Miss Timmins' School for Girls (15 page)

“And anyway, what are they going to do?” said Tara defiantly when we pleaded with her to slow down. “Throw me out and tell my parents that I was wearing the wrong underwear?”

There was a deep breath of dread in the ranks when we saw that it was the bloodhound herself on lunch duty. But she did not ask for a single elastic snap as we filed into the dining room. She announced after grace that Miss Apte had been called home because her mother was seriously ill. “She is in a coma,” she added, but was too distracted to offer to pray for her quick recovery.

My knickers felt like a straitjacket. I was itching all over and could not sit still through lunch. Rumors and theories and wild stories swirled around the tables like red rainwater through open dikes. The shock of the crushed skull was now overlaid with the thrill of being amidst dastardly deeds.

Shobha was indignant that her prime suspect had slipped away. “It's a ruse,” she pronounced. “Apt found a way to get out of the school. Probably sent herself a telegram. Mother sick. So original. Every year my servant gets the same telegram. But we'll get her. We are practically finding facts by the minute.”

We added the facts to our book.

The Apt and Prince were lovers.

Merch knows we were on table-land that night.

Prince read a letter and then dashed out to fight with Nelly.

The first line bothered me, but the girls overruled my objections. “Miss Mathews said they were muttering and moaning all night in the room, and that can mean only one thing, Nandita,” said Shobha, and the others nodded in agreement.

We agreed that in a day or two we would be able to march into Woggle's office in triumph and lay bare the entire plot. His stomach would tremble.

But Ramona was not to be tempted by fame and glory. “There is always a second murder,” she said darkly. She said she would not take part in any interviews. But of course she would remain with us, she said, as a behind-the-scenes kind of detective. We decided that Sister Richards should be our next interviewee. She was sure to have seen something if Prince and Apt were lovers, since her room was next to Apt's. We convinced Ramona she needed to go to hospital. Akhila and I supported her down the steps.

Sister hated to admit anyone to hospital. Too much bother, she said. If you did not have fever, spots, or a mortal wound, you were subjected to one of the following three: red swab for wounds, purple swabs for sore throats, and bitter medicine for everything else. If you were deemed sick enough the next day, you were to come to the hospital during morning break and meet Dr. Desai. Dr. Desai was a decrepit man who still wore a bowler hat and was hard of hearing.

“Speak up, girl,” Sister would say as we described symptoms. “And don't breathe on the poor doctor! Look the other way, child.”

“Get yourself admitted,” we urged Ramona. “Try and faint. You look so pale anyway. Then you can snoop around Apt's room and gossip with Richards.”

“Sister Richards,” we called, “Ramona is very dizzy. She nearly fainted. Mrs. Wong thinks she is very sick. She was in bed all morning.”

But Ramona did not look as sick as she could have. We eyed her balefully. Akhila pinched her upper arm.

“Ow!” she said.

“Anything hurt, child?” asked Sister.

Akhila pinched the same spot. “Nothing, sister, a mosquito just bit me,” said Ramona calmly.

Sister went to the dispensary to get the bitter bottle. “At least I'm taking the medicine,” hissed Ramona. “Why don't you try and find out about Apt?” She had turned suddenly tall and gangly last year, but her chest was still as flat as an ironing board.

“We saw Miss Apte being carried out. Is she sick, Sister?” asked Akhila.

“Poor girl,” said Sister. “First her friend and then the mother. Was crying in her room all day yesterday. I said to her, ‘You know Inspector Wagle. Go tell him to release Shankar.' Ridiculous. Whole town is talking. They say it is some private vendetta.”

“But how does she know Inspector Wagle so well?”

“Same caste. You know. Miss Apte used to shop in the bazaar with his wife. They all stick together, those Maharashtrians. That girl was always talking to them all in Marathi. Even Shankar,” said Sister, putting the thermometer back into the bottle of dirty white liquid.

“Didn't know what she was getting herself into, that girl,” she muttered, almost to herself, as she went back to her radio.

