Miss Timmins' School for Girls

M
ISS
T
IMMINS
'

School for
Girls

a novel

Nayana Currimbhoy

Dedication

To my two true loves

Tarik & Sana

Acknowledgments

Special thanks to:

Carol Frederick, the book angel that every author of first fiction deserves.

Arshia Julian Mrugank and Rachel, my generous friends who waded through various half-baked versions over and over and over, over the five years it took to write this novel, and held my hand over the rough spots. And all the kind readers—too many to name—for their insights and encouragement.

My ever-beautiful mother and all my family and friends for the cushion of their love and support.

My valiant, wonderful agent, Dorian Karchmar; my brilliant editor, Claire Wachtel; and all at HarperCollins for making my story better, for giving it a chance to see the light.

And to the Ledig House writers' residency for the sweet writing spot.

Contents

Prologue

The Closet Room

MERCH

T
oday Charu came back to me, suddenly. On a summer morning, with the sunlight forming a sharp square on the balcony, she waltzed up the stairs to my room in Panchgani, above Dr. Desai's dispensary.

“What kind of idiot were you, Merch?” she asked, sitting on my bed, legs dangling. “Who were you in those days? Did you think you were that young man in
Crime and Punishment
? I can't remember his name. You know, that pale young man who lived in a cupboard and killed the old lady.”

“Dimitri Dimitrovich,” I said. “It's safe to call all Russian heroes Dimitri Dimitrovich.”

“You know what I mean,” she said. “Were you actually making devious plans in your closet room?” She lit herself a cigarette from the packet in her pocket and took a deep first drag. I recalled with a pang how she would fumble and look up at me to light it. I was her lighter in those days, and I loved it.

1974 was a forked tongue of a year, it spoke to me of murder and madness, and love and laughter in equal measure.

I did not answer her question directly. “I was obsessed with you in those days, Charu,” I said. It was not the answer she was looking for, but it was the truth. I was obsessed with Charu in 1974, when we were all embroiled in the murder of Moira Prince, and I am obsessed with her now, though twelve years have passed.

“And who are you
these
days, Merch?” she might just as easily have asked—Charu, if she asks these days, is always forthright—and I would not have answered that, either, though I think about it constantly.

Today, when she walked into my room, all the surfaces turned glossy. She tilted her head to the side, she ran her fingers through her tousled hair, she stood, she sat, she smoked, she was a ball of nervous energy, she brought with her a heady whiff of the old days. I thought of the roses we crushed with our fingers and piled on a steel plate, our walks on rain-soaked nights. The mountains that framed my windows stopped being paper cutouts. I felt the current creep back into my hands.

“I just had to ask you in person. I rushed all the way from Bombay, dropped everything,” she said. Charu was Atlas, holding up her world, caring for everyone. So sure, she had a lot to drop. I had picked up nothing all these years. I was as free as a vagrant and should have been content.

“You were seen on the cliff that night,” she said, accusing. We both knew, of course, that she meant the night the rain stopped. The night the body of the British girl was found broken on the black rocks below the cliff.

“Why didn't you tell me, Merch?” she said. “All these years.”

It is that kind of story. Though it lies sleeping, it can awake at any time. Facts and fictions are nearly one. They ripen and burst suddenly, without a warning.

“I forgot,” I said, though I knew she could not possibly believe me. “Anyway, it's not exactly true,” I said, and then added a third excuse for good measure, an extra pat of butter on a frying pan, “and we all had our secrets, didn't we?”

1974 was the year of the Great Panchgani Scandals.

Panchgani is not on the way to anywhere at all. It is a small town on a medium mountain reached only by one long and winding road. In the summer families come from the cities in the plains, children lurch through the bazaar on undernourished ponies, honeymoon couples climb up to Sydney Point to watch the sunset. But the monsoon settles long and hard in this region of the mountains. Nobody comes to Panchgani in the monsoons, except perhaps sturdy parents of small sick children. The retirees, TB patients, and hotel owners close their homes and their businesses and go off to live with their daughters in Poona. No one leaves Panchgani in the monsoons. The steep mountain slopes are slippery, and you can see trucks overturned in the valleys. The rain closes in around the town, and those who remain consider themselves the real people of Panchgani.

