Miss Timmins' School for Girls (20 page)

Jon

And so it turned out that Raswani was not so daft as I had supposed when she said her last words to me, the Saturn ring melting around her pupils. In fact, she had been diabolically clever.
Show it to that silly child, your friend Akhila
, she had said.
Tell her to revise her favorite chapter
. And coming to think of it, MariOrPiriKuri
could
be construed as Akhila's favorite chapter.

Throughout the term, Akhila and Ramona had put up their hands in Hindi class and inevitably asked some dumb question designed to make Raswani say the word again.

“MariOrPiriKuri. Yes, I told you before. You will have to revise the chapter again,” she would say. She said it in a juicy way, slapping her lips together as though she was waiting to eat her dal chaval. The chapter was a vapid outline of the life and achievements of Marie and Pierre Curie, but their names had been butchered in our phonetic national language, and Raswani would say them as they were written. She must never have heard of the Curies, we gloated. Not a scrap of information must have entered her head since the turn of the century. We kept thinking she would catch on, and correct herself and say Pierre instead of Piri one fine morning, but she did not.

In our personal Timmins history, Marie and Pierre Curie were more famous for opening up the Great Panchgani Scandals than they were for their Nobel Prize–winning discovery of radium. And they are known forever as MariOrPiriKuri.

No birth certificate was found in the envelope, and there was no photo of the village church. We did not know how Raswani had gotten hold of the letter, or why she had now given it to us. We were too shocked to care.

Nelson was the mother of Prince. All this time. A child born in sin under our very noses.

No one knew, not the rest of the Holy Trinity, and certainly not poor Prince. Nelly, our upright principal who was so fair with us all, had kept her secret love child right in front of our faces. And how callous she had been with her own child. Now that I thought about it, they both did have the same strong jawline.

We knew we had solved the case. We shook hands with each other—“Well done, Sherlock,” “Elementary, my dear Watson”—and brimming with power and confidence, we decided to walk out of the school in broad daylight and go boldly to Inspector Woggle on our own. There was no time to waste.

As we were leaving the front gate, Ramona suddenly wanted to go to the bathroom.

“Hurry up; I'll go down with you,” I said.

“No,” she said, “I might take some time. I have my chum. I think you should carry on.”

“Don't ditch now, Ramona,” we begged. “You saw her on table-land. You were one of the three. And three witnesses are much stronger than two.”

“I am sure to meet Merch. I do not want to meet him,” Ramona said in a small, despairing voice. “So why don't you all just carry on and tell the Woggle your story and show him the letter. I can be called later, if they need me.”

“And what does Merch matter now?” we asked her. “He is nothing. The case is closed. We have proof of the motive, and we have proof that Nelson was at the scene of the crime. What do you think, Ramona? You think he is just lurking around the bazaar waiting for you? Come on, one hardly ever sees him even.”

So she came along with us, but we should have known better.

The mist lifted as we walked through the bazaar, and a soft ray of light pierced through the clouds for a moment, lighting up the puddles. The world looked suddenly fresh and clean. We could smell the end of the monsoons. We felt it was an omen, a good omen. When we got to the police chowki, we were told that the inspector was busy. And so we waited on the slatted wooden bench in the veranda.

“What about Apt?” asked Shobha. “What should we say? Dushant saw her running down. She was technically at the scene of the crime.”

“But we didn't see her. If Dushant saw her, Dushant should say,” I said.

“As if he would lie,” said Shobha, flouncing.

“That's not the point, is it? The point is that Dushant himself was breaking rules, so he has to decide what he wants to tell and what he doesn't. We are not the witness, he is.”

Shobha opened her mouth and then closed it. She could not argue with that.

My instinct was to keep the Apt out of it. I had no idea what to make of all the love triangles the girls were drawing, but to me, Apt seemed so soft and innocent, I was sure her role was incidental. I wondered where Dushant really saw her. If he saw her near the municipal park, she could have been walking home from the Sydney Point road. There were a whole bunch of houses out there. No point in bringing her into it. This murder had long and twisted roots. Nelson, who I had thought was fair and kind and wise, had an evil side. She did not want to be the mother of Prince, much as my own mother did not want me. From the time I was little, I noticed the revulsion on my mother's face when she looked at me—she wondered where I had come from. As though it were all my fault. My fault for being short and fat and hairy, my fault for breathing. I was suddenly all choked up with tears. I was sure now that Nelson had killed her daughter.

Two hawaldars sat on their haunches smoking bidis, which they crushed as soon as the inspector yelled from behind the closed door. “Send the schoolgirls in,” he said in Marathi. We tumbled into his room, the four of us, self-important and bloated with our news, only to find Merch sitting on one of the two chairs facing the inspector's large worn wooden table.

