Miss Timmins' School for Girls (30 page)

No, I had not.

But you must, a book of pure genius, he said, adding the fat book with a torn pink cover on top of the pile beside the bed. Later, I wondered why he did it, whether he had some sort of sinister motive.

But that night, we were still beneath the perfect sky. We stood in the balcony and smoked a joint, and when we were freshly high, I wrapped my brown shawl around us both, and we went to Kaka's, and sat at our usual table in the
ladys and familys
section on the second floor.

Even the surly little waiter smiled at us in the dingy single-bulb light, so that we looked at each other knowing there was a glow around us. And then we went back to his room, we fell into each other's arms once more. I took off all my clothes and did not put them on again until I left, two days later.

On the morning of the second day, when the light was gray and pink, he threw on the shirt left on the floor from the night before and popped his head out of the window, the rest of him dangling naked. He called down to the mali to start a sigri for him, and then get him one packet of Wills cigarettes and two packets of Charminar from the bidi stand, sandalwood paste and a packet of camphor from Panchgani Stores, and fragrant roses and jasmine.

I tugged his shirt from behind. No jasmine, I said.

Only roses, he called, but the most fragrant ones from the puja market.

Tell him to get the flowers first, or else the housewives will snap them up for their morning prayers, I said, and so he conveyed that in turn to the mali.

He then went to the kitchen, where I heard him start the tea. While the water boiled he shuffled to his desk and sat down and carefully rolled three joints and laid them out. His curly long hair fell across his face, and there was a gray-green stubble on his chin. We had spent the night curled and close, between waves of desire. But we had not made love all night.

Deep into the night, I had opened my eyes to find his face buried in my hair on his pillow. I wish it were perfumed, I said, like a princess. I told him I had read how Mughal princesses spent all day in the harem adorning themselves. How they scented their seven orifices, and how their maids held their long black hair above hot coals infused with sandalwood and roses so that they walked in a cloud of perfume all day.

Was this your fantasy? he asked.

This was my fantasy, I said, to make love with perfumed hair.

Let's do it then, he said, and went back to sleep inside my hair.

When we were drinking his strong, sweet tea and could see the clouds rising from the morning valley, I heard the mali walk up the stairs, and I sprang up to hide in the bathroom.

It's fine, murmured Merch, holding my hand down. I don't allow servants in the room. I don't allow anyone in the room, except friends. And no one over thirty-five. I clean my room myself—that explains the dust, I said—and the dhobi leaves my clothes downstairs. The locals are afraid of me, he said, raising his eyebrows, bemused. They think I am into satanic practices or something.

We carefully heated and crushed rose petals and added them to the sandalwood paste. Then we had a hot bath, sliding with soap on the bathroom floor. We washed my hair and rolled it into a towel and wrung it out till it was nearly dry. The coals in the sigri beside us glowed red and warm.

On Merch's balcony, with the sound of the wind in the silver oaks, I still see the two of us, spreading my hair over the fragrant smoke. We put our messy rose paste in a steel dish on the coals, and when it began to smoke we knelt naked on either side of it, holding my hair between us like the girls held out Mahrukh Tunty's bras to dry.

We tried various positions. In the end, I knelt facing away from the sigri and leaned backward into it, while Merch knelt beside me, bolstering my arched body against his, holding up my head with one hand and my hair, above the sigri, with another, so close to the fire that I could see the smoke closing in over my head. I kept my hands locked behind his neck to keep from falling into the fire. This is a job for seven maids, I said, and he bent to kiss my blot, and then we both began to cough with the smoke, and we ran into the room, and I jumped onto his bed and spread my legs, and when he was sliding so smooth and fine inside me I did feel, for the first time, the rhythm of the tide inside me. This is meant to be, I thought, dancing under him. The smoky perfume from my hair got into the pillow and sheets and was in our hands and noses and in our heads because we were nearly one that day.

