Miss Timmins' School for Girls (11 page)

I began to feel faint with fear. I knew for a fact that Sister Richards and the Hindi teacher were enemies. I had seen the way they threw dagger looks at each other. If they were holding a conversation about me, everyone in school must know, must know something, but what did they know? My thoughts were scurrying and screeching like rats in a metal maze.

Common Knowledge. I felt dizzy with it. The Hindi teacher hated the world in general, but she hated Sister Richards more, and she hated Pin the most. Pin baited her like a matador, red cape just outside her reach. “See the smoke coming out of her nose,” she sniggered as Raswani snorted and pawed the earth. “Can you imagine, the other day she called me ‘a burden to mother earth'?”

“These women here can drive one to madness,” said Sister, after a refill. “That Raswani woman, you know, she used to be in your room when I first came to Timmins. She's cuckoo. Just plain crazy. Pah.” She spoke with venom, the “pah” short and sharp, as if she were spitting. “No life. Nobody. Stays here through the short holidays. Rents a room somewhere in the December holidays. Just imagine, wanted to come with me to Deolali. You know, my brother Cedrick and his wife, I have a room there, anytime, waiting for me.” Sister usually talked in shorthand after her first drink. “Everyone hates her. Everyone. Girls, teachers, servants.” The whole school lived in terror of Miss Raswani.

“Except for Miss Nelson,” I pointed out.

“Pah. That Nelson of yours wouldn't admit it if she had a viper in her bosom,” said Sister with a dismissive flick of white curls. “That Raswani is plain crazy. I should know. We had to treat so many people driven crazy by the war. She's twisted. Should be locked up. I could tell you a thing or two about her.”

I was still too roiled about my own good name to be too interested in the Hindi teacher's madness. But Sister continued.

“You know, I saw her peeping into my bathroom one day, those mad eyes of hers. I went to Nelson straight and told her. That Nelson, so saintly, just smiled and said, ‘Maybe it was dark, Sister.' ” Sister pursed her mouth and mimicked. “But next day, I went to her again. I said, either I go, or she goes. Cannot live with that wretched woman. Always muttering and praying in her room. Now she's next to Nelson. Bet you she's spying on her.”

The brandy crept into my veins, and I began to feel less fluttery. Sister would not be so casual about it all, talking to me like this, if Raswani had seen Pin and me kissing behind the gulmohor tree at the outer edge of lower garden, as we had done, just once or twice.

Raswani must have seen us walking in the rain and laughing. We did that all the time. But it was innocent. In fact, I was the picture of innocence. I knew that. Even if she had seen a hint of something, no one would believe it. That quiet little Maharashtrian girl with a blot on her face, who could think she was carrying on with anyone at all, let alone a woman—and let absolutely alone the dangerous Miss Prince? That was it. They all thought we were a bit too friendly. Maybe they even thought the Prince was trying to seduce me. My secret was safe. If they had known, if Hendy or Sister or Raswani knew, all hell would have broken loose. Surely.

Tai's voice came floating back from a still afternoon in Kolhapur: “Chastity. Let chastity be your sword.” I was sitting on the floor while Tai was advising Padmaja's older sister Joytsna, who had been caught kissing her fiancé in the car at night. I must have been around fifteen. “A woman has her own power,” said Tai. She was sitting on the bed, legs apart, like a pasha.

“Whatever
they
may want to do,” she said, her face screwed in disgust. “We have to take a firm”—she pronounced it “farm”—“hand. Chastity,” she said to the squirming Joytsna, “chastity should be your sword”—she pronounced it “swared.”

And innocence shall be mine, I thought. Chastity has gone, but I still need a weapon. Innocence will be my swared in this battle. I will smile and dimple, as I always do.

I skipped dinner and went to Merch.

“Ah, Charu on a weekday,” said Merch with a giggle of pleasure. Soon, Samar came by, we picked Pin up from Sunbeam, and drove up the back road to table-land. Before I knew it, we were at Shankar's fabled den in search of some Afghani hash. It appeared that Shankar had passed Samar in the bazaar that morning and indicated that he had some good stuff from a foreign hippie.

Shankar, the school handyman, lived a double life. By day he bustled around the school mending and lifting. At night, he sold hash and illicit liquor from a cave halfway up the table-land cliff. Strange though it seemed, the missionaries did not seem to know that he ran a thriving illegal business on the side. I knew Shankar quite well in school. He had come and fixed a leak in my bathroom. It was I who broke the ice, by talking to him in Marathi. He said when he saw me he always thought of his daughter, who was in college in Vai.

