Miss Timmins' School for Girls (14 page)

“
What ho, Malvolio
,” muttered Ramona when, soon after lights out, Apt's back door squeaked open and she slunk out and started walking at a determined pace down Oak Lane. I was plump and thought I was wise because I lived mostly in my books. Ramona was nervy and wired. She hated Shakespeare, but I had to admit that it was she who came out with the most unexpected and quotable of quotes.

We followed at a distance, holding hands for courage. We wore randomly borrowed raincoats and looked quite anonymous, we thought, like women walking in a Panchgani monsoon. We had spent months planning our last escape, but here we were just walking out like this, so easy. It was, of course, a time of more chaos in school than we could have imagined in our wildest dreams.

We poked each other breathless with excitement when she went to Dr. Desai's dispensary and climbed up the stairs.

She emerged after about ten minutes, accompanied by Merch. We knew Merch, he taught us geography one summer in a listless, funny sort of way. We were doing North America that year, and I remember he said Pawtucket could have gotten its name because it tucked the paw of Connecticut, and I never did figure that one out.

We trailed them at a distance. There was a light mist in the air that night, and they seemed not to even be aware of us. Merch was wearing gum boots and a dark red pullover. He had no raincoat. We did not dare to talk. We walked quietly, heads bowed. Before they even turned up the fork from the municipal park to which no one ever went, we knew they could be headed to only one place: table-land.

Once up on table-land, we had to be very careful. If they turned, there would be nowhere to hide on its flat echoing surface. There were some bushes near the lake, which was to the right of the road as you reached the top. We hid behind them. Merch put his arm around her shoulders as they walked towards the rocks where the Prince had been the night she died. We could see them faintly in the distance, defined by the intermittent glow of a cigarette.

Were they friends, were they lovers? We knew that Merch and Prince were often together. They were so easy with each other, always laughing and smoking in the bazaar. Many in Panchgani said they were having an affair. But we knew the Prince preferred girls.

But what of Apt and Merch? How were they connected? He had put his arm around her. “It is a love triangle,” said Ramona, in triumph. She just could not wait to tell the others.

“But on second thought, why should they both be in love with Apt? She's ugly,” said Ramona.

The Apt was my pet teacher. I felt obliged to stick up for her. “What about when she laughs?” I said, remembering how her brown eyes sparkled. It struck me for the first time how hard it must be for her to keep those eyes sparkling. I was not pretty, I knew that, and I knew how hard that was, but it must be so much harder to grow up with a big red mark on your face. How many people, I wondered, would bypass the mark and see her? It had taken
me
pretty long.

We were crouching, sitting, and creeping around the rocks behind the bushes for almost an hour, cold and restless, when we heard echoing footsteps. Under the clouded moon we saw the Apt, alone, walking down, a black shawl draped around her head.

Should we follow? Should we wait? We'd have to wait, we whispered, otherwise Merch might see us as he walked down. We could see the glow of his cigarette near the rock. Soon, he came towards the path. But instead of walking down, he turned and came to the pond. He walked to the bushes and looked down at us, huddled behind the hedge.

“How very nice,” he said, and his eyes glowed white. “Ramona and Nandita. Just the girls I wanted to see.”

Merch had always looked like a harmless sort of bloke. We bullied him when he taught us. But tonight he loomed large and sinister over us.

“I have something of yours in my room,” he said. “Follow me and I will return it.” His voice was a whisper, but we heard every word. We stood up, squirming, and followed him, heads bowed, down through the bazaar. He did not turn back to look at us.

I wished for Shobha the sure, or for Akhila of the impertinent questions. But here we were, the timid ones, Ramona and I, alone on a night soaked with already-shed rain, dripping, not asking a thing. Like docile little cows, we waited downstairs outside Dr. Desai's, holding hands, too numb to talk.

When he came down carrying our raincoats, I was relieved. I do not know what I expected.

He opened each one and read the names written below the hood.

Nandita Bhansali

Akhila Bahadur

Ramona Dastoor

He paused after each name, as though he were Miss Nelson reading order marks. I think we even hung our heads as we did in the prayer hall. He handed the three raincoats to us, and said in a low and sinister sort of voice, “Now I want to hear nothing, you understand, nothing about anything, from any of you. I trust you will convey this to Akhila also.” He paused, looked at each of us in turn, and then said, “I say this out of concern for your personal safety.” He did not mention how he had happened to find our raincoats at the scene of the crime, and we did not have the courage to ask him.

