Miss Timmins' School for Girls (18 page)

“In the mornings, you will sit quietly in the exam hall and study the subject you were to have written. After lunch, you may remain in your dorms and pack your suitcases.

“The events of the past few days have been very upsetting and unsettling for us all. I hope that, out of respect for the gravity of recent events, you will comport yourselves with dignity and refrain from undue hilarity.”

Miss McCall played the piano as the girls burst out of the room as out of a tight corset, overjoyed at the double bonus of going home and no exams. That is what I remember most about those days, how the whole school swung wildly as on a frayed rope.

By evening Shobha had changed her mind about the scream. “I think,” she announced importantly after a dinner consisting of the dreaded poky vegetable swimming in pepper water. “I think you are right. It was the Prince. She is furious. She must want revenge.”

“Let's call her spirit, then,” said Akhila. “Let's do a planchette tonight.”

About once a year the planchette craze would start up in the senior dorms. Our school buildings were old and creaky; some of them were rumored to have been built on the grounds of an old Muslim graveyard that the missionaries had bought cheap under the protection of their God. Spirits surely roamed the halls, and would be willing to look into the future and tell us how our lives would unfold. We would draw a rectangle in chalk on the floor, with alphabets written out on one side, numbers on the other, and place an overturned steel bowl in the center. After lights out, we would call the spirits. Three girls would put their index fingers lightly on the katori, and in the torchlight we would ask for a spirit to tell us when we would get married and how many children we would have. I did it many times, with no verifiable results. Sometimes the katori did not move at all, sometimes at a sluggish pace that led me to suspect one of the girls was moving it. Only once had the katori moved fast, as though of its own will, though the answers had been garbled nonsense.

We decided that Shobha would sneak into our dorm, hide in the bathroom until lights out, and then the three of us would meet there to do the planchette. We decided not to tell Ramona. She was too nervous these days, we agreed.

We were always cautious about our spirits. We always said “friendly spirit passing by, please come to our help,” because we had been warned against waking up specific spirits who might get angry and curse us if disturbed. But tonight we were going to be bold and ask for the Prince herself.

We were scared, of course, but mostly elated, because we would be breaking another of our list of breakable rules. Rule Number Seven was to be broken with a midnight feast or dorm event that was spectacular in some way.

So far, the Lower Willoughby girls held the title of the best feast. They had somehow managed to procure a large quantity of milk and sugar, and, in an incredible feat, stolen a primus stove from the pantry and made dudh pak.

Everyone agreed that the Lower Willoughby dudh pak was so far the most spectacular midnight feast of the Rule Breakers' Club.

Calling the spirit of Miss Prince, and having Shobha sneak in from another dorm to attend the event, was to be our way of topping that. And in order to make it a feast, Shobha had mooched a packet of glucose biscuits.

We were to meet in the last bathroom. Shobha and Akhila had drawn up the planchette by the time I got there. “What took you so long?” whispered Akhila with accusing eyes, for it was almost eleven. “Ramona just kept chattering, just would not let me go back to my bed,” I said, though it was not entirely true.

I had been in charge of putting Ramona to bed. I had gone to her bed after lights out, as we so often slipped into each others' beds and exchanged dreams and secrets and family stories. I went that night to distract her and soothe her to sleep. We wanted her to be asleep and suspect nothing. Ramona knew one of her brothers would come to take her home, and she seemed calmer now. I got her chatting on about her favorite subject, the pranks they played on her grandmother. I let her ramble on, and was tempted not to go the bathroom at all and later tell Akhila and Shobha I had fallen asleep, because I did not want to face the spirit of that scream. Nothing is really going to happen, I convinced myself finally. We will all just sit around and be scared, and then go to sleep. I felt braver then. I pretended to fall asleep while Ramona was talking, later pretended to awake with a start, and then got up and stumbled to my bed so that she would not suspect the rest of us were meeting that night.

Ten minutes later, I tiptoed out without a torch so that Ramona would not see me walking by her dorm. I had been eleven the first time I was in Pearsall, and I remembered now how long and dark and dangerous the corridor had felt then, and how sinister every creak and sigh. That was how I saw it again on this night. The corridor stretched to be as long as my life, and I arrived in the bathroom with my heart thudding in my chest.