After that, he showed me her photographs and her letters, which he insisted she write in English, though he could not read them. He carried them around in his pocket and showed them proudly to select teachers. Miss Nelson had promised that his daughter would teach Marathi at the school as soon as she finished college. This was a vaulting leap up the ladder for her, and he could not contain his enthusiasm. “Bhagi will be like you,” he often would say to me as he stood on a ladder fixing a light or sloshed through puddles in his knee-high black gum boots. “You must be her friend and help her out.” And I would nod my head and assure him that I would, although I did not really plan to be around for so long. But we had met each other with our good school faces. I had never been to his den. And I did not wish to go.

Pin and I had stayed behind in the car as the boys walked up the final steep path to the cave. We stopped kissing and squirming when I heard them splashing back. I pushed Pin away and adjusted my clothes. I never let Pin touch me in front of the gang. Samar directed a dim torch light at the backseat. His bulging eyes, which got very red and glassy when he was stoned, peered down at us. I composed my face. “We're taking Shankar to the bazaar,” he said. I saw Shankar's smiling face perched like a moon on his shoulder. I saw his smile freeze, in slow motion, when he saw me there. “Charu!” he said, terse and shrill. And then he looked away. He got into the front seat and did not look at me through the ride, not even when he got out. Shankar was in shock. I had taken on the responsibility of being a daughter, and then he had found me at night among the depraved and debauched. Veils and virginities were being stripped away so fast, I had no time to think or feel.

I'll deal with it tomorrow, I thought, and reached out for the joint as it was passed to Pin. I smoked my first joint that night.

Now that I can sometimes see my life swirling like a bowl of clear soup, I cannot quite recall the intensity of those days when the door first opened. I remember the panic, the fear of falling, and then, the music.

Samar had rigged two large black speakers in the car so we could have the right kind of music. It was Cat Stevens that night, hammering his sad voice into my small soul.

Lisa, Lisa, sad Lisa

Tell me, what's making you sad, Lee?

I heard the pauses for the first time. They were wide and deep and dangerously lovely.

After that, Pin would always produce a rumpled cigarette at choice moments. “Let's have a small one,” she would say with a sheepish grin. I soon learned to tighten my throat and inhale properly.

The effect was instant. It was wide, wild, wondrous. I walked in wet and tense, and tight as a button. After the joint, we would roll around, or play and talk and giggle and kiss. We smoked, we kissed, we looked into each other's eyes and sighed. We lay on her satin sheets, her body white and soft as a goose feather. In the dim red glow of her room, we would whisper and laugh, we would start playing with each other and fall asleep warm and wet and entwined. The drumming of the rain became our own private dancer.

Twelve

The Vortex

I
t was the fortieth day of rain. Even Mr. Blind Irani, the oldest Panchgani resident, could not remember such a long stretch of constant rain. The light was dim and gray, the sky always overcast. The rain on the tin roof had become a steady beat in all our heads. It was as if the whole entire school were living inside a giant drum.

That night, the rain had been angrier than usual. There was a high wind. The lights had gone out again, and I was in my room correcting exam papers after dinner, with the lantern turned so high it was smoking. I was bored. I was wondering whether to pass or fail Daksha Trivedi for a rather dim essay on Lady Macbeth when I heard a banging on the bathroom door. No one ever entered my room through that door except me and the servants.

I opened the door to find her, drenched, on my doorstep. “I just couldn't wait another minute,” she said as she stepped into the room, putting her wet hand under my blouse. “Hmm, you're toast,” she said, nuzzling.

She dropped her clothes in a damp heap on the floor. “Dry me up,” she whispered. “Rub me till I am safe and warm.”

My lips were stiff, and my tongue refused to move against hers. I was angry. She knew I needed to keep my two worlds apart. She did it to mock me, to mock my middle-class morality. “
So
unlike the love life of our own dear queen,” she retorted once, grinning, when I blocked her roving hands near the music room.

But I could not send her away. I locked the door, dimmed the lantern, and got out a fresh white towel. I sat her down on my only chair, a low-backed one whose corners always poked into my midriff.

I stood behind her and starting rubbing her hair. Her head became a rag doll, swinging limp against the cradle of the towel. Her eyes were closed. Still standing behind her, I started kneading her shoulders with the towel. I strayed down, briefly, to pat dry the valley between her full-moon breasts, then pulled back to the shoulders, smoothing out the knots of tension. I did not touch her wide warm nipples. Time moved in large long seconds. I dried her back and then came to face her. I knelt at her feet. Slowly, slowly, I pried open her small neat toes and rubbed the towel between each one. The towel smelled of sigri smoke. I felt a serpent coiled inside her that night.

She got up abruptly, searched through the pockets of her jeans, found her packet of cigarettes and lighter, and sat on my bed. I remember us both on the bed, naked, smoking a joint. We sat with our legs cradled around each other, and it seemed we murmured for hours.

