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‘Cleanliness is next to godliness', ‘A
stitch in time saves nine'.

but I am increasingly enthralled by a world in
which people ask impossible questions, questions without answers.

It is impossible to communicate all this to my
father. The few times that I have tried he has turned to me with
worried eyes, as if I have become one more problem in his life that
he will be forced to solve. I know only too well the other pressures
on him and do not want to be part of the problem. So I say nothing.
Or I say it obliquely: at the dinner table I will suddenly ask the
adults if they know of a place where I could get my Michelangelo
print of David framed to hang in the living room.

I brace myself for the inevitable answer: ‘There's
too much dust from the textile mills. Any picture on the wall will
have to be dusted every single day and you know how lazy the servants
are.'

So I sit in the pictureless living room, with its
solitary calendar from Batliwalla and Sons being the only thing
hanging from the walls. I notice that even the calendar does not have
a picture on it. Someday, I promise myself, every room in my house
will have pictures on the wall. And I will buy fresh flowers once a
week. Someday.

I sit crouched like a tiger, biding my time.

M
RS BEATRICE D'MELLO HAS THROWN me
out of her physics class yet again, so that I have now spent five
days in a row in the hallway. Most days it is a badge of honour to be
kicked out of Mrs D'Mello's class but today, Mother
Ignatius had passed me in the hallway, raised her eyebrows when she
saw me leaning against the cream-coloured walls and said,

‘Out in the hallway again, eh, child?'
and I had felt my face flush at the injustice of it all. I wanted to
explain how Mrs D'Mello had a vendetta against me, how she
kicked me out of class at the slightest provocation, how she would
ask me question after question until she threw me one I couldn't
answer and then ask me to leave the room. But Mother Ignatius was
already walking away.

There was a time when Mrs D'Mello was
genuinely fond of me though it seems so long ago it's hard to
remember. There was a time when she laughed at all my jokes and would
even allow me to interrupt the class by turning on my pocket
transistor radio and listen to the cricket score when India was
playing Pakistan.

In seventh-grade, I was the first girl to come to
school with a pocket radio. It was a yellow Philips radio that Babu
had bought for me. The radio made me feel connected to the legions of
cricket fans who brought the city to a virtual standstill when there
was a test match going on. Bombay, when gripped by cricket fever, was
a transformed city. White-collar workers called off sick in record
numbers. A middle-aged businessman in a white Impala would think
nothing of rolling down his car window and asking a street urchin if
Sunil Gavaskar was still at the bat. Strangers walked up to each
other and asked, ‘What's the latest score, yaar?'

Firecrackers went off all across the city whenever
Bedi bowled another batsman out. During the India-Pakistan matches,
the Muslim shop owners at Bhendi Bazaar would hand out sweetmeats
each time an Indian wicket fell, while nearby Hindus glowered at
them. A panoramic view of the office crowds at Churchgate or Flora
Fountain would have shown men and women leaning slightly to one side,
pocket transistors glued to one ear. The air filled with the crackle
of these radios, the rapid-fire voices of commentators Vijay Merchant
and Lala Amarnath rising and falling like ocean waves. No war, it
seemed could bring Bombayites together the way a test match did and
if I had to be at school and away from the excitement, the least I
could do was carry a pocket radio.

I would turn the radio on low, flip open my desk
top and lay it on top of my books inside the desk. Every few minutes,
I would cradle my head in my hands and rest my ear against the desk.
Then I would whisper the score to the girl sitting next to me, who in
turn would pass it to the next person until the whole class knew. For
a few days, Mrs D'Mello watched me go through this elaborate
charade. Then she said, ‘Okay, child, let's do this. I'll
let you listen to the radio every once in awhile and you can tell the
whole class. Then we go back to our studies, eh?'

I thought she was the coolest teacher in the
world.

But the friendship between Mrs D'Mello and
myself was short-lived. It ended the day my classmates and I were
standing in the hallway during a class change and I made what I
thought was a brilliant anthropological observation. ‘Hey, do
you notice how much Mrs D'Mello looks like a horse when she
laughs?'

I said to Anita. ‘Such big teeth she has.'

Anita gulped hard. Her eyes grew big as she stared
at a spot over my shoulder.