I remember the stab of fear I felt when I first saw the back of his head, with his straggly hair tied in a low ponytail. He said nothing, just looked at us with his customary expression of mild curiosity. But when he lit his cigarette, I saw that his hands were shaking.

We handed the letter to the inspector, still in its envelope. The Woggle held it up and read it, emitting small whistles of sounds as he moved through the words. Then he looked up, and we wondered what he would do.

The inspector had thick oily hair, slicked back. There were two beads of sweat heading down both sides of his plump cheeks. “This is very important evidence,” he said, fanning his face with a slightly grimy handkerchief. “Now we have a possible motive. A very good motive. But a motive does not make a murderer. We have no reason to connect your principal to the fall in the middle of a rainy night. The only person present at the scene of the crime was Shankar. And that makes him the main suspect.”

I had a feeling Merch was at the inspector's to report seeing our raincoats at the scene of the crime. But he said nothing.

We told him our tale, Akhila, Shobha, and I talking in turn as we were trained to do, still standing in front of his desk as we were used to standing in Nelly's cold office. We told him about the letter, the fight, and our walk on table-land, where we saw Nelson sitting a few feet away from Miss Prince. We put Nelson, with her motive, at the scene of the crime.

And that was how the principal of Miss Timmins' School for Girls came to be walked out of the school in the afternoon, surrounded by policemen.

The inspector walked ahead of her, his two hawaldars behind. The news spread through the school like wildfire. “She is not in handcuffs,” shouted Rajvi Tandon, “but she is surrounded.” Everyone—girls, teachers, and servants—stood around in gaping groups as she sailed past, looking proudly into the distance. No one said good-bye. In fact, no one said a word to her. Miss Wilson walked by her side, wiping her red nose.

The police jeep was parked under the banyan tree. Before stepping into it, Nelly turned to the crowd that had followed her up. “Miss Wilson will guide you through this. I have entrusted the school to her at this time,” she said, and gave Willy a reassuring pat on her back. Willy mustered a strong face, but turned around and walked back into her room as soon as the battered jeep left the school compound.

The disappearance of the Hindi teacher came to our attention the next morning. I do not remember if we were informed of her departure at prayers or even if there were prayers that morning, though of course there must have been.

The rain had started up again, and a sad, slanting drizzle created a hypnotic pattern of crowns on the stone steps. We were all forced to cluster in dorms and damp corridors and soon everybody knew that the Willoughby ayah had found Raswani's room empty.

We wondered where she went, for we knew that she had no home. The most plausible rumor about her life was that she grew up in a Christian orphanage and had lived her entire life in missionary-run enterprises. We imagined her to be a virgin.

She left no note of explanation and no forwarding address. We wondered how she left. How did she carry out all her bags and belongings since the servants declared that none of them had helped her?

So just as one mystery was solved, another came into view. Just as it became clear that Nelson had murdered Prince, we began to imagine that we could prove she had also murdered Miss Raswani, for that was the sequence of events we had expected from the beginning, and the one that Ramona had predicted. There is always a second murder.

Now you can relax, Ramona, we said. The second murder is done.

Events were falling into the pattern of a classical murder mystery. The first murder is committed to hide some terrible truth. The second, to silence the person who had chanced upon either the terrible truth or the terrible act itself. And Raswani had most definitely happened upon the terrible truth.

If Raswani had disappeared, I could have been the last person in school to see her. She gave the letter to me and fled, fearful for her life. Made sense.

But she could very well have been killed. Nelson did not know the letter was out. She could have killed her for the letter.

“I am told that second murders are easier than the first,” said Akhila, as if she personally had tea and toast with first- and second- and third-time murderers.

The entire case lay wide open before us. How did Raswani get hold of the letter? Why did she give it to us? When was she murdered? Could Nelson have killed her? How could Nelson have killed her?

But we had little time to set about solving the case before we were whisked out of the school. We flitted like butterflies from one mystery topic to the next and came up with nothing on that gray morning before Ramona's brother arrived in a creaky taxi from Poona and Shobha's sleek father took her and five girls, including Akhila, in his gleaming Chevrolet Impala.

Twenty

The Melting
Murder

M
y father
drove up two days later with my mother beside him wearing a silk scarf to keep
her hair down and a transistor playing Radio Ceylon held at her ear.

I had skulked around the emptying school for the
two days, but discovered nothing new. We had prayers every morning, then two
hours of sitting silently at our desks and “studying.” I read Ayn Rand. We were
taken for crocodile walks every evening in three rows: seniors, middles, and
juniors. The teachers and matrons were too busy placating the flood of irate
parents to think of our moral or intellectual welfare, and certainly too busy to
talk to me.