There was another significant pause, after which he looked at me. “Nandita, you are the reasonable one. I hope you can impress this fact upon your classmates.” He was very stern. “Leave the detection to the adults, otherwise there will be trouble.” He was sneering at us. “I can personally assure you of this,” he said.

We were both shaking with fear. We realized that we were not just the watchers. We were also the watched.

“He did it,” breathed Ramona. “I could see it in his eyes.” She started sobbing as soon as we were out of earshot. “I don't want to die,” she kept repeating, between sobs.

Ramona was high-strung. She had always been like that. She got very excited and could be a lot of fun. But she could fall apart quite suddenly. “Let's talk it over, the four of us. It all makes no sense,” I said, linking my arm through hers. I just wanted to get her back into bed, safely.

Fifteen

Panty Day

T
he next morning I awoke with dread in my soul and went to call Akhila and Ramona so we could have a few minutes to talk before the rising bell. Ramona was the prefect of the second dorm. The prefect beds in Pearsall were front center, with two rows of narrow metal cots lined up against the wall on either side, fourteen girls to each dorm.

Ramona's swollen eyes popped open before I reached her bed. I could see she had not slept. I motioned her to our meeting place in the corner of the bathroom. Akhila sprang awake before I got to her bed, her black eyes crackling with excitement. She dashed out with me in the flowered blue pajamas that were too tight for her, her springy black hair tied in two tight pigtails that bounced around her shoulders.

“Merch is going to kill us,” announced Ramona as soon as we met.

“Merch? Merch? You're mad or what? He could not even kill that bat in the classroom. He went and called Shankar,” said Akhila scornfully.

“No. Really, really, really. He looked so scary last night. And he told us to stay out of it. Otherwise, he said, he would personally take care of it. And that can mean only one thing,” Ramona said. She was going to burst into one of her crying fits, I could see it coming.

Akhila looked to me. Yes, I said, he did go back to the place of the crime, and yes, he did return our raincoats with a sinister warning. The rising bell interrupted us for the ten thousand and tenth time, and we went back to the playing fields of Eton, herding our charges through brushed hair, made beds, and polished shoes before breakfast.

Just before the breakfast bell, Dina Bhutta came to tell me that Ramona was still in bed, her blanket over her head. She must have crept back into bed after our meeting.

“Ramona,” I said, sitting on the edge of the bed. “We are all together in this. Don't have to take it so badly, you know.”

She poked her head out and eyed me balefully. “
The Thane of Fife
,” she said, “
had a wife. Where is she now?
”

I wished she would at least smile a little when she said it. But she just pulled the blanket back over her head.

Below the veneer of merriment and camaraderie, there was a layer of sadness in the school. An orphaned feeling in the pit of all our stomachs. We had been snatched from the bosom of our families and left on this hilltop with no one to sing us to sleep or hear our frightened dreams. We were all there for a reason, especially those of us who had been left on the hilltop before we were even ten. My two sisters and I were in boarding because our mother was not capable of looking after us. Our father had told us that. At least this way he knew we were looked after when he traveled, he said, since our mother played cards all day with polished nails. Ramona had been a bed wetter. I remember her being hit by Miss Barnabas on the head and pushed to the bathroom, looking down and holding back tears. “Dirty child, did it again. Ayah, just see what this child has done.” We felt for her but we never spoke about it. Many years later she told me that she would awake at dawn in a panic, knowing she had wet her bed again. She would fan her legs furiously under the blanket for a whole hour. “I thought if I fanned it enough, it would dry up and they would not notice it. I even became a Christian for a short while in standard three. I went and told Mrs. Prince—can you imagine, our Prince's mother, remember she used to hold all those intense prayer meetings?—that I wanted to let Jesus into my heart. She knelt with me in Nelly's drawing room, and then she gave me a little picture of Jesus. I remember it so clearly: Jesus had long blond hair and was wearing a blue scarf over his robe. He was holding a lantern that cast this warm glow, and he was knocking on the wooden door of this cozy little cottage. ‘He has been waiting all this time for you to let him in,' she said. I would stare at it in bed before lights out and pray for him to help me. I felt very strongly about it for some time. I was always talking in my mind to Jesus. I felt I was in this English cottage, sitting on a sofa with this Jesus from my picture. I don't remember when I stopped being a Christian, but I know I stopped wetting my bed in standard five.”

