Miss Timmins' School for Girls (25 page)

It was three in the afternoon. It was the right time to go to Willy. Or even Woggle. I should go to the Woggle and tell him what I saw.

I was tired suddenly, exhausted from the travel and turmoil. I had become lethargic and used to afternoon naps. I lay down and fell into an indolent sleep. It was evening when I awoke. I lay in bed in the gathering gloom for a while, considering my options.

It would do me no good to be blamed for a murder I did not commit. Once I said I was there, I would have to explain what I was doing. And if the affair trickled out—which it no doubt would, whispers and rumors and what was she doing up there in the middle of the night with that notorious woman, and yes, we saw the two alone in the hockey pitch, no doubt Ayi would die. She was hovering between life and death as it was. This would probably give her a big push to the other side. The Kolhapur gang would blame Baba's bloodline. I imagined Tai's face screwed up in disgust, saying, “The apple does not fall far from the tree.”

But my silence would mean that Nelson would be the culprit. And she was innocent. Only she and I knew this. I should go and meet her in Vai, I thought. I should find out how she plans to defend herself.

I changed into a saffron kurta Pin had given me one day when I walked into her room drenched. It was a man's kurta, cut wide and short. I had washed it and kept it on the chair, meaning to return it. But now, no need, I thought, as I slipped it on and took a look at my flared hips in the mirror. Maybe in her clothes I can be as bold and heedless as she was. On the other hand, that might just have gone and got her dead.

Twenty-five

The Secret
Mother

N
o one
asked me anything when I landed up in Merch's room that evening clutching my
brown suitcase, though they were all there, Samar and Shabir and a boy with
dirty feet who had smoked a joint with George Harrison. No one ever asked me
anything. That was the beauty of being with them. I blithely believed that they
knew nothing. I believed that they never spoke about me behind my back. I
considered myself to be smooth on the outside; I thought I was sliding in and
out of things, leaving no aura behind.

I had left the school and rushed to Merch's
retreat, thinking on the way that maybe I should ask Merch for advice. He is a
wise man, I thought, and so much older, almost thirty.

But Merch was edgy, nervous, pacing around the
room, not meeting my eyes. Usually I would look up at him and almost always find
his eyes on me.

The rest of them were discussing ways of getting a
fresh supply of drugs, now that Shankar's den of vice was no more.

“Rajneesh Ashram is best,” said Shabir, and so they
decided to drive to Poona that very night. I was worried about Ayi and had been
planning to return to Kolhapur by the morning bus. But this was too good a
chance to lose, I thought. I must strike while the iron is hot, I must meet
Nelson right away.

“Can you drop me off at Vai,” I asked, “since it's
on the way?”

“Why Vai?” they asked astonished.

“I'll take the morning bus to Kolhapur from there,”
I said. Vai was the junction town at the foot of the valley, with a large,
thronging bus station. “No, no,” they said gallantly. “We'll take you. We'll go
to Poona, we'll pick up the dope, and then we'll drive you to Kolhapur.” They
were most enthusiastic. I knew this meandering trip could take days, or
weeks.

“At least let's start with Vai,” I said.

It was already late when we were ready to depart.
We were all stoned. We stopped for tea as often as we could. After each chai
halt, we all smoked a joint. I cannot remember the name of the boy who had
smoked a joint with George Harrison, because by the time we reached Vai,
everyone had started calling him Hari & Son. They said they would call him
Hari for short. Hari, who was trying to distance himself from the Beatles,
pulled out a Jethro Tull cassette from his orange backpack, which he had bought,
he said, from a foreign hippie in Colaba. I was very much in awe of him and
hardly looked at him. I sat at my usual window, now with Merch's thigh pressed
close, as we lurched down the winding ghat road in a mystical Tull trance.

Merch sat next to me, but we did not talk at all.
That night after her death, we had gone to table-land and sat beside her rock.
We wept bitterly, but it seemed to me that we had not spoken at all. I do not
remember even looking up at him; I remember only that I felt almost safe, with
my head against Merch's bony chest.

And now, today, he would not meet my eyes. But
those first days were jagged and bittersweet with death—as Merch later put
it—still perched on our left shoulders. I did not even find it strange. I did
not speak to anyone at all. Not that it mattered. I liked this about being
stoned.

We emerged out of the mist at 2 a.m. to find that
it was not raining at all in the valley, and that there was a dim light burning
outside the trucker's chai stop on the outer edge of Vai. We parked the car and
honked and honked for service, and then at last we got out of the car to find
the night-duty boy stretched asleep on the counter itself, his red-checked
gamcha spread over his face.