Soon after the arrest of Miss Nelson and the
disappearance of the school's oldest teacher, Miss Wilson developed her stiff
upper lip. She kept her pleas to the good Lord pretty cut and dried, and whisked
around trying to keep the truth at bay. “Until the true events come to light, we
will refrain from conjecture and debate,” she announced the next morning after
we had finished reciting the Lord's prayer. “For the sake of the reputation of
our students and our school, we will not discuss the events with the public. No
reporters will be allowed in the school, and I have impressed upon your parents,
and I do so again with you, to please refrain from loose talk during the
holidays. The lawyers, the police, and your teachers will be able to do
everything to get to the truth of the matter. We have had a difficult time these
last few days, and I want you girls to relax and have a good time at home.”

She did not mention that four of the schoolgirls
had been instrumental in the arrest of the principal. I was the only one of the
detectives still around in those last days when the girls fell out of the school
like milk teeth, but Willy did not call me up to her office and talk to me. She
knew what I had done, but she showed no anger or emotion. It was during this
time that she turned into Wilson the Just.

W
e
spent that three-week September holiday after the murder in Bombay, Akhila,
Shobha, and I. We spent the days in Shobha's posh flat overlooking the Oval
Maidan, eating onion bhajiyas and hot fried potato chips made by her fat cook
Deoka, who had been with them since Shobha was four years old. He lives to
please me, especially now, said Shobha, tilting her head proudly. We knew that
now
meant after her mother had left her, and
asked no more. We were allowed to have as many Cokes with ice in tall glasses as
we wanted.

We told our parents we needed to be together every
day of the holidays to study for our exams. And we did sit around and use the
tools of our trade. We dissected the events and the words around them like frogs
in Miss Mathews' science lab. We used deductive logic, inductive logic, and, as
Akhila later pointed out, we used seductive logic. With the juices bursting out
of our bodies, our pimples, our periods, coarse curly hairs sprouting on our
nipples and chins, we tried to divine the actions and motives of Raswani and
Nelly, those two old women who had lived cheek by jowl for so many years.

The murder holiday was like a rest stop in the path
of the scandals. It was after the murder of Prince, after the disappearance of
the Hindi teacher, after the popping of the first scandal. It was while the
world still thought that it was a fact that Nelson had murdered her blood child
that we sat around hugging pillows to our breasts, and spinning and whirling and
stretching the story as we sucked ice cubes from the frosted glasses of
coke.

We wrapped up the story of Prince's murder and
moved on to Raswani after the newpaper reports of September, 12, 1974.

ACCUSED PRINCIPAL
DOES NOT DENY MURDER CHARGE

The principal of Miss Timmins' School,
Panchgani, has not denied the charges leveled against her. Accused of murdering
her biological daughter Miss Moira Prince, Miss Shirley Nelson, who is currently
being detained in a room in a mofussil hospital, has refused to make a statement
either denying or admitting to the crime. Her only words before the Satara
sessions magistrate prior to being taken into judicial custody were, “His will
be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” She has not spoken since. She has refused
to retain counsel. Reporters were informed that the State of Maharashtra would
designate a lawyer if no one came forward to take up her case.

The report went on to say that a local man, Shankar
Tamde, who had been held for questioning, had been released.

The
Indian Express
quoted Nelson as saying, “I am in a great strait: let me fall now into
the hand of the Lord; for very great are his mercies: but let me not fall into
the hand of man.”

The story had now become front-page news. The
entire country seemed to be following the dark tale of the two British women who
had played out their twisted history atop this remote rain-washed mountain. The
Naxalites set fire to an abandoned church in Gauhati, in the state of Assam,
protesting missionary presence in India.

It was all so surreal, for we felt inside it and
still so far removed.

Shobha's bedroom had a balcony that was level with
the top of the palm trees that circled the Oval. The monsoon winds came in from
the sea at high tide, and buffeted them around so that when we were lounging on
her bed, we could see the bent trees swishing their branches like tails. In the
evenings we could see children taking pony rides at the bandstand.

We imagined the sequence of events. On the night of
the murder, while Shobha, reading
Lolita
with a
torch under her blanket, heard the scream torn from the soul of the poor Prince,
Raswani watched from the other side, and with her mad white eye glued to the
chink where the wall met the wood of the door between the rooms, she saw the
Prince fling the letter at Nelson, and saw that Nelson did not pick it up to
read it, for of course she knew the fact that it contained, had lived in fear of
it all these years.

Raswani saw the Prince stalk out, and soon after,
she saw Nelson snatch her purse and walk out into the night. She could see the
airmail envelope on the table, nearly within her grasp. She knew the bolt on the
door between the rooms was loose. You could jiggle the door and drop the latch.
And so, while we were running down from table-land and Nelly was saying her last
prayer before pushing her daughter off the edge of the cliff, the Hindi teacher
went into the room she had watched secretly for so many years, and with shaking
hands she snatched the letter and ran back into her room.