We are the perfect match, he said, and my heart rose and battered against my chest in hope. We are the perfect match, he said. I think we are the bull and the mare. He pulled out a dusty copy of the Kama Sutra—oh, let me dust your bookshelf one day, I said—and we studied the chart of sexual unions with our legs entwined together.

In his damp kitchen, Merch had one little cupboard, which contained a tin of Nescafé, Darjeeling tea, two bottles of jam, eggs and milk and butter, stale pau bread tied in a newspaper, and a few misshapen bottles of spice. I make the best omelets, he said, and expertly cracked the eggs down the center with a fork, and with the aid of two teacups, he separated the white and the yellow. He beat the whites into a froth with a fork—always forty lashes, he told me, firmly.

We sat cross-legged on the worn carpet with the frying pan between us, scooping up the cloud-light omelet with dripping pieces of bread fried in butter, as Nina Simone's blue-black voice sealed the time in that room.

But what do you really eat all day? I asked him, prying at the little mysteries that surrounded him.

I have a dabba service, he said. Mr. Irani's cook makes me dinner in a tiffin three or four nights a week. I pay fifty rupees a month. Good stuff, actually. He makes chops and sali boti and deviled eggs. Sometimes I only eat at night.

Yes, he said, I am true to type. A Parsi bachelor. He did his Parsi accent, but there was only a hint of Cyrus in his voice, there was no Cyrus without Freny, and there could be no Freny without Pin. I saw the ghost of her against the edges of my eyes. How could I not, when this was the very bed on which I had made love with her?

But guilt, I said to Merch out of the blue. How does this Naked Ape world deal with guilt?

Well, a certain degree of guilt is necessary when killing occurs within the tribe, he said. Maybe I turned as white as a sheet, because he stammered for a moment, and then he hastened to add, I mean, for example, of course, in the extreme case. I mean killing in battle is rewarded, but crimes within the tribe have got to be accompanied by guilt and punishment, for the survival of the tribe, he said, rubbing his beard stubble—the stubble that I had cleaned like a cat, with my tongue, that very morning.

You know, he said later when he had begun to use my hair against me as an erotic device, and I knew where his hands and then his mouth were headed, you do know that in our case, guilt is irrelevant. She was already over the edge, he said, and went on to bite my navel, so that I could pretend that I had not heard it.

After sunset, Merch put on his khaki pants, a red pullover, and thick ghati chappals, and went out to the Irani Café to get some hot gutli pau.

I found
Ada
on the pile beside the bed, and I curled in his bed and read random pages from the musty book, desire spreading and twitching in the pit of my stomach again. I saw how Van Veen loved only Ada, for all of his long life. He loves me, I thought, and I jumped up and did a circle in front of his mirror, my breasts bobbing, my hair flying behind me. And then I stopped and kissed my face in the mirror. He loves me, he loves me, he loves me.

It was the pure day. Of the three days I spent in Merch's room, it was the second. The first day was the shy and awkward day, with nervous giggles and anxious looks. On the third day, our paths began to veer away from each other, because it was on the third day that I loved him the most.

“I read parts of
Ada
,” I said to him coyly, angling for a declaration of love. I had turned suddenly cunning in his absence.

“I always saw us in it,” he said. “From the day you walked into my room, like Venus emerged from a shell. I felt I wanted to know you all your life. I wanted to grow up with you, to watch you get your breasts, your pubic hair. Ada is the perfect love story, isn't it?”

But this, I wanted to say, this is perfect too, as he lay inside me, limp and resting, and then, one of us would move slowly, and then I would feel him harden, and we would move faster and faster and we would look into each other's eyes and see the worlds we would travel together, and when I came the burst of it was deep inside the center of my soul. This was the life I wanted, this room, this man, this love. And it was when he saw this in my eyes, this greedy need of him, that he began to retreat, although I did not understand this until much later.