The eight boarding schools stay open, and all those that serve them. The teachers, the servants, the shopkeepers, the post office, the police station, Kaka's Bakery and Eatery, the Irani Café, and the old men who have nowhere to go. And me, Merch.

At the Irani Café in the rain, the old men played bridge while we drank endless cups of tea between joints, which we would smoke in the abandoned municipal park just outside the bazaar. We would watch the Timmins girls file past in their rubber raincoats. In the monsoons, the schoolgirls were lined up in twos and taken for long walks. There were only yellow, blue, and green raincoats that year, each of the ugliest shade possible. The line would stop to regroup just before the end of the bazaar, and the laggards would waddle across my vision like seals in hospital bed mats.

When I picture Panchgani in the monsoon of 1974, the line of schoolgirls turns into a line of ants. I see Panchgani as a circle of anthills rising out of the red mud, each with its own separate army of ants. The murder of the British girl smashed through the world order like a sharp rock thrown by a cruel boy. I remember the shock of it, the sheer insanity of it. White women and locals who lived in mountain hollows, schoolgirls, hippies, policemen, mad teachers, were all forced to rub up close against each other. Information jumped lines and became contaminated.

Then the scandals passed into memory and myth. Everyone went back to their anthills, regurgitating their own scraps of information. No one has the whole story, not even me.

I could have told Charu that she was at least half right. I
was
sitting in this very room and making dubious plans that year. Truth is, I have sat in the cocoon of closet rooms and made devious, dubious plans all my life. I could have told Charu that plans are nothing unless action follows. Or, I could show her.

I think I should, tonight. Twelve years is nothing.

BOOK
ONE

Panchgani

Charu

One

High Upon the Mountains

I
n 1974, just three weeks before my twenty-first birthday, I left my family and traveled halfway across India to teach English and literature at Miss Timmins' School for Girls. The school was in Panchgani, an eight-hour drive from Bombay in those days.

My father and I joined the school party at Poona Station. Two train carriages carrying the banners
Miss Timmins' School for Girls Traveling Party
had departed at dawn from Bombay and deposited the girls at Poona Station by noon. We had been instructed to meet them in the First Class Ladies' Waiting Room, where we found the girls in blue-checked dresses eating sandwiches and boiled eggs from brown paper bags. Their dresses were flared from the waist, like umbrellas. Bananas were being passed around. We were to go the rest of the way up the mountains by road. After lunch, the girls were lined up and stuffed into three red and yellow buses. Baba and I were told to get into the middle bus by a dark lady in a white sari, no doubt a teacher.

Baba was the only male on the bus. We sat apart, he and I, like lepers on the last, bumpy bench. The girls looked back curiously from time to time. The bus had a sullen air as it grunted and groaned up the foothills outside Poona. Some girls were sniffling. They seemed to be feeling as rough and as raw as I was.

As we went deeper and higher into the mountains, up the narrow winding road, the sunlight became slanted, and the air thin and clean. The girls revived and started singing. Baba and I sat quiet and erect, I near the window. Eventually the girls swung into their school song.

High upon the mountains

Away from city clamor

By graceful trees surrounded

There stands our own dear school

On the bench beside us sat two sisters with short brown hair, twins I thought. They sang loudly and soulfully, and completely out of tune. Baba looked at me and we exchanged a brief smile. We were both thinking of Ayi.

We revel in the leisure

The studies, sports, and fun

The beauty of the hillside

The breezes, rain, and sun

I knew the words by heart. I had spent a large part of that summer in my room with the school prospectus, imagining myself in its blurred black-and-white photos. A certain Miss Timmins had founded the school in 1901 for the daughters of British civil servants whose health was too delicate for the heat of the plains. In those days, the girls were carried up the mountains in chairs by natives, a journey that took two weeks. After the British left in 1947, the school had tottered for a time but then come into its own. Now the girls were Indian, and came from Bombay and Kerala and Aden and Africa and from sugar estates along the Deccan Plateau to get the right kind of English education.