I sent Dina to call in the matron. Mrs. Wong was a slim and elegant Chinese lady who wore lacy undershirts and slept with curlers in her hair. She regaled us with stories of her aristocratic past in China. All stories ended in the drama of the escape from the Communists, and how the family servants tied her to a donkey and crossed the snowy mountains into India. “Then we run, we hide, we tie cloths on our feet.” She would mimic every action with the face of an anxious young girl peering over a mountain ledge. The story sessions happened only when she was in a good mood. Mostly, she was in a bad mood and stayed in her room.

Mrs. Wong felt Ramona's forehead and wrist, asked her to stick out her tongue and show her stomach. “No fevel. No spots,” she said, “but stay in bed for morning. We see at lunch time.”

So it was the three of us under the banyan tree after prayers. It was a cloudy day with no wind and birdcalls hanging loud in the sullen air.

“I think we should stop,” I said. “Let the Woggle figure it out. Why should I care about who killed Prince?” Akhila and Shobha remained unshaken by the tale of the new monster Merch. They urged me to lighten up. Akhila was a wiry little bouncer with ink stains on her uniform. She was one of the naughty girls, confident and cheeky. She was a beloved only child. Her father ran a sugar estate with no suitable schools around. Her mother sent her parcels with home-fried papdis and puris every week, and knitted bright new sweaters for her every year.

As we filed into the gym where we were to spend the morning studying for the afternoon exams, we saw that the good Inspector Woggle had set up a desk in the staff room and was interviewing a very grave Miss Jacobs.

Miss Mathews was the duty teacher. Her sari was in complete disarray, and her eyes were swollen and teary. Within minutes I got a note from Shobha, sitting eight desks down. “She's falling apart. She must know something. Let's pump her.”

Miss Jacinta Mathews was the most pumpable of all the teachers. We called her L.S., because she was spacey and someone once said that she was a real Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. First we started calling her Lucy in the Sky, which was too long, so one day it became L.S.

My resolve to remain aloof from the murder investigation faded, and I followed the two of them to the duty desk on the stage at the front of the gym. “Dark things, girls. Dark things under our very noses,” said Miss Mathews, shaking her finger at us, her rosebud lips aquiver.

“But Miss, you must know who killed her,” said Shobha. “You lived in the same house. And she liked you. Come on, Miss, we saw you laughing with her on sports duty just last week.” I had always been a little repelled at the blatant way that Shobha sidled up to teachers and flattered them when she wanted something. But I had to admit it worked.

“Did the inspector already talk to you?” I asked.

“I am not going to tell any strange man what I heard,” said L.S., tossing her head defiantly. “But I did tell him what I saw.”

“Miss, you know who pushed her! Your photo could get into the
Poona Herald
!”

We rolled her around like a ball of puri dough.

“I told the inspector I saw a letter on the tray for her the very evening of her death. From England,” said L.S., arching her eyebrows with an important air.

“Oooh Miss. So you know what was in the letter. You know why she died. Must be some dark secret.”

“Akhila Bahadur, try not to be stupider than the good Lord made you. How can I read someone else's letter?” But then she dropped her voice to a whisper, looking around to make sure no one else was listening. “She came home after dinner, she read it, and then she ran out into the rain.”

“For the last time,” said Akhila in a sinister undertone.

“But she was your friend, Miss Mathews, did she tell you anything? She hid that girl from Queen Mary in her bedroom for two whole days, remember? Why do you think she did that, Miss?” asked Shobha, playing with Miss Mathews' hair. I saw where she was leading.

“I'll have you know she was not my friend,” said L.S., her eyes flashing. She had a small heart-shaped face and very long eyelashes, which she loved to bat.

“Miss Prince was really Charu's friend, no?”

Miss Mathews' eyes started shining, a tear spilling out. “Muttering and moaning in the room, all night long,” she mumbled.

And then, like a child who has said too much, she suddenly raised her voice. “Now go back to your desks, you silly girls, before I give you all an order mark,” she shouted so that the whole gym could hear.

The Apt, we had to talk to Apt. But lo and behold, as we were sidling out of the gym, we saw the Apt being led out by a fat lady in a nasty nylon sari. She was weeping. A driver in a white uniform carried her suitcase.