The Pearsall bathroom block was a large echoing chamber with constantly leaking pipes. The sinks were to the right as you entered; the toilets were lined up to one side and the baths on the other. Shobha and Akhila were in the last bath, a small square room with a tap and a drain in the center. The room was dry, but they had spread a towel on the floor and placed two glowing torches at opposite corners. They looked like they were at a moonlit picnic. Akhila's hands were cold and sweaty, as were mine.

We put our fingers on the katori and called to our spirit. We looked at each other, but the katori did not move. “The spirit of Miss Prince,” we whispered together. “We want to help you. Do you have a message for us?” The katori did not move, but we looked at each other with round eyes in the dim light, for we felt it was about to. We felt a presence, I know we did. Suddenly, instead of fear, I felt a rush of energy, as if I were upon a stage before a hushed audience about to speak my lines. Akhila and Shobha looked confident too. We were the three witches again, reaching into the nether world amongst the dripping taps. “
Fair is foul and foul is fair
,” I muttered as we waited for her spirit to move.

“The spirit of Miss Prince,” we pleaded, “do you have a message for us? Do you want to tell us who killed you, so we can bring him to justice? Miss Prince, we will be your instruments if you will give us just a hint.” We were calm and strong now. We knew something would happen that night. But the katori did not move at all, though we sat for nearly an hour. We should have known better. We should have known that the mighty Prince would not stoop to move an overturned steel bowl at our bidding.

We heard footsteps entering the bathroom, and so we put out our torches and held our breaths. And then we heard Ramona, hoarse and terrified and urgent. “Nandita, come quick,” she said. “Where are you?”

We rushed out and found Ramona crouched beneath the sinks, her hands up in front of her face, her torch rolling on the floor. She had heard the voice of Miss Prince, she said in a breathless whisper.

“Didn't you hear it?”

“No,” we said. “We heard nothing.”

“How could it be?” she said, getting even more agitated. She was shivering. Akhila put an arm around her. “How could you not have heard? It was so loud her voice was echoing through the whole bathroom.” Her eyes darted nervously around the room. We shook our heads.

“Then it was only to me, or maybe it was in my head, but it was her,” she said. “I swear it was the Prince. She was here, in this bathroom, and she spoke to me.”

Ramona said she had wanted to go to the bathroom and had come to wake me up to go with her. She found my bed empty. She went to Akhila's bed and found that empty too. She knew we were up to something and was angry at being left out. Instead of proceeding with fear, as I had, she'd run to the bathroom in anger, and before she went up the stairs, near the sinks, she said she heard the voice of Prince say to her, “Leave now. You will leave this place forever tomorrow.”

“But what sense does it make?” I asked her.

“How do I know? I didn't make it up. I am just telling you what I heard. Wait a minute. Maybe she was warning me. Telling me to leave the school, or else I will get killed. Or something like that.”

“What was she wearing? What did she look like?”

“I didn't actually see her. From the corner of my eyes I saw a white light. But when I turned, I could see nothing.

“Let's run away now. Let's leave this school. We can stay in El Cid Hotel or something tonight, and tomorrow early we'll take a taxi and go to Poona,” she said desperately.

“Yes, and how will we pay for the hotel? And don't you think they'll bring us straight back here? They're not going to give a room to four schoolgirls in the middle of the night, Ramona. Use your head,” said Shobha, not masking her contempt for poor Ramona.

“Ramona, let's go to bed now. Anyway, one of your brothers will come tomorrow and take you home. Won't that be easier?” I said.

Later, when we were called by Ramona's family to talk to her about it, in the hope that we might make light of those events, we told her it was a prank we played on her, a cruel prank, we said, sitting in her drawing room sipping tea—although of course we had no idea it would turn so cruel, we assured her. We were very sorry, we told her. We said we had wanted to get her back into a good mood, and we also wanted to break Rule Number Seven. We told her we thought we would play a trick on her and make her laugh. She had always been one of the girls who dreamt of being taken out of school. She had even planned to run away once with Bina and Sameena Rauf, but they did not do it in the end. “So Shobha put a sheet over her head,” we told her as she sat across from us tying knots in a pink handkerchief. “We thought we'd tell you that you would leave school and you would be happy, and later, we would tell you the truth.”

She looked up at us for the first time then. “Later, when later? You mean like now?” she asked with a flash of her old spirit. We could only nod sheepishly, knowing she would not believe us.