The song lurched to its high finale with the girls swaying as the bus twisted up the last mountain.

So here's to Timmins

To dear old Ti-im-mins

May we be always true

I was close to tears. It just all seemed so silly. This was not a part of the dream. I wanted to be a Bombay girl, with bell-bottom pants and foreign perfume floating in the breeze behind me. I wanted to be a Bombay girl, with no stain on my face.

I had broached the idea the day I got my B.A. results. “I want to go to Bombay,” I said at dinner, still basking in the glory of my First Class. “To teach in a college.”

I had expected dismay and shock. Instead, a meaningful glance passed between my parents.

“Well, what's wrong with Indore? Why don't you teach here, in Indore?” said Ayi.

“For a little while,” said Baba.

I saw then that they had spoken the truth between them, man and wife: It would be very difficult, perhaps even impossible, they had agreed, staring up at the whirring fan with their heads on identical hard pillows, to find a good boy for their only child. Charu should get a job. Be independent. But they had imagined me at home, with them. I soon convinced them they needed to let me go. They too must have known it deep down. It was time to let me go.

Bombay was out of the question. “We have no real relatives there,” said Baba firmly, and Baba was not so often firm.

And so they settled upon a cloistered school where I could be tethered, and perhaps even tended. Miss Timmins' School for Girls, run by British missionaries. Indian teachers were allowed, but only Protestant Christians. The school was making an exception for me because cousins from the shiny branch of my family had studied in Timmins for many years. No doubt the missionaries had been assured that I was a conservative, well-brought-up girl. I myself could not dispute that.

It had seemed a good step. Closer to Bombay than my tight middle-class world. Now, though, I had the feeling I had veered in the wrong direction. I wanted to hold Baba's hand and say, “Let's run back home.”

But Baba sat beside me impassive in his public face, his trousers creased, his back ramrod straight. I looked out of the window and let the wind unfurl my hair. Baba, the fountain of all facts, had told me that it rained over two hundred inches during the monsoons in Panchgani.

“You should expect the current soon, around the second of June. I will keep you informed of its progress,” he assured me as the bus puffed past a yellow signboard that said
Welcome to Panchgani, the Kashmir of Maharashtra
alongside poorly painted mountain ranges.

The road to the school was a narrow one, lined with tall trees that shook silver leaves in the wind. “The British planted silver oaks in the early 1900s,” said Baba. He always spurted more facts when he was uncomfortable. Ten minutes later, we turned in to the school.

I hold it in my mind still, the way I saw the school on that first day. A red castle with two towers, rising from red mud. The bus shuddered to a stop in a compound with a large banyan tree in the center. Girls pranced around the benches between the roots, chattering like birds.

“The iron in the water is very healthy. You will soon have rosy cheeks,” said Baba, picking up a pinch of the dry red mud. Later, it was the water that we blamed for all the madness and chaos of that monsoon—water from deep old wells that dug into the gut of the ancient mountains.

The principal came towards us, smiling. “Ah, you must be Miss Charulata Apte. Welcome to Timmins,” she said, her hands outstretched towards us.

Miss Nelson, a British woman with tight brown curls, wore a blue-and-red-striped dress and a two-string pearl necklace. She walked erect. Her smile was grave and her eyes were large and round through her thick glasses.

I am not sure if I even noticed the purse on that first day. But now, of course, it is impossible to imagine her without it. Miss Nelson always carried a flat white purse. No one had ever seen Miss Nelson without her purse. The girls claimed that she took it to the bathroom with her. They said she kept inside it photos of a lover who jilted her at the altar. In England, of course.

The outrageous Miss Prince, who delighted in shocking the staid school, claimed that the saintly principal collected pornographic pictures of young girls. “Every night, she prays to the Lord to help her burn them. But the next morning, she cannot. So she carries them around another day, afraid to die,” she said in the staff room one day as all the teachers pretended not to hear her.

No one had ever seen Miss Nelson open the steel clasp of her purse.

