, is amused by me
and that takes the sting out of her words.

And then there is this: For all my declarations
about not caring about grades and reputations, deep down I do. Years
of lectures by my parents have done the trick and the thought of
repeating a grade is so shameful, so unthinkable, that I know that
flunking high school is not really an option. And I know that Greta
Duke knows that I know this. That's why she's not ready
to give up on me. One day, in an attempt to encourage myself to
study, I copy lines from a Dylan song on a sheet of lined paper, fold
the paper and hide it in my chemistry textbook. ‘She knows
there's no success like failure and that failure's no
success at all,' Dylan sings and I think I know what he means.
I know that Greta Duke is throwing me a lifeline, pulling me out of
the dangers of the world that I am being seduced by. Even though I
publicly pretend to disdain it, I hold on to this lifeline, sometimes
fiercely, sometimes half-heartedly, but I hold on just the same.

After all, I may be the Mad Parsi. But I'm
not crazy.

T
HE CHILDHOOD DREAM ABOUT THE city's
poor has stopped visiting me. But the poor are still with me. Like
ghosts, like shadows, they are everywhere and their presence exposes
the contradictions and follies and hypocrisies of middle-class life,
cracks it open like a rotten egg.