She talked of England, a small town by the sea. “I am going to leave this place, Charu,” she said. “I really am.” She was pensive, and I had never seen her like that. She told me “they” had left her some money and a small house on the coast. She said her time here was over. “I feel it in my bones,” she said. The sheets lay loose at our waists. She painted patterns with the tip of my hair on her open palm. “Come with me, Charu. I will buy you fish and chips in a paper cone, and take you swimming in the sea,” she said. This was the only time we ever spoke of being together in another place.

“I want to take you to the witch's needle. Let's go now, to the witch's needle,” she whispered later as we lay with jumbled legs. “Let's go naked. Just put on our raincoats and run.” The witch's needle was a tall black rock on table-land with a hole on its top like the eye of a needle.

“Not in this rain. And it's so windy tonight,” I answered. We were so close and warm and cradled.

“But on a night like this the wind whistles through the needle. You'll love it, I swear.” She told me she went up there sometimes when she could not sleep, and sat under the needle. “It's so peaceful,” she said. “The wind through the eye makes this amazing high-pitched sound. Like a lullaby. One time I stayed there until dawn, and then went back to my room and slept like a baby until noon.” She said once when it was raining hard she slipped off the edge near the needle. “I nearly died,” she said, smiling as though it were some great personal achievement.

“That's exactly why I don't want to go tonight. Too close to the edge for tonight,” I said.

“But you know, I almost let go that night,” she said. “It was tempting. Really, it was. I was hugging this rock, it was so windy, I was sure I could let go and fly.” She had never opened up to me like that.

“Stoned,” I said. “You must have been stoned. Please don't go again like that.” I ran my hand through her hair and held her tight, feeling a tenderness welling up inside me. “I'm not going to let you go there ever again.”

“But tonight, Charu. Let's go tonight.”

“Why tonight? It's pouring cats and dogs, don't you hear it?”

“Because, my darling, tonight I am not Moira Prince.”

I searched her face for a trace of a smile, but there was none. She had a nervousness and intensity about her that I had never seen before. I was afraid of it.

“Is there a riddle here that I am supposed to solve? What does it mean, ‘Tonight I am not Moira Prince'? Who are you, then?”

“Come with me, and I will show you,” she said.

“Where? To table-land?”

“Don't ask. Can't you just trust me and come? Please?”

I did not trust her. She seemed edgier than ever. Did she think she would turn into Pan or something? I was afraid she might be going mad. I searched my mind for something flippant, something to change the subject.

“Just for a night,” she said, her voice cracking with intensity. I said nothing, but stroked her back as one soothes a child.

I had a cold that night, a sudden-blobs-of-snot kind of cold. She leaned over and scooped a blob of snot from the edge of my nose.

“Chi, don't do that,” I said, turning my face away.

“Only your own family will tell you when you have snot on your face,” she said wistfully. “Only your very own people.”

She did not look at me. She stared gravely at the yellow blob on her finger. And then she licked it. I should take that hand and lick the fingers, I should shush my inner Brahmin. But the Brahmin remained firm. I took her hand out of her mouth and wiped it primly on my sheets instead. I bent to kiss her, but in the dancing shadows of the wavering wick her face looked hollow, her mouth a gaping hole. This is how she will look when she's old, I thought, and felt a wave of revulsion sweep over me.

“If I were a man, Charu, would you marry me?”

“I doubt it,” I said flippantly, though I knew she wasn't joking.

“Why?” she asked.

“Because I prefer you as a woman,” I said. I did not mean any of it. I was suddenly thinking, I want to get out of this. This is not me.

I knew I heard a sound then, and a sharp intake of breath. I thought I heard a whisper.

There were three girls with mumps in the hospital. They chirped around happily all day in pajamas, with slightly grimy cloths tied like rabbit ears above their heads. They must have heard us. I sat up, gathering my sheet nervously around me.

I was embarrassed at her naked body in my bedroom, repulsed by what I had become. I imagined the entire school staring with unblinking eyes into the room; I saw them lined up behind the curtain of water as on the day I had run out into the rain. On that first day of rain I had felt my blot prickle with her hard look. Now I wanted her to be gone. I recoiled from her, this white woman slouching.

She could see my naked feelings on my face. She jumped off the bed.

“I just don't think it's wise for you to walk in on me like this,” I said, harsh with fear. “I am sure they heard you knock.”

“But fuck all that,” she said fiercely, not bothering to lower her voice. “Let's go out together. Come with me.”

“It's all right for
you
,” I said. She was the bad girl. I was not. I did not want her life, people turning away from me and whispering as I passed.

“Yes, of course, always all right for Pin,” she said sullenly, and I felt a bad mood rising. Her mood could change in a minute. “Pulling you down, aren't I?” she said in a tone she had never used with me before. She reminded me of a crouching cat. “Well, you can keep your precious little chastity, Miss Charulata Apte. I will never come
here
again,” she spat. She pulled on her clothes with her back to me and left. I did not move, I did not look at her. I lay on the bed staring at the ceiling. She was true to her words, you could say, for she never did come back to that hospital room.