I want you, Merch, I hugged him and said, hoarse and fierce and weeping with the strength of my feelings. He took my hair, pulled it up above my head till it almost hurt, and then he kissed me hard till my lips were bruised and I had a blue love bite on my neck. I want you, I said. I want you, Merch, I want you beside me forever. He said nothing.

I awoke the next morning to find
The
Hunting of the Snark
by Lewis Carroll on the pillow instead of his tousled head. The room was quiet, the curtains drawn. Merch had gone out without waking me. He will be back with a newspaper and eggs, I thought, and dozed off again to awake at eleven with a heavy head. The room was still silent, and I wondered why he should be away for so long. I picked up the book and saw the poem he had written on the first page.

As birds are fitted to the boughs

That blossom on the tree

And whisper when the south wind blows—

So was my love to me,

And still she blossoms in my mind

And whispers softly, though

The clouds are fitted to the wind,

The wind is to the snow.

—
LOUIS SIMPSON

I knew before I knew, as the stomach fell out of my body, as the stars fell from the sky. This was how Merch would do it. This was his way of saying he would not go out into the world as my man. I felt as a newborn might feel, thrust raw and red from a womb.

He would not return to the room until I was gone. Coward, I thought, he takes and props me up as a princess, and then he cannot come and say good-bye. He is not a mystery man, I thought with anger. He is just a common coward. Later, when I was more charitable with him, I granted that, at best, he was an aesthete. Perhaps he wanted to hold the moment forever, like a rose preserved in the pages of a book.

I too got my perfect moment, this I must admit, now that I am older.

But that morning, sobbing, I washed my hair with the shikakai soap in the scrupulous, double-layer soap dish in Merch's dim bathroom. I do not know at what point during the bath I decided to cut it all off, because I know I did not think of it when I went in. I wound my long black hair into a tight tail till the water stopped dripping from it, and then I took a new blade from Merch's shaving kit and hacked off the part of my body that I had always loved, with only the small square shaving mirror above his sink for company. It came off in my hands like a live limb. I wound it into a bun on Merch's pillow, in the place of the book he had left for me there. I buried my face into my shorn hair, as I had done on so many childhood nights. On his pillow, smelling of sandalwood and roses, it became a foreign body, and so I was able to leave it there, sitting like a nest. All he wanted from me, I thought bitterly, was a perfect memory, so let him keep it. Let him miss me now, I thought spitefully as I slammed the door behind me, swearing that I would not need to see him again.

But I could not stay away from the gathering of the gang in the evenings, because that was the lodestar of all our lives. We dream-walked through the days and we came together pulled by magnets and sat stoned and laughing in Merch's room, or wandered around on valiant whims. Merch and I were sheepish with each other for a while, and then one day when the home team, as we called ourselves in those days, parted at dawn, I stayed behind in his room and we began to sleep with each other again and I put my intensity on a shelf and loved him as he wanted to be loved, although it wasn't always easy.

Maybe he still has my hair curled in his cupboard wrapped in a soft white cloth. My beautiful black sleek hair that was my pride; it will be as dry and dusty as our love. I miss my hair now, I miss it swinging merrily around me, I miss it gleaming on my back like an exclamation mark.

But at that time, I did not. I felt light and confident, with wisps and curls around my face. In 1974, I passed through death and dementia and deep and drastic loves, and began to feel that I was destined for a charmed life. I felt that I had cut my hair and stepped from the shadows into the light. Even though the sharp crackle of danger was around me, I walked jauntily along the precipice. I felt I was acting in a story that was sure to turn out right. I was twenty-one.

Thirty

The Princely Eye

A
fter a month of lying fallow, the case was moving again, and the girls were in a stratospheric state of excitement.

The Scottish Presbyterian Mission in Scotland or wherever such kind of headquarters would be had decided to pay for a lawyer to defend Miss Nelson. Miss Wilson had worn a long navy-blue flowered skirt and closed shoes and a brooch on her white blouse and gone to Poona to meet him.