Because Prince's prophecy had come true. Ramona had gone home with her brother the next day, and when her family saw the condition she was in, they took her out of school. She never did come back. And she never did regain her balance. She finished school in Poona, but did not go to college or get married or do anything at all. She grew nervous and paranoid, she began to inhabit a world where “they” were always watching her. They stole her ideas right out of her head; they tapped her phones, siphoned petrol from her car, and were waiting to rape her and kill her. She did not leave the compound of her Parsi family's rambling home, and when we went to meet her, we would find her sitting under a tree staring and muttering, looking increasingly dirty and disheveled.

For a few years she teetered on the edge of sanity when she became a part of some sort of cult. “I feel so calm and happy,” she said. “We just wait for the divine light.” The divine light, she said, was white. We called it the white-light cult and wondered if it had anything to do with the light she saw on the night of the haunting.

“I went with her once,” her brother's wife told me. “And it was, of all things, a bunch of old Sindhi women who meet every afternoon in each other's poky little flats. Just imagine, all these fat women in white saris; they sit on mats on the floor, and they sing bhajans and achieve some sort of ecstasy by seeing celestial lights. I was quite spooked, I tell you. But anyway, if it gives her something to do, I guess it's OK with us.” She shrugged complacently as she plied us with Shrewsbury biscuits.

Eighteen

The Haunting

I
know what it is like to be haunted. Not that I looked at it that way when it was happening. That night when we went back to bed after the failed planchette, I could not sleep. I was floating above the earth, through a landscape that was not anywhere I knew, but in it I saw suddenly pockets of places that were my own. I saw our home in Bombay, the small two-bedroom flat in a dirty old building in which my father stooped and sweated to live up to my mother's dreams but could not. I saw my parents' snips of conversation flying above them like knives, my sisters and I running from corner to corner but still getting the knives in our stomachs, in our hearts. I would love my family and my friends and hold them close no matter what, I told myself that night. I always remember that vow and am glad I made it.

I saw that night on table-land. I saw us all on a merry-go-round, Nelly, Apt, Merch, Shankar, the boys, the three of us. The Prince stood outside the circle of swinging horses, silhouetted against the jagged rocks. Children with blue balloons the whole bunch of us, we waved to her as we passed the spot where she stood. Behind me on the merry-go-round, I saw a dark figure, I saw wisps of white hair flying as the head moved up and down and nothing more. I saw everything together, but still sharp and separate, and I know now that it was because I was haunted, carried through the world in the wake of the newly dead.

The planchette we had made earlier that night turned into a jigsaw. The pieces were all lying around: the letter, the vendetta, the love affair, the raincoats. I knew the center piece was mine to find; it was there, waiting. “The letter,” I said aloud. “The letter is the key.” And as soon as I said that, the letter flew up and spread itself out in the center of the square. The Prince had gotten a letter from England, she had rushed to Nelson and screamed,
Couldn't you tell me? Just one sign, even? Do you know what it would have meant to me?
And then Nelson had been so distraught she had followed her up to table-land in her nightdress. Nelson, who was so proper we used to say she must put her pearl necklace on in the bathroom itself. There was some terrible secret between them. The letter flew away and a dark amoeba that was the secret took its place. I poked it and circled it but I could not bring any light into its dense form.

I may have drifted into a light sleep, because I awoke in the dark before dawn when the birds were beginning to call, with a big new thought bursting out of my head. Miss Raswani. Raswani had to have heard the fight. Shobha heard a little, but her bed ran along Nelly's bathroom wall. Raswani had the other side, where the fight must have taken place. But how could we get anything out of her? And what would she say? She never spoke to anyone; she went up and down the halls alone, shaking her head from time to time.

At first I could not wait for it to be light, so I could go and talk to Shobha and Akhila. But then I began to see how it would be with the four of us, giggling and pinching each other, going to Raswani's door. She would shout and roar and send us packing, for who would tell a dark secret like that to a bunch of arrogant schoolgirls? I would have to go to her alone. I was good with the teachers, they trusted me, and so I knew it would have to be me. I would go to her alone, after breakfast, and somehow feel myself into her mind and make her tell me about the fight. I knew my new strength from the night would not leave me.

Shobha had slept in Ramona's bed, and both of them looked tired. Ramona was pale and wan, and could barely muster a smile when she saw me. You look like you have seen a ghost, I wanted to say, but I did not, because I was not sure she could find it funny. But I said it to Akhila, who appeared to be the least affected by the events of the previous night. “Do you think the Prince was really there last night?” she whispered, her eyes large and limpid.

