Miss Timmins' School for Girls (13 page)

No one in school ever had an extra raincoat. The school list decreed only one raincoat and one pair of gum boots. We could conceivably rob three raincoats from the teachers, but that seemed far too dangerous. It was Shobha, finally, who had the brilliant idea.

“So let's steal lots of raincoats instead,” said Shobha.

If only three of us did not have our raincoats, it would be very suspicious. But what if lots of random girls did not have their raincoats? It would be chalked up as another mystery of that mysterious time.

“Or they might think it is a petty thief,” said Akhila.

We had to act right away. The girls were dispersed, talking in tense whispers, and the teachers were in each other's rooms, muttering and crying. Raincoats were hung on a row of pegs outside each dorm. We went to the nearest dorms, and grabbed three or four raincoats, each of the same color, folded them over our arms to look like one, and walked as casually as we could down to the hockey pitch, at the very bottom of the school. There, past the school bakery, was a footpath to the lowest tier of Panchgani.

The road was flanked by three newer, less established boarding schools: Bata, Green Lawns, and Oaks. In all our years in Panchgani, none of us had ever been down that road. We had no truck with those schools. We looked down on them. We decided against entering any of them to leave the raincoats, and saw, after Green Lawns, a small steep footpath used by the villagers in the valley. We dumped the raincoats in a heap behind some trees. “I hope the village children use them,” said Akhila. And we ran back and got into the school with enough time to saunter into line when the lunch bell rang.

After lunch, the four of us were back on the hospital steps, when Smita Sheth, daughter of the owners of Panchgani Stores, came looking for us. She lived with her parents, and was one of the few girls who attended the school as a “day scholar.” She was greatly valued because she was our link to the outside. She had brought a note from Shobha's boyfriend. Shobha put the letter in her pocket with a proud look, and said she would catch up with us later. But ten minutes later she came panting up to us, so excited she could hardly talk.

“The plot thickens,” she announced. Dushant, her boyfriend, had also been there that night, and had seen something very different.

When the rain stopped, he wrote, he and two of his friends had skinged out of school and walked to Shankar's den of vice, hoping to buy some cheap rum.

No Timmins girl in living memory had ever gone to Shankar's den of vice. That was way beyond the outer edge of the Timmins code. The cave from which Shankar sold his wares, a hollow carved of volcanic rock below the steep edge of table-land, was called Devil's Kitchen. It was said to be haunted by the ghosts of the marriage party crushed by the boulder that had been dislodged from there by an eruption of the volcano many, many years ago. The boulder now rested precariously halfway down the hill.

When Dushant and his friends got there, they saw the body at Shankar's feet. Shankar was bent over her. “
We did not stop to look. Shankar told us to leave at once
,” Dushant had written. “
But I wanted to tell you that, on the way up, we saw that strange new teacher, the one with the big red birthmark. She was running down the road from table-land, looking wild, almost mad. Could she have done it?
”

Miss Apte. Why was she there on table-land in the middle of the night? “Curiouser and curiouser,” said Ramona, rubbing her hands.

“Let's get serious, girls,” we told each other. Ramona's cheeks were red with excitement. With the full weight of all our detective knowledge from Agatha Christie, whom we were allowed to read, and from James Hadley Chase, whom we were not allowed to read but we got from Ramona's brother, we made a chart of the scene of the crime. We became the Find-Outers from Enid Blyton's books, our first detective novels. We knew we must make a list.

All the People on or Around Table-Land That Night, and Who Saw Them

Ramona, Akhila, and Nandita—known to be seen by: Miss Prince

Miss Prince—known to be seen by: the girls, the boys, Shankar, Nelly. Maybe by Apt.

Miss Nelson—known to be seen by: the girls

Miss Apte—known to be seen by: the boys

Shankar—known to be seen by: the boys

Dushant and two friends—known to be seen by: Shankar

We were very pleased with our chart. It suggested that more of these people could actually have seen each other. After some time, we changed the Miss Prince line to read:

Miss Prince—known to be seen by the girls (alive), the boys (dead), Shankar (perhaps dead), Miss Apte (dead or alive?), Miss Nelson (alive).