She had then taken him to Vai to talk to Miss Nelson. But we had heard through Miss Henderson, who told Sister Richards who told Nandita who told me, that Miss Nelson had refused to admit them into her room.

After they had waited for a time, she pushed a note from under her door. She would receive no visitors until the day she appeared in court. She would pray and prepare herself so that she could be an instrument of the Lord.

Thank the mission for coming to my help. The lawyer can have a free hand in conducting enquiries, and he can send me any paperwork he desires. I will meet him on the day of the court hearing. I have put myself in the hands of the Lord.

“If she is innocent, then she should take the Gandhiji route. Fast and pray. Drink only lime water for forty days.” Shobha was holding forth in the detention room on Saturday morning. “I feel so bad for her. Let's send her an anonymous note, telling her to fast. That will get everyone to take notice.”

“Nelly knows everyone's writing. There can be no anonymity in this school.”

“We'll cut it out of newspapers or books, like they do in the movies.
Fast unto Death for Death of Daughter
.” Shobha raised her voice as I entered the room.

“You're a mean one, Shobha,” said an admiring voice from her gallery.

I was glad not to be teaching the likes of Shobha anymore. I enjoyed teaching eleven- and twelve-year-olds. Especially Hindi. I felt I was pouring a warm bath as I read them short stories. They entered Hindi class in a defensive crouch, their senses jammed by Raswani's brutal teaching. When I read “Shatranj ke Khiladi” from
Premchand ki sarvasesht kahania
, the entire class, including the South Indian girls who had probably not understood a word, sat in pin-drop silence for a full minute after I finished it.

But there was still an occasional detention duty, since they were so short on staff.

I don't remember why Shobha had detention that day, but she was clearly intent on goading me. First she passed notes, then she threw notes across the room, then she started whispering, and then talking loudly, until I had no choice but to respond.

“Shobha, stand up now and get out of the room. And do not bother to come back.”

Shobha stomped out. But she stopped just outside. She turned around and faced the class with a smirk on her face. The class began to giggle.

“I said I want you out of the class.” My voice was quiet now, and controlled. Commanding, I hoped.

“But Miss, how can I leave a detention room? If you throw me out, I won't have done my detention. And anyway, Miss, I am out of the class. See, here is the class line, and I am on the other side.”

What to do now? I stared at her malevolently for a few minutes, my hands itching to slap her.

Shobha construed my silence as victory and decided to play to the gallery. “This line will be my boundary from now on. I will not come into the class. I will stand outside here and imbibe your wisdom.” Her eyes were insolent. “I will be like Sita, Miss. This will be my god-given boundary line.” The class was roaring.

I was wearing one of my tight chudidar sets stitched by Rathode of Rathode & Sons in Indore, and I felt ugly and ungainly, which made me see a deeper shade of red. My blot was blistering, scarlet.

I walked up to her, went really up close to her, so she could smell my breakfast-eggs breath, and stood with my legs apart, hands on hips. She was about an inch taller than me, with mango breasts and almond eyes.

“You will go right now to the library. You will get two order marks. One for disrupting the class and the second for talking back to a teacher. And now you will go to the library and spend the rest of the detention there, reading chapter six of
A Tale of Two Cities
.”

Shobha's smirk took on a pasted quality as the muscles in her face became tight. She stood there, not wanting to show a weakness in front of the class.

“If you do not turn around and leave now, you will get a third order mark for disobedience.” I liked my newfound voice. It was smooth and icy.

“You can't give me three order marks for the same thing. It's not allowed.” But her voice had a waver, had a question at the end.

“You just watch me,” I said, standing almost right on top of her.

She turned to leave. But before she walked off, with her back to me, she muttered just under her breath. “You did it. We know.”

“What did you just say?” I asked, putting my hand on her shoulder and turning her around roughly to face me.

“Nothing, Miss, nothing at all.”