“And thank god you're still a fucking virgin!” she said, flinging the words over her shoulder as she walked out. She banged the bathroom door. I know she did it to spite me. She wanted everyone to know she was in my room at night, I thought.

I lay there like a mummy. Good, I thought, if this is the end. Let her go, and I will be free of her. Next term, I'll lead a normal life.

I do not know how long I lay staring at the ceiling. I do not know how long I stayed there after the rain stopped. I know only that I heard the back door banging loudly with the wind, and noticed then that the drumming inside my head had ceased.

The rain had stopped. It was eerie, the sudden silence in my head.

The sequence of the night settled in my head. She was wrong to have come to me in my room. But she had never done it before. She had come because she needed me.

Poor Pin, wandering the world alone.

It was as if the room, the night itself, pulled me off the bed.

I threw aside the sheet. My naked body reflected in the mirror, smooth as silk. I would go to her defenseless. I needed to tell her that I loved her. I wanted to run after her. She had to know that I loved her.

I will go naked, as she asked me to, I thought, and reached for my raincoat. The raincoat felt wet and rough, like the slap of a cold slug. I slipped my bare feet into my gum boots and shivered as I ran out into the slush. I did not even stop to take a torch, I did not stop to think where I would find her—I knew she would go to table-land. I imagined us again, with the wind in our hair, and the rain in our mouths. I would open out my raincoat and lie naked in the middle of table-land. “Ferry me across the water, do, boatman, do,” I was chanting, singsong, as I walked as fast as I could through the shuttered bazaar. It was what Merch had said to me one night, one of those lines he slips like a smooth stone into a lake. The ones that continue to creep up on me at odd moments of my life and turn into a mantra. I began to run and trot and stumble, slowing to a fast walk when I thought I heard a voice at my back.

I knew she would be by the witch's needle. I imagined her leaning against the tall rock, hunched and smoking. I was running to her, aching to hold her tight, her body that was so secretly plump and warm, wanting her, just wanting her. She has never been loved, I thought that night. And I, I who had been so beloved, all my life, I had not loved her back. But I would do it now.

I came to the needle from the back. I saw her standing too close to the edge, raincoat flying like a cape. She was looking out to the mountains behind the mist with her chest open to the wind. The wind from the valley plastered her hair back against her skull, and her cape became a gusting rubber sail. I could hear it thrashing.

I was afraid that she might jump. I wanted to run and pull her back.

And then I saw a white blob flapping in the wind, on the rocks between us. As my eyes adjusted to the black rocks, I could see the outline of her broad, straight back, I saw the tight curls on the back of her head. My heart jumped into my throat like a frog. Miss Nelson. Miss Nelson! To be near naked, on table-land, on a monsoon night, and then to see your school principal in between you and your lover.

There was nothing to do but watch and wait, on a night like this. I sat down on the flat, wet earth. I could feel the hollow earth, I could feel the dank raincoat rub against my skin.

I do not know if I sat there for ten minutes or for twenty or for forty. I do know it was a
Macbeth
minute. Suddenly I saw Miss Nelson get up and walk to the Prince. She walked in a trance. She put a hand on her shoulder, from behind. The Prince did not turn around. Nelly caressed her hair for a brief moment. She did it as if she couldn't stop herself, as if it was something she had longed to do. The Prince continued looking, chin jutting, at the mountains beyond the clouds. Nelly let her hand rest on Pin's shoulder briefly, and then she turned around and walked down from table-land, her back ramrod straight, her purse dangling neatly on her crooked arm. It seemed to me that her walk had an almost jaunty air. White pajamas and a dangling white purse, on a principal, in the moonlight. The night, I thought, was getting curiouser and curiouser.

Abruptly, Pin sat down on the very edge of the cliff, her legs pulled to her chest. I would have never let her go so far. I would rush to her, pull her back, and then we would sit, I would massage her knotted shoulders, I would lay my head on her shoulder, and I would take her hand and put it to my naked breast. But my naked breast felt cold and damp, and I found I was shivering.

I walked towards her. Her back was to me. I stood behind the needle. But now that I could run to her as I had dreamt, the urgency of the night drained from me, like blood. I could not go to her.

Because of my blot, I had it in me always to step back, to pause, to watch. But that night I was different, rushing headlong in every direction. It was my weather-vane night. One minute I was looking at one life, and the next I was turned all the way around.

She was not for me. I saw it all, in a moment of clarity. I saw her, so proud and broad-shouldered, so hunched and curled, dragging me in her magnificent, muddy wake. I could not do it. It was a night of magic and mystery, for I saw my ayi now, sitting on the rocks where Nelly had been. And I could not cross her.

For a spun moment I stood there, longing again to be in Pin's arms, to be in her arms so that I could become completely beautiful. No one had ever made me feel so beautiful. Perhaps no one ever would.