Miss Nelson lifted a thick green curtain to a room lined with pink wicker sofas. “Do sit down and have a cup of tea in the staff room. I will greet the little ones and be back to show you around,” she said. The little girls, some of them seemed to be four or five, were tumbling down from the last bus.

Then Miss Nelson turned to reveal the largest bottom I had ever seen. It started at the waist, just below the belt, and seemed to be strapped onto her like a shelf, like a pillow a clown might wear. It joggled and jiggled along quite unaware of her front, and completed a turn a split second after she did. When she walked towards you she was an ice queen, a model of decorum and dignity. But from behind, as she waddled around among the children like a mother hen, I could just see the feathers sticking out of her bottom.

I felt, suddenly, that she might understand me. I thought that she too might have spent hours agonizing about when to enter, and when to leave, a room. She was two-sided, like me. But she was the light, I thought. She could enter straight and strong.

I, I am the night. I prefer people to see me first from behind. My hair is rain. It is thick and black and long, and it swings on my hips like music. My hair is my own private beat as I walk to school, to college, to family dinners, as I walk behind my mother, carrying her vegetables and fish.

I often combed my hair drooping over my cheeks in one low plait. I hoped to cover the red blot on the right side of my face, even just a little. Specially at weddings and parties, when the old aunts gathered. “Oh, no, Shalini,” they wailed as my mother's shining face closed up. “What happened to her? Oh, she was so fresh, like a cucumber, when she was small. Now how will you get the poor thing married?”

My mother always tried to shield me; she would give me a pat, or a pleading look, which hurt even more. I hurt for me, and for her, having to bear us both, her husband and her daughter, like weights upon her back. For we both had our blots, he and I.

My ayi rarely hugged me; we were not a hugging family. She put all her love into my hair. She massaged my scalp and oiled it with the special homemade coconut oil. She coiled it around her hand, shining in the sun like a serpent before she plaited it. She wove bright and beautiful ribbons into my hair, and tied them in big bows that I wore through the day like medals. She told me stories, mainly from her endless legend store. And she would weave it all into my hair.

“This mark makes you special. Now only those who can really see inside can know what a beautiful girl you are,” she would say, tilting my chin up so she could get the parting straight down the middle. “It is your special mark, maybe from your last life. It is a signal for the right man. Now don't forget your Ayi-Baba when you go off to the palace with your prince,” she teased, sending me out laughing to meet the world. Later, when I started wearing flowers instead of bows, Ayi paid the doorman's son five rupees a month to bring gajras and fresh flowers every morning at seven.

Miss Nelson put her purse arm comfortingly around me and assured my father that they would take good care of me. “We are a family here,” she said.

The school was terraced down a hillside. Behind the stern gothic face, it fanned out into long low buildings with red tin roofs. Miss Nelson led us down wide covered corridors and staircases, through the school to the hospital building. I was hypnotized by her jiggling bottom.

“Most of our younger teachers are in Sunbeam, a separate house behind the bazaar, but we thought we would keep Charul-a-a-ta-a here with us,” Miss Nelson told my father. Then she turned to me, and her eyes seemed to twinkle a little. “We can't have your parents worrying, now, can we?” she said.

She never got to calling me Charu, like everyone else. And until the end, she did not change the drawn-out
la-ata
with the very wrong
t
.

The hospital was at the bottom corner of the school, set at right angles to the rest of the buildings. It contained about ten narrow beds with white counterpanes and painted white metal lockers. There were two smaller rooms for infectious cases. In the front was a dispensary. Out to the right, two rooms, one for the nurse, and the other, to my horror, was to be for me.

Baba, being a man, could not stay in the school, and had decided to go back to Poona right away. He looked at me longingly, passed his hand over my head, and left. We promised each other a letter every week. I went back to my room and sat on the narrow spring bed. The room had a desk, a lamp, an upright chair, and a small lumpy sofa covered in the same bright pink fabric as the staff room. There was one window facing some trees and dried bushes. It smelled of disinfectant. I felt dislocated from everything I had ever known. I did not have the strength to get up and unpack. I just sat on the bed, staring at the peeling wall, until it was time to go to dinner.