“Look at me,” I said, I lifted her chin and held it in place. “You better watch what you say, you stupid little schoolgirl. Or you will regret it later.”

There was complete silence in the detention room for the rest of the class, and I relished every minute of it.

“I
'm sorry about your mother, Miss,” Nandita said one day, falling into step beside me as I walked up the winding way around the school building to the staff room. It was called the winter way, because it was used only in the winter. In summer and monsoon everyone used the long covered steps that ran through the center of the school.

Nandita looked at me gravely. She wore thick glasses with square plastic frames. She walked in silence for a few steps, pushing her thick fringe away from her face. Then, suddenly, in a rush, she said, “Miss, you're . . . You know, you're different this term. Everyone says so.”

“Well, Nandita, a lot has happened in the last two months,” I said. My world had changed. I felt I was a woman on a windy plain in some ancient epic.

“But it feels like—I don't know how to say it, but it feels . . . oh, I don't know, Miss. You seem like a different person.”

Nandita had the ability to chat with teachers as one adult to another. I knew she must be referring to my most recent episode with Shobha. Nandita was right. The detention-room drama had the dregs of Prince. Raging Anger was Prince, not me. Charu was silent, stoic, and suffering.

But no point in getting into that. I was pursuing my search for the Hindi teacher.

“Nandita,” I said. “It was you who got the letter from Miss Raswani, right?”

“Yes, Miss, it was me,” she said

“What made her give it to you just like that?”

“I felt she knew something, and so I went and spoke to her,” she said with quiet pride.

“Nandita, well done. No one else could have done it,” I said. I meant it. Raswani must have let her guard down, with Nandita so reasonable, so quiet.

“And the next day, she was gone, correct?”

“In fact she disappeared the same day. I was the last person to see her, I think.”

“Did she appear to be frightened?”

“She seemed defeated. I don't know if you know about the incident of the day before. She could not control the girls in the gym. She walked out while the girls clapped and jeered. We were always terrified of her. But that day, she walked out with her head down. I saw her face. It was the same look she had on the day she gave me the letter. Like she had lost her roar.”

“You girls,” I said. “Where do you think she is now?”

“Now that we know the terrible truth about Nelson, mostly everyone thinks she might have killed Raswani. Because of the letter. It is logical to assume that Nelson thought her secret was safe as long as no one knew about the letter, and so she killed Raswani. She didn't know that Raswani had passed on the letter to us.”

“No fingerprints, no signs of struggle in the room, and no body,” I reminded her.

“I don't know, Miss,” said Nandita. “Who knows how efficient these Poona police are? No better than Woggle and his gang, I bet.”

Nandita would have been more guarded if she had been with Shobha or Akhila, who were quite wary of me. As it was, she seemed eager to share her knowledge.

“You could be right,” I said. “You think her body could be lying hidden under a rock?”

“Or a cave, maybe,” said Nandita. “It's hard for us to get out of this place, but I wish I could.”

“Well, you obviously managed to get out before,” I said in a supercilious tone, asserting my teacher self.

“Yes, Miss, but you know what I mean; I can't just roam around like you,” said Nandita, quite unfazed.

She seemed almost as eager as me to solve this mystery. We should team up, I thought.

“Actually, I agree with you,” I said. “I have been snooping around. I even went into the Devil's Kitchen two days ago. I saw nothing. No torn clothing, no bones, no smell of rotting flesh.”

With Shankar no longer running his den of vice, Devil's Kitchen had an abandoned air when I went there two days ago, on a sunny afternoon. It was windy, but the rock hollow was quiet and dry. The cave must have some aperture somewhere, because it had a diffused glow. There were five metal folding chairs and an upturned box with a couple of half-burned candles, and an outsize overflowing metal ashtray engraved with the words “Tekchand and Sons Water Filters.” You entered a wide mouth and then turned to the right, where you were sheltered from the elements and from prying eyes. In one corner was the bar, a plank of wood raised on boxes, with a lantern at either end.