He sat up and squinted up at us with bloodshot
eyes.

“Khalas. Khatam. Nai hai,” he said petulantly,
seeing that we were not his regular brawny truck drivers but effete city kids.
“It's over, go away,” he said. The boy, who was sprouting his first beard, sank
back on the counter as if it were the most comfortable bed in the world. He soon
let out a contented snore, the cloth of the gamcha blowing in and out of his
open mouth like an accordion. We stood around and watched him. A dim bulb burned
above his head.

We smoked another joint while we wondered what to
do.

“Let's check up on Gaiky,” said Merch. “He might be
able to help us score some grass here in Vai.” I had heard Gaiky thrown into a
few conversations, but had never met him.

We awoke Gaiky by throwing stones at his window
until he popped his head out, his teeth gleaming white like tubelights. We
tiptoed quickly past his deaf boxer, Raja, who barked halfheartedly just after
we were safely in his bedroom. Gaiky's parents,
Dr. and Dr.
(Mrs.) Gaikwad
as per the sign outside the garden gate, ran the
gleaming Vai Hospital and lived in a large bungalow close to it. Gaiky had a
whitewashed corner room overlooking the garden. He was the blackest boy I had
ever seen; his skin was shiny, blue-black.

Tai should see him, I thought. Surely the original,
or virginal—as the boys had recently been saying in a Tamil accent—black boy.
The boys were now spending all their waking hours together, since Raisa was
pregnant in Poona and Samar's wife, it seemed, had fled. Gaiky was wearing a
cream-colored T-shirt that had “Indiana University” written across it in small
chocolate-brown letters. I was told he went to college in Poona.

It was past four o'clock, and I could not smoke
anymore. I lay down neatly curled at the corner of a mattress, covered myself
with my dupatta—it was a red cotton, I remember—and fell asleep, hearing their
chatter from afar. I awoke with a start at nine the next morning to find the
five boys asleep, fanned out on Gaiky's large, high four-poster bed like the
petals of a decaying poinsettia.

In the spare, echoing bathroom, I tied my hair in a
tight knot, poured five mugs of cold water on alternate shoulders—head standing
straight up as Ayi had taught me—and felt somewhat better after I had an
intense, silent five-minute sob. Ayi said she had bathed with cold water even in
the Kolhapur winters because Gandhiji had advised the youth of India to do so.
He must have done so to discourage sloth and sexuality from arising in their
loins.

I had slept in Pin's kurta, and now, not wanting to
go out to the car to get my bag, I put it back on and smoothed it out with my
palms. I had begun to put kohl in my eyes, and a red vermilion tika as large as
a coin on my forehead. It was Pin who suggested that I start putting on makeup,
though I had not done it while she lived. “Bring out your eyes and make a big
tika to balance your blot,” she said, though she herself kept only a bottle of
Johnson and Johnson baby oil on her dressing table, which she used to slick back
her hair, and which we had used one Sunday afternoon to massage each other with
long, languorous strokes, making ourselves as slippery as slabs of butter when
we made love. And now here I was, drawing a round dot in a strange man's
bathroom, wanting to tell Pin that she had been absolutely right. It was a
bolder face that I was presenting now. I had always tried to get all eyes off my
face, not knowing that the blot would suck up all the energy thrown at me like a
black hole if I let it.

It was time to meet her mother. Her secret
mother.

I tied my hair, still damp and gleaming, into a
tight knot between my ears and was drying out the wondrous dupatta, which I had
used as a towel, near the patch of sunlight in the bedroom when Gaiky sat up
with a start. He had a small, straggly mustache, and he ran his fingers through
it. He fumbled to the door, popped his head out, and shouted for two cups of
tea.

He did not have to tell me to retreat when the
servant knocked on the door. I popped behind a wall as he cracked his door and
took the steel tray, his body blocking the servant's curious eyes. A girl in the
room might be better than a bird in a bush, but she was not for the household to
see.

We sat down like a civilized couple and I asked him
as we sipped the fragrant ginger tea if I could meet Miss Nelson, the principal
of my school.

“Yes,” he said. “She is on the top floor of the
hospital. Sort of like a house arrest. My mother said she is very quiet and
polite, and always smiling. Come, I'll take you to the hospital. I am quite sure
she is allowed to have visitors.” He spoke English with a Marathi accent, his
consonants thick and dipped in ghee, like mine. We felt instantly at ease with
each other for that. The girls called it the vernacular accent, with easy
contempt.