She
could
have read it
right there in the room. She could have stood over the desk, read the letter,
and left it there so that Nelson would never know she had seen it. Then it would
have been a different story. But maybe she was nervous, standing in this inner
chamber; maybe she did not have her glasses; maybe she expected Nelly to burst
into the room any minute. And so she took the letter and retreated to the safety
of her room. And did not put it back.

How shocked she must have been when she read the
letter—perhaps she had lain rigid in her bed, tossing it around in her boxed
brain. And as more time passed, it grew harder for her to get up and go back
into the room to return it.

When Wilson announced the death of Prince, the
horrible truth must have been clear to Miss Raswani. Perhaps she had even seen
Nelly come back to her room later with signs of the deathly deed fresh upon her.
Perhaps her clothes were tattered, since it was a known fact that there had been
a struggle before the Prince's body went hurtling over the cliff. Raswani could
have heard her washing her white pajamas in the sink at night.

But she did not tell the inspector. She did not
tell anyone at all, not even Willy, because she was going to protect her beloved
Nelson, whose face she saw instead of the Lord's when she prayed at night.
Why should she suffer so much? Hadn't she suffered enough?
Hadn't we all suffered enough?
Raswani was really the most
simpleminded of the Timmins teachers—nobody with an ounce of intelligence could
teach like her—and so we gave her a simple construct. We figured that she saw
them as the sinner and the saint. Nelson, who had hidden her love child and then
committed murder, was the saint, and the brave-hearted Prince was the sinner
because she made love to women and did not hide it.

“The twistedness of this logic is truly
horrendous,” said Shobha in her imitation Indian Jamsetjee Ram accent, nodding
her head from side to side.

“Nelson must be her only real contact with
humanity. I bet you no one else has even liked her,” I said.

But if that was her motive, we asked each other,
biting into salted buttas on the windy ledge of Marine Drive and watching the
sea thrash out the last of the current of that long, wild monsoon, if she wanted
to keep that secret locked in her soul, why did she give the letter to me, the
letter that implicated her beloved Nelson? Why did she give me the secret letter
after hiding it for a whole week?

He is testing me.
That
was the first thing she said when I informed her that the three of us had seen
Nelson that night on table-land. I saw now that she must have taken my words as
a sign from her God. I was her messenger from God, sent to tell her not to hide
the truth. We had seen Nelson on table-land. I had told Raswani that day in her
veranda that we would have to tell Shobha's father. Raswani must have known that
the questions would begin and the story would soon unravel.

Into Thy hands I commend
Thee
, she had said, like the good Christian that she was, as she
slipped the letter into the book with only a glancing hint. Leave it to the
Lord, she must have thought. If He wants the truth to be known, He will reveal
it to them. And she had gotten it out of her hands, for she had felt so tainted
and so guilty with the letter in her room—after all, she had been a thief in the
night, breaking into someone else's room and stealing. She had kept reading and
rereading the letter and shoving it to the bottom of different drawers, so when
she had finally decided to put it into the Hindi text, she could not find it at
first.

She knew the story would unravel, and she wanted no
part of it. That is what I believed then.

We agreed that Miss Raswani, who had been such an
integral part of our edifice of fear,
could
have
ordered a taxi, called the driver down for her bags, sneaked out from the gap
behind the hockey pitch at dawn, and disappeared forever, as in a respectable
Agatha Christie novel. Or she could have been killed.

We were aware that there were still mysteries at
hand.

We wrote in our murder notebook. It was our last
entry. I must have been responsible for that “ergo.”

Proposed Order of Events on Table-Land on the Night of August 27, 1974

10:45. Girls reach table-land. They do not go
near the needle, but wander around.

11:30. They see Nelson and Prince near the
needle.

12:35. The girls are back in school.

Somewhere between 12 and 1, the boys see Apt
running down.

Ergo: She probably went up before 12.

Somewhere between 12 and 1, the boys find
Shankar bending over the dead body.

Whichever way you came down from table-land—unless
via the cliff, like the Prince—you had to pass the municipal park
.

Apt could have gone up after Nelson left. Between
the Apt and Nelson, I would say Nelson was the murderer. She had the motive.
Shobha presumed that Apt was the last person down. And she and Merch together
had pushed the Prince off the cliff because of some tensions in their supposed
love affair.

“I spoke to Dushant today,” Shobha announced on the
last day of our holidays. Her boyfriend had been in some backwater family
factory town during his break and was just back in Bombay. “Dushant told me that
the boys have decided to report Miss Apte to the authorities,” said Shobha,
looking archly at me.

I wanted to warn Miss Apte. I wished there were
some way to tell her that a trap was about to be sprung, but I had no idea where
she was.