Devil's Kitchen, witch's needle, at first I thought that these were internal Timmins names made up by imaginative girls at midnight feasts. But then I saw a guidebook on Panchgani (“Come visit the Kashmir of Maharashtra, with its sylvan forests, its panoramic mountain views, its salubrious climate”) that touted these as places for tourists to view the surrounding vistas, along with Baby Point, Parsi Point, and Sydney Point, the last of which I presume was named after an intrepid British explorer in a solar hat who hacked his way to the hill with the help of a bunch of natives carrying folding desks and foreign newspapers.

“All this Devil's Kitchen, witch's needle. I mean, who came up with these names?”

Nandita smiled and shook her head. “Don't know.” She had a very white, even set of teeth. “It's so out of
Macbeth
, isn't it miss?” she said, shyly.

“Have you been to the Devil's Kitchen?” I asked.

“Long ago, when we were in junior school. Before Shankar began to use it, we sometimes went for Saturday walks around the back of table-land to the cave. Once, we went exploring to find the source of the light. Right at the back, there is a hole and you can see a patch of sky from it.”

“So then, someone could be on table-land itself, and if they knew how to find the hole, they could slip into the cave?” I asked, astonished.

“The hole is high up, and it seemed very tiny. Like a slit, really. Perhaps a small child on the shoulders of a very tall man could climb though it. And jumping down would be impossible. In fact, after we saw the hole, Tara became obsessed with the cave for some time. She and Ramona had this elaborate prison-break plan where they were going to get a ladder—don't ask me how—and prop it against the hole, and then one day when we went to table-land they would slip through it, run away from school, and live in the cave until the end of term. We were eight or nine then, I think. For some time after that, whenever we went to table-land, we would look for the hole on the surface where the cave should be—but, you know, we have not found it to this day.”

“Panchgani is a strange place, no?” I said.

“Don't really know any other, Miss,” she said, shrugging her shoulders. “I've been in this school since I was six and a half.”

“Is it hard? I mean, I know so many of the girls hate being here.”

“I just know that it is the best option for my family, so I don't mind,” she replied matter-of-factly.

Sometimes, I thought Nandita was the oldest soul in the whole school.

Since I wasn't teaching the seniors anymore, I did not go past the prayer hall and the big banyan tree, but up the stairs to the middles section, which was perched above the prayer hall.

Akhila came upon us as we turned the corner.

“Good morning, Miss Apte.”

“Good morning,” I said.

“So, Miss, you found a place to stay?” she said, smirking. There was a nip in the air, and the girls wore navy-blue pullovers over their blue checks. I presumed Miss Manson was still vigilant, and their bloomers were elasticized to the perfect degree, plump thighs forming puffs of flesh on either side of the tight elastic.

I ignored Akhila. I turned to Nandita. “I hear Ramona is not back this term. What is the matter with her?”

“She is disturbed because of all the things we saw, you know, that night,” began Nandita in a measured tone. By the way that she paused significantly before “that night,” I knew she was considering her approach. I waited, and we walked a few steps in silence.

But Akhila was not a patient girl, and she blurted it out. “She says she saw Miss Prince's ghost, and it told her she had to leave the school.”

Why would I imagine that she had visited only me? She might have visited half of Panchgani, for all I knew.

“Ramona is a nervous girl,” said Nandita, embarrassed, giving me a sideways glance, trying to judge my reaction.

“So has she left the school, or is she coming back?”

“We don't know,” said Akhila.

“I think she will be back soon,” said Nandita stoutly. Nandita tied her green belt too high on her waist, wore her socks long, just below the knees. I saw something of myself in her, an adult facade that I wanted to rip apart. I wanted to tell her to stand on the big swing outside the snuggery and take it so high that it went parallel to the sky, before it was too late. And that is how I often see her in my mind, her dress blowing in the wind, her hair flying, her knees bent to take the swing as high as it could go.