We should not rule out anyone, said Shobha. But ourselves, we agreed. So we revised it accordingly: “Shankar (dead/alive?), the boys (dead/alive?), and Nelson (dead/alive?).” Any one of them could have seen her alive and been the cause of her death.

We tied together a little booklet from pages torn out of Shobha's Hindi rough book, and wrote “Murder on a Monsoon Night” on the first page as a working title.

On the second page, we wrote “The Theory.” The plan was to discount nothing, take nothing for granted, but have a theory so we could have a plan.

My theory was that after the fight overheard by Shobha, Nelly followed Miss Prince up to table-land. She sat on the rocks and she prayed for strength. That is when we saw her. She had not seen us because her eyes had been closed in prayer. After we left, she went up to Miss Prince and tried to plead with her, tell her to change her ways. “She said, ‘Let the Lord into your heart, my poor lost child,' ” mimicked Akhila. Miss Prince, as we all knew, was completely unpredictable. So maybe Nelly tried to put an arm around her and was pushed away, and maybe, in the scuffle, Miss Prince slipped and fell over the edge.

Akhila and Ramona felt that Nelly had pushed her. They surmised that after the fight, something in Nelly had snapped. She had followed Miss Prince to table-land, said her prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane, and then pushed Miss Prince over the edge, believing that she was doing the Lord's work.

Shobha believed it was Apt. She could not say why. “It is just my intuition, and don't forget, girls, intuition must play a large role in detection technique,” she said. “She's a deep one, a chhupa rustam. Looks so good and bland, but she's not. And what was she doing on table-land?”

In fact, said Shobha, Radha just told the dorm yesterday that she had seen Apt with Prince. They were running down the slippery way to the hockey pitch in the rain, the Prince and Apt, sliding and giggling. That sealed it for Shobha. “There was something between them,” she said, her eyes round and large.

By no stretch of imagination could I imagine Miss Apte shoving Prince off a cliff. Nor could I imagine her having an affair with Prince. Young girls had crushes on prefects, prefects had crushes on teachers. Friendships between girls became intense and all-consuming and sometimes as obsessive as love affairs, though actual lesbian affairs were not known to happen in our school. But this was all boarding school chatter. Miss Apte did not grow up like us.

The first day she walked into our class, thin and tentative and as nervous as a fawn, I thought, She's going to be as bad as Jacinta and that lot. And when she said “Hello, I am Charulata Apte from Indore” in that terrible vernacular accent, I thought, What does she know about literature?

Served me right for being such a Bombay snob.

She turned out to be the best teacher I ever had. I forgot about her accent and her scarred face. I loved her classes. She helped me think about women's lib and hippies and Bob Dylan and all the things happening in the wide world outside our gates, and
Macbeth
as well.

“I don't think she's the type to have an affair with a woman at all,” I said. “She wears Indian outfits, and she's from a small town. Too conventional.” Lesbians should be brash and bold, I would think. Like Prince.

“But Radha saw them together.”

“So, they slid down the slope in the rain. So what?” I said.

“Must have been Miss Prince trying to seduce her. In fact, I was always afraid walking down the covered steps alone with Miss Prince. God knows what she might have done,” piped Akhila.

“Idiot,” said Shobha contemptuously. “Like she had nothing better to do but pine to hold
your
hand.”

Akhila blushed and bit her lip. But I began to think there might be some truth in there. Prince might have set her sights on the innocent Charulata Apte.

All of us agreed that Shankar was the least likely of the suspects, mainly because the Prince and Shankar were from different worlds.

“He could have been up there to sell her pot, you never know,” said Ramona. “We should not rule anything out.” We knew that was the first rule of detection. Suspect everyone. That would be our motto. Shankar could have sold her drugs up on table-land near the witches' needle and then gotten into some drugged argument and pushed her down. His den was directly below that edge of the plateau, and although there was no footpath down the steep cliff edge, he could have walked down the main road and come around to his den to see if she was dead. The boys could have come across him then as he was bending over the dead body. It was hard to imagine, though, Shankar in a scuffle with a white woman. Quite preposterous, we agreed.