There was no need to support Ramona back up the stairs, and we were walking back through the hospital veranda, digesting Sister's vendetta story, when we saw three sets of eyes dancing just above the window ledge. There were three juniors with mumps in the hospital, and they had something to tell us. They met us at the back door, breathless with excitement.

The girls said they had heard whispers and movement coming from the Apt's room on the night of the murder. One of them, Dilnaz, had even heard a knock. They were sure there had been someone in her room that night. And then, after the rain stopped, they had heard the back door banging. They knew the Apt had left, because they had knocked on her door.

“We were going to pretend that Sita needed something if she answered,” they said. Their bandages were tied in big loose bows above their heads and flapped as they talked. Dilnaz had her baby-blue pajama top buttoned wrong. The three of them looked like the see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil monkeys on the posters in the dining room. Gandhiji had been fond of these posters, it appears, and had advised that they be put up in all the schools of India.

The girls leaned as far out as they could from their window that night, they said, to where they could see a little bit of the room. “But we never saw anyone,” said Dilnaz. They were nudging each other and giggling, and so we knew there was more they wanted to tell us.

“We saw cigarette smoke out of the window,” they said, “and Dilnaz, Dilnaz says she heard . . .” and then they started fidgeting and giggling again.

“Yes, Dilnaz,” I said, staring kindly into her eyes.

“I heard the word
fuck
,” said Dilnaz finally, at which the girls once again burst into giggles.

“Who is that?” shouted Sister, hearing a noise. The girls rushed back to their beds, and we went onward.

By the time we met again, Ramona had it all wrapped up. “It could only be Merch in the room,” she said. “He smokes, and he could easily say words like fuck. They are lovers. The girls heard them leave. They went up to table-land, waited till we had left, and killed her for a private vendetta. You heard Sister Richards, even she said private vendetta. QED.”

“And that is why he said he would kill us if we tell the Woggle,” she added with sullen conviction.

It was easy to be irritated with Ramona, but you could not stay really angry with her. She was just such an innocent, always had been. Everyone in the class understood that. Her excitements were intense and infectious, her anxieties all-consuming.

Right now, she was like a rocket about to burst into some sky or another.

That afternoon, her paranoia became the cause of an indelible event in Timmins history. It cracked the iron back of Miss Raswani, the most hated and feared teacher in school. Miss Raswani taught Hindi in an archaic and rigid manner. Everything went in a two-week cycle. On Monday, she read a chapter aloud standing in front of the teacher's table. Then she made the class read it in turns, a paragraph at a time. For Hindi night study we had to learn the first half of the chapter by heart. On Tuesday Raswani would sit ramrod straight at the desk and eye us sternly. “Punita Parikh, first paragraph,” she would bark, and Punita would have to stand up and recite it. Wednesday, it was the second half. Thursday the whole chapter once more. Friday was the test. We had to sit down and write the whole chapter. There was no wavering from the text, no need for explanations. This was how the Vedas must have been taught to Brahmin boys in Benares a thousand years ago, and Miss Raswani saw no need to deviate. I can still recite entire chunks of “Bharat ki Vividh Rituen
.
”

The next week was devoted to corrections. Any departure from the text was crossed through with an angry red pencil. We would have to rewrite it, in pencil, in our Hindi rough books. Sentences with errors had to be rewritten once. Misspellings, three times. As we finished, we would take the book to her to be corrected. We would stand by the desk, quivering, while she spitefully jabbed at the book with her pencil. Even the littlest of mistakes could get the book flung in your face. We had to keep doing corrections in our rough book until they were completely right. Then, the corrected correction had to be copied into the fair book in fountain pen. God help you if you made a mistake in your fair book, where there was no scratching out. Miss Raswani gave the most homework, and the most detentions.

Miss Raswani, who could drive the entire senior school into tense silence as she turned the corner to a classroom; Miss Raswani, during whose class we were afraid to look at each other or put up our hands to go to the bathroom; this very same Miss Raswani left the jeering gym with a quivering lip, as if she were Miss Charulata Apte just arrived from Indore.

It was Ramona who started it.