The Apt was always neat and well kempt, her hair sleek and braided. Recently she had started wearing cotton saris with borders, and tying her hair in a low knot at the nape. It often came lose, and she would shake it out and then coil it again. She had begun to look quite pert. But today, as they gently folded her into the white Ambassador, her hair was dry and knotted as if it had not been combed for days, and her face was like a cracked egg with the yolk streaming out.

“She's having a breakdown,” I said. “They called in her family.” My first thought was, Oh, no, I'm going to miss her class. I looked forward to her classes, her questions, her homework, her tests. I wrote better for her. I could see her reading my essays, pencil in mouth, smiling. She gave me very high marks. She once even gave me a nine out of ten, and often read my answers aloud to the class.

“She just likes you,” said Anjani, who worked harder than me. “I bet if I wrote your name on the paper I would get nine out of ten too.” I did not bother to contradict her. “You are just smarter than most people,” my father often told me. “Remember that.”

Ramona was back in the dining room for lunch. She gave the thumbs-up—the secret panty sign—as she filed in. I felt betrayed. I had worn my bloomers as usual.

“This morning you were so scared—couldn't even get up,” I said reproachfully. “What made you wear a panty today of all days?”

“Well, if I'm going to die, might as well die with a panty,” she said. Turned out that even Akhila had worn a panty that day. “I knew no one would be watching, so why not?” she said with a shrug.

It was Rule Number Three on our List of Breakable Rules. It was also known as the Elastic Band Rule. Akhila had suggested it, and it had turned out to be the most delicious of all the rules that we broke.

Wardrobe rules were very strict at Timmins' School for Girls. Each girl's trunk must contain eight blue-checked knickers, two red-checked knickers, two navy-blue sports knickers, and eight play knickers. The whole army of knickers had to be bloomers, held up with elastic at each leg, not more than six inches above the knee. At home, through every holiday, the tailor sat in our balcony for weeks, patiently threading elastic into the one hundred twenty knicker legs of us three sisters. Everyone turned up with tight elastic legs. But the elastic started loosening up as the term progressed. By midterm, we became a straggly lot, each with one or two knicker legs hanging limp below our hems.

Miss Manson came back from furlough firm and resolved. She could have told us to throw the bloomers in the fire then, but that would be the beginning of the end of colonialism. No, Miss Manson took it upon herself to see to the uplift of our brown masses. She set up an inspection regimen.

Every morning when we lined up for prayers, each class would have to knicker snap as Miss Manson walked by. Suddenly, she would stop and turn, impaling some unfortunate girl with her watery blue stare. “Alpa Mohite, let me hear your elastic,” she would say in her thin stern voice, and the poor girl would have to produce a respectable slap before the silent school. Those found wanting were pulled out and taken for private screening in the staff room. There they would have to line up and lift their dresses. Girls with badly failing elastic got two detentions.

By midterm, Miss Manson began to think that the Lord needed more of her. We would find her waiting when we turned corners, or she would quietly creep up on us from behind. “Let's hear your elastic, now,” she would say, softly. She was always on the lookout for fallen girls, we could feel her X-ray eyes boring into us as we walked by her, we knew she was trying to look up our dresses when we jumped. We began to call her the bloodhound.

Breaking of the Elastic Band Rule required fairly elaborate strategies that had taken many nights of excited discussion and practice. Our ammunition was lots of little bands of elastic. These were to be kept in both pockets of the uniform, to be curled around the index finger and snapped upon demand. We practiced this often. Of course for sports and P.E. we had to stay with the navy-blue bloomers under our divided skirts.

And remember, girls, no climbing trees, no standing up on the big swings, and no running down the steps on panty days, we said. We hid lacy little panties in our lockers and would wear them when the spirit moved us. We could not send them to the dhobi, and so we washed them and hung the wet panties behind our towels. This rule must be kept secret, we all agreed. The Rule Breakers were sworn to secrecy on this, because we knew it would be tempting. We knew that if the news spread, and all the seniors started wearing panties, we were sure to be discovered. We were not to misuse the rule, lest it give us all away. Perhaps only once or twice a month, we assured each other.

But we began to feel so lithe and graceful and free, so full of tingles, so like real college girls that of course we began to wear panties more often. We had now reached the end of the second term, and it was possible that we would get away with it entirely. Only Tara Guha had been caught, once. But then, Tara was bound to get caught; she was wearing panties every day. Tara had started kissing boys at thirteen.