Ramona was angry and suspicious. “What were you doing locked up in the bathroom?” she demanded, looking at me as if I were the great betrayer. “I did not expect this of you, Nandita, of all people. Stabbing me in the back.”

“We were calling the ghost of Prince. And anyway, you said you did not want to be involved in scary things anymore,” said Akhila.

“Ya, we just thought you would be more scared, Ramona. We were protecting you,” I said, and it was the truth. I wish I had lied. I wish the story we made up later had occurred to me then.

“Well, you should have let me decide, at least, whether I wanted to be there or not. You are not my parents, or something. And it turned out to be worse. Nothing happened to you. Instead, I walked into the bathroom and had to . . . had to . . . It was real, I swear it,” she said, putting her finger nervously into her curls. And then she burst into tears.

“Ramona, can't you see we are all scared? Take a deep breath and calm down, why don't you?” snapped Shobha.

We were at our usual spot, the hospital steps. A large white cloud had settled upon the school, and we could only see outlines of people beyond the steps.

“I am going to meet Raswani. I am going to find out what she heard that night,” I announced, bursting into Ramona's hysterical rantings. “Right now, alone,” I added for effect, and stood up straight and dusted my dress, though I could feel my knees begin to wobble. I had kept the thought firm in my head throughout breakfast and prayers.

They all looked up at me. Even Shobha was stunned. Shobha and I were wary of each other. From when we were all young, from when we had bonded into a class batch, we had maintained an unspoken rule never to trust anyone from outside the class. That is how we remained so strong. But circumstances had forced us into this alliance with Shobha from a class below us, and now she had taken the center spot. I was not used to someone else calling the shots. I had let myself remain in my usual role, the portly class adviser. The voice of reason, the voice of caution.

But now I was going into the lion's den, alone, and the power of it spread through my body like pleasure.

“Hats off, Nandita,” said Shobha, grudgingly shaking her head but still trying to maintain the upper hand. “I had always thought of you as too goody-goody. But you have guts, man. In your own way, of course.”

“What will you say? You can't just barge in and ask her what she heard. You have to have a plan,” advised Akhila. I could see that she was relieved that I did not want her to come with me.

I planned to knock on her door and begin by asking Raswani what I should be studying during the holidays. I had no idea what I would say after that. This morning, it was as if I had been anointed with some special knowledge. I knew that a leader must not always be cautious. A leader must take a risk when the moment demands it. I had to step in and shape events. But I still didn't know how I could do it.

The mist wrapped itself around me as I walked to Raswani's room. The light was brittle and blue. I felt I was back in the world of my waking dream from last night, with no shadows to hold my body down.

Raswani's room was tucked into a far corner of the senior dorm building. You had to walk over the wooden bridge, up the stone steps, past Upper Willoughby, past the wide, curved veranda outside Nelson's drawing room. I paused outside Nelson's door, listening for a cough or a sniff, or a sound of movement. But everything was shuttered and quiet.

Raswani had a private veranda sectioned off outside her room with a large, badly painted green metal partition. The door was ajar, and so I stepped in. Her bedroom was closed. I knocked softly at first and then louder. I could hear her moving. No one had been inside her room in living memory. No one had even peeped into her room. She did not answer for what seemed like forever. She wants me to leave, I thought, and so I will not. I knocked again.

Finally she said, gruffly, “Who is it?”

“It's me, Nandita, Miss. I wanted to ask you something. About the Hindi syllabus,” I said, hoping I sounded calm, though I had to keep myself from faltering.

“Come back later,” she said. “I am busy now.” There was no roar left in her hoarse voice. With the anger sucked out of it, her voice sounded detached, dispirited.

“But Miss, many of us are leaving this afternoon. And everyone in standard ten wants to know what they should study during the holidays. Only a few minutes, Miss,” I pleaded. Although I kept a respectful distance from her, I was not as terrified of Miss Raswani as some of the girls. All we did in her class was learn things by rote, and that was easy for me. She was almost civil with me. I never let myself be open to being yelled at by her. But today I feared I had crossed the line.

I stiffened my spine and straightened my shoulders. I expected a roar. But after a moment's silence, she said, “All right,” followed by a deep sigh.

I saw the top of her head first. Usually her thick white hair was plastered to her skull in a middle parting and tied in a tight small knot at the back. But today I saw the wispy strips of hair darting in all directions, as I had in my dream. I knew she was the key to the murder.