The afternoon seemed to stretch forever as we sat on the hospital steps. Rainwater stopped running down the gutters, and a weak sun popped occasionally out of the cloud cover.

We had two main suspects: Nelly and Apt. We decided to keep a close watch on both of them. The time is now, we agreed. Akhila had it on the authority of some forgotten book that criminals always revisit the scene of their crimes within forty-eight hours “to check if they left any clues.”

It was decided that we would split up into two groups of two, each group taking charge of one suspect. Akhila and Shobha took Nelly, and Ramona and I got the Apt.

When the bell rang to summon us to line up for church the next day, there was, as expected, a commotion in the dorm verandas. We had been told to wear our red-checked dresses, navy-blue blazers, and berets, which we always wore to church in the monsoon term. With Nelly in her room all day, and Willy and Manson closeted with Inspector Woggle, the lines of authority were quite limp. Miss Henderson, confronted with a mass of fifteen girls without raincoats on the way to Miss Prince's memorial service, decided that those girls would just have to stay behind. Sister Richards offered to watch us. “Girls, get your needlework or reading, and sit in or around the dining room,” Hendy said as she left.

Shobha, who did have her raincoat, was about to pretend that she did not when we saw Nelly step out of her room and walk slowly up the stairs without looking to the left or the right. She wore a black dress made of shiny silk, white gloves that came up to her elbows, and a black wide-brimmed hat with a net that covered the eyes. We had never come across anyone dressed like that except in Hitchcock movies seen during holidays in Bombay.

Shobha gave us the thumbs-up, Akhila quickly borrowed a raincoat from Rita Bhatia, who did have her raincoat but preferred not to go, and the two of them left for church while Ramona and I watched for Miss Apte, but she did not leave her room that evening. We sat around gossiping in hushed voices, the stolen raincoats now another topic jumping among the scattered girls in their red-checked dresses. The school had the ruleless feeling of the last day of term, when we would be packing our sheets and blankets into our holdalls. Sister Richards launched into a long and gory story of some general who had gone home on leave to find his wife with a lover, pulled out a pistol, shot the two in the bed, and then gone on to shoot himself while his children watched. I supposed it was meant to keep us from speculating about the death in Panchgani. “Or,” said Ramona darkly, “maybe she knows something. She may be hinting that it was an act of passion.”

Shobha and Akhila reported that Pastor Reese's sermon at the service was loud and emotional, concentrating mostly on the saintly lives of Moira Prince's parents. The Lord was charged to have mercy on her soul and her parents' souls in their heavenly abode. There were sniffles from the back, where family friends from Nasik and Sunbeam teachers with swollen eyes were seated. Miss Mathews had a crying fit. But Nelson sat dark and erect in a corner at the back and the girls could hardly see her, though they craned their necks. After the service, the girls were walked back to school by Miss Raju, a fat history teacher with calloused feet, while the rest of the teachers stayed for the burial in the church cemetery.

No one had died in the school for nearly sixty years. The last Timmins teacher to be buried in the cemetery behind the red church building had been Miss Pearsall in 1917. The cemetery recorded the British dead from the dawn of Panchgani, and we knew every headstone.

The church and the pastor were shared with St. Paul's School, which belonged to the same Scottish Presbyterian mission as Timmins. But the boys' school did not harbor any spinster missionaries, and the Lord's hand rested more lightly on their daily schedule. The boys who came to church were usually the ones interested in looking at the girls.

After the sermon and prayers that day, Pastor Reese announced that a gold plaque dedicated to Moira Prince and her parents, Joseph and Martha Prince, would be hung on the wall of the church. It would be placed next to the one for Mary, Minnie, and Emma, daughters of a prior pastor, who, according to the ornate gold plaque, perished during a storm in Vai.

“The plaque has been donated by Miss Nelson,” said Pastor Reese solemnly.

That evening, Willy, Nelly, and Manson, the Holy Trinity, gathered for dinner in Miss Nelson's private drawing room. The Apt did not leave her room, and we saw the ayah take her dinner to her on a tray. We Apt-watchers agreed to sneak out after lights out and watch her room.