We agreed that there was no need to let the
household know I had spent the night there. “Why uselessly create tension?” said
Gaiky, and so he left the room alone and went and stood outside his window
holding up his arms to help me down, smooth as a princess.

Sudden gusts of wind sent gray clouds scudding
across the weak sun and shook the pink and orange bougainvillea that lined the
stone path leading from Gaiky's house to the square three-story hospital
building. Raja followed us reluctantly, as though it were his duty. I was not
afraid; I was not even nervous. I realized I was still stoned from the night
before, from the Bombay Black, which was purported to have opium. I was aware of
everything. Between each step I took, I saw the gray pebbles that parted to
allow stray stalks of grass. A pale watery sunlight shone down on the families
of villagers waiting patiently on their haunches in the hospital compound.

“They bring their sick in by bullock cart and then
sit around like this for days, waiting for them to get better. Or die, of
course,” explained Gaiky. He summoned a thin mali in ragged khaki shorts who was
watering the flowers lined against the building, whispered to him for a moment,
gave him some money, and patted him on the back. “This mali has good grass man.
Clean stuff. Somu always gets it for me. I think I should take it up as a side
business. I could sell it to the white hippies in Poona, though of course they
prefer hash.” He left me at the hospital steps and instructed a ward boy in
white shorts to take me up to the gora memsaab.

I thought I had an advantage when I went in to meet
Miss Nelson. After all, I knew she had not killed her daughter. She did not know
I knew.

It seemed so far that no one had seen me up on
table-land. It was my own personal hour, my borrowed hour. I would give it back
when I was ready.

I had to find out what Miss Nelson would do to
defend herself.

Her doors were shut. Even the window that opened
onto the corridor was shut tight. I knocked on the door and got no answer at
first. I waited a while—the hawaldar assured me that she was in there—and rapped
louder on the glass pane. After a moment, I heard the tail end of the flush as
she came out of the bathroom. I imagined her to be smoothing her dress, hanging
her purse on the back of the chair—to see her is to see her purse—arranging her
double layer of pearls, and then sitting erect and composing her face. It will
be grave sorrow, I thought.

“Do you realize that she controls the whole school
with her three looks?” Pin had said to me one night after a Sunbeam dinner as we
walked along the winding lane lined with sleeping houses. It was during the days
of the long rain, and we were both huddled under our separate raincoats, walking
with arms crossed tightly against our breasts so that the elbows did not touch
the soggy raincoat.

“She learnt it from my mother. The Three Looks: the
smile that doles out praise, disappointment when expectations are not met, and
grave sorrow when dispensing justice. No anger, never anger. And under it all,
the mask of serene holiness. Control. I saw my mother teaching the bitch how to
compose that face.”

She turned so that we faced each other under the
streetlight. With large golden drops of rain falling between us, she made the
holy face for me, lips in a straight line with the corners slightly pursed to
draw in the cheeks, eyebrows raised so the eyes appeared wide open.

I remembered now how she had looked eerily like
Nelson to me then—her mother, her mother, no wonder now, and to think of her two
mothers at the dinner table eyeing her with serene sorrow. I saw my Pin as a
tousled tomboy with bruised elbows, squirming between them. Between her sacred
mothers. Growing up between the secret sacred mothers, my poor Pin.

“Come in,” she said.

I felt my first pang of panic when I saw that her
face was puffed from weeping. I could look at nothing but the red rims of her
magnified eyes as I walked towards her. She wiped her swollen nose and tucked
the handkerchief in the sleeve of her pink pin-striped dress, which had pearl
buttons running down the front and a collar with a red rickrack edge. I sat down
across from her. She closed
The
Pilgrim's Progress
by John Bunyan.

The hospital room was a standard one with the bed
in the center and a metal nightstand. The only sign that it housed a prisoner,
not a patient, was the two hawaldars lounging on a bench outside her door. There
was a large wooden table by the window of her room with three upright chairs.
She sat behind the table like a right-angled triangle, her back to the
window.

She seemed too overcome to speak.

I wanted to leave her. I wanted to turn around and
run back to Gaiky's safe room. But no, I thought, with my nails digging into my
palms:
This is a step on which I must fall down, or else
overleap.

She must be waiting to get clearance from the
mission in Scotland to get a lawyer to defend herself. I must find a way to ask
her.

“How are you?” I asked, and wondered what on earth
I could say next.

But she took the decision out of my hands.

“I was waiting for you,” she said, as if she were
sitting at her desk in the principal's office.