The gym contained all of the middles and seniors, about a hundred girls whose desks had been pushed out of their classrooms and then lined up in six long rows with a passage through the center to the stage where the teacher sat, so that exams could be fair and firm. I loved exams. I loved writing the answers in the two hours of pin-drop silence, and I loved the marks I got after that. I loved walking up through the crowd to the list to see if I was first or second.

But it was not an exam day. Exams had been postponed. It was a post-murder day. The boundaries were stretched taut, like a ribbon waiting to be cut with a sharp pair of scissors, and it was Ramona who did it, unknowingly.

The gym smelled of sweaty Keds, the everyday brown sports shoes kept in two huge cupboards of cubbyholes just big enough to hold them. The right wall was made up of large lattice shutters that looked out onto the road. I was in the window line, three desks behind Ramona, surreptitiously reading
Atlas Shrugged
hidden inside the textbook
History of British Rule in India.

“The killer,” Ramona suddenly said, loud enough for all the girls around her to hear quite clearly. “The killer is here.” She was pointing, either at the road or at the red house across it that belonged to Mr. and Mrs. Nerulakar, who taught in Sanjeevan School, near Sandy Banks.

All I saw was one head bobbing by above the hedge, Mr. George Singh, the sports master from St. Paul's School, a military man who held himself so stiff that there was a story of his head having been cut off in a duel and then glued back on at Devil's Kitchen. He might even have been whistling, since I remember a tune floating by in the leaden air. There was no sign of Merch.

There was a disruption in the ranks. Girls from desks at the other end of the gym began to stand up to see what was going on.

“Who said that?” roared Raswani, her eyes directed towards the girls staring at Ramona, who was staring out at the road.

“Ramona Dastoor, come here at once,” she said. Ramona did not seem to hear her; she did not turn her head. A heaving gasp passed through the hall like a huge wave.

She saw me sitting three desks behind her. “Nandita, bring that wretched girl to me,” she ordered, banging a ruler on her desk and demanding silence.

I went to take her by the hand. She was ice-cold, and she kept looking at the road, transfixed, though I could see nothing of interest.

“Should I take her down to the hospital?” I asked. But the gym was getting noisy; circles of whispers were swirling around the room.

Raswani banged the desk loudly, and the noise subsided.

“Should I take her to the hospital?” I asked again, though Raswani still did not answer. “Miss, she feels ice-cold, and on top of that she is sweating.”

“Come on, Rami, I'll walk you down,” I whispered in her ear, taking her shoulder.

But she did not look at me.

“There is going to be another murder,” she said in a loud but low-pitched voice, as if possessed, as if she could see it happening in front of her.

I stepped back. Although I had stood beside her naked at the two-ayah bath in Little House—we were lined up and passed like packages from the three-mug washing ayah, to the bad-tempered wiping ayah who stank—I was suddenly afraid of her. I thought she might turn and put her hands around my neck and choke me until my face was blotched and blue.

Pandemonium broke out in the gym.

“Silence,” roared Miss Raswani. “I will have complete silence in this room.”

The noise actually got louder. Girls began to leave their desks and cluster around their friends. There were gasps and an undercurrent of the inevitable giggles.

“Immediately. I want complete silence right now,” she thundered in voice that had been known to wet timid knickers.

No one looked at her. No one paid any attention. Suddenly, as if by silent consensus, the one hundred girls in the gym decided that Raswani's rule of terror had been a skipping-rope, and they jumped right over it to the other side.

I stood transfixed, enthralled more by the way decades of carefully nurtured authority could be squashed like a soft strawberry than by Ramona's hysterical ranting. I realized that Raswani had never had any other strategy but frontal attack. She continued to bang and shout, but a confused and vulnerable frown appeared on her face.

Suddenly the Hindi teacher got up from her desk and started walking through the center of the room with her head bowed. Someone started clapping when she was halfway out, and by the end, the entire gym was clapping in unison. And when she had left without even turning to look at us once, we began to cheer and jump and pat each other on the back in glee, as though we had just won the Third Battle of Panipat or something. “Just imagine,” my sister Viny came up to me and said. “We won't have to wake up with the dread of Hindi ever again.”