“Don't forget to look into her room. See if she has any photos or anything,” the girls had bid me. I was poised straight outside the double doors for optimal viewing, but she opened one door a crack and came out, so I saw nothing inside the mystery room.

I had not laid eyes on her since her ignoble defeat in the gym. She was wearing a purple cotton housecoat, tied tightly with a bow just above her waist. The bottom of her sari petticoat peeped out from beneath it, an inch above her ankles. She wore flannel slippers. She looks like a lonely and confused woman, I thought, surprised. I felt I was looking at her for the first time. She must be at least sixty, I realized, though it had never entered my mind to guess her age before. We always looked at her in a slanting way to avoid her angry attention. When she was on night-study duty, no child even coughed.

In the veranda was a wooden table with a single high-backed chair facing the green metal door. I could see her sitting there on summer evenings, murdering our rote writing with her slashing red pencil. She sat down on the chair.

“Let me see your textbook, and I will mark out the important chapters,” she said. The fat Hindi text issued by the government of India's Board of Education was packed with mind-curdling random essays such as “Nehru Chacha Ki Topi” (“Uncle Nehru's Cap”) and the life and teachings of Buddha and Jesus Christ—as if we did not hear enough about him already. The book was devoid of meaning. Any stray bits of interest were stamped out by Raswani's brutal teaching.

She leafed through the pages swiftly, trying to muster some concentration. I could see her mind was not on it. Her hands were shaking.

I was standing beside her, so her eyes were level with my green Rowson House belt. My mind was swirling in a panic. After she gave me the important chapters, I would have to leave. What should I do? What would Tara do? Or Shobha? Or the Prince, what would she do? But then, I thought, none of them would even have gotten this far. Only I can make it happen. I have to go solo, I thought. I felt goose pimples crawling up my back. Lights, music, action. I lurched and then slumped down and managed to be sitting in a huddle at her feet, my head resting on my knees. I was shaking like a leaf. The shiver had crawled up my spine and sent my teeth chattering.

She recoiled in horror. “Are you unwell?” she muttered in a hoarse whisper. Another teacher might have touched my shoulder, patted me. But not her. She must not have touched anyone since she was twenty-two.

“I feel giddy, Miss, not so good,” I mumbled with my head still down. I needed to summon tears when I looked up at her. Tears did not come easily to me. Even when my mother berated me—she hated me because I was my father's favorite—I never cried.

“How can there be a murder here, in our school?” I said, finally looking up at her with what I deemed to be trusting eyes. I was still shaking, I knew she could see that. I felt the tension of the last few days winding up inside me and then radiating out. I knew how I was going to play it. Like my mother did in her endless games of bridge. I was going to finesse the queen. I was the best actress in the senior school; I always played the lead for Rowson House. I could see myself sitting at her feet on the stage, and the audience gasping in the dark behind me. It is all just a play, I thought, for what do I really care who killed that woman, the Prince?

“I came to tell you something,” I mumbled, looking down again. “I do not know who else I can trust but you.” There were teachers like Jacinta Mathews who were susceptible to flattery, and we all knew them. But I doubted if anyone had ever flattered Raswani the monster. No one dared to speak to her. We just ran or hid or prayed to be invisible when we saw her. That was what she seemed to want. “Get out of my sight, you wretched child,” she would scream, swollen veins popping out of her neck.

But I knew she was past screaming. And if she knew a part of the story, surely she would want to know another secret. And a little flattery could do no harm. That is what Shobha said. When in trouble, apply flattery.

“We saw the Prince on table-land that night, and then we saw Miss Nelson there. It was the three of us, Akhila, Ramona, and I. We have not told anyone yet. We are afraid. We do not know what to do,” I said, speaking slowly and tremulously. It was the truth. But Raswani was the last person we would have confided in. My hands were cold and clammy. I expected her to say, “And what were you doing out on table-land in the middle of the night?” She would pick me up by the collar of my blue-checked uniform and march me to prison, I thought, my heart thudding against my chest. I knew my cheeks were flushed.

But not a sound escaped her. She was quiet for too long. I glanced up at her. She was looking out into the distance. “He is testing me,” she said finally.

Then she looked down at me. Those mad eyes with the flaring white rim. In a soft voice that seemed to come from deep inside her—a voice we did not know she had—she said, “I will not ask what the three of you were doing out of school at night. I know you could be expelled for that. But it is not your fault. I know you, Nandita. You are a good girl. It is because of the wicked one. But the Lord took matters into his own hands.” She looked down at her gnarled hands.