I turned around. Mrs D'Mello was glaring at
me, her eyes narrow and mean. She had a tremendous scowl on her face.

My stomach dropped.

‘I…I…It was a compliment…I
love horses…I didn't mean anything bad…' I
stuttered but it was too late. Mrs D'Mello had turned on her
heel and was marching into the classroom.

Thus began my long and lonely exile in the
hallway. Most days, I was fine with it, would walk out of the
classroom with a swagger, making sure that everyone noticed the novel
I was carrying to keep me company in the hallway. But today,
embarrassed by Mother Ignatius' words, I am fuming about the
unfairness of it all.

It is lunch recess and about seven of us have
decided to go across the street and get a plate of pyali, a spicy
mixture of potatoes and beans. On the way back, Tasneem decides to
buy some boras, the red, tangy berries, and slices of raw green
mangoes dipped in salt. The old street vendor deftly slices the mango
and I stare at his small, sharp knife. ‘I swear, yaar, if I had
a knife I'd go and kill Mrs D'Mello right now,' I
say almost to myself.

But Anita Khalsa hears me. ‘I dare you,'
she says immediately.

‘Dare me to do what?'

‘I dare you take a knife and go up to Mrs
D'Mello and say the words, “Mrs D'Mello, I'm
here to kill you.”'

The other girls crowd around us. My mind is
working fast.

This is my chance to once and for all be the
undisputed holder of the title of Mad Parsi.

‘What's the bet worth?' I ask.

And they think for a minute. ‘One LP,'
Rukshan says, knowing my love for music.

‘Not enough, men,' I say. ‘This
could get me thrown out of school, for God's sake. No, this is
worth at least four albums.'

That stops them for a minute and I'm almost
hoping they will back out. But then Anita says, ‘Yah, we can
all chip in the cash, so what. Okay, four albums.'

I gulp hard, wondering how I manage to get myself
in these situations. Nothing to do now but see this through.

Tasneem's first-floor apartment is adjacent
to the school and we decide to go there to borrow a knife. She
decides not to run up to the apartment, convinced her mother will be
suspicious if she looks her daughter in the eye. ‘Ma, ma,'
Tasneem yells from below and when her mother appears at the balcony
she asks her to toss us a knife.

‘What you need a knife for, beta?'

Tasneem thinks fast. ‘For biology class, ma.
We have to cut up a frog.'

Even from this distance we can see Tasneem's
mother grimace. But she goes inside and returns with a knife wrapped
in newspaper, which she throws down at us after asking us to get out
of the way.

So there is no way out now. My last hope, that
Tasneem's mom would smell a rat and refuse us the knife, has
faded. The presence of the knife makes the dare seem more real. As we
walk back to the school and climb the two sets of stairs that lead to
the teachers' lounge, word spreads, so that a procession of
about fourteen girls is now following me. I hold the knife, still
wrapped in the newspaper, and try to think of how to extract myself
from this situation in a way that will fulfil the spirit of the dare
and still let me save face. And then it comes to me: while the others
wait outside the glass doors of the teachers' lounge, I will
walk up to Mrs D'Mello and say loudly,

‘Mrs D'Mello, I'm here to kill
you.' But here's the tricky part, here's where I
will prove myself more wily than Houdini—I will also add, in

a voice soft enough for only Mrs D'Mello to
hear, ‘Don't worry, this is just a joke.'

It does not occur to me that Mrs D'Mello,
who has hated my guts for more than two years, may not think much of
this joke.

I feel confident of my secret plan as we march
toward the teachers' lounge.

More confident than the others, it turns out. As
the group sees that I am determined to see the deed through, the
enormity of what could happen begins to dawn on them. We are at the
end of the hallway that leads to the teachers' lounge when
Tasneem chickens out. ‘Ae, come on, yaar. This is going too
far. If my mother finds out what I wanted the knife for she will make
mincemeat out of me.'

Mary pipes up. ‘Yeah, we'll all get
into solid trouble. And after what happened only two weeks ago, none
of us can afford to get into any more trouble, no?'

We all know immediately what she's talking
about.

The troubles that Mary is referring to began with
a song. It was a song I had written in tribute to our school's
patron saint, Claudine Thevenet, and was sung to the tune of The
Osmonds'

I'll Be Your Long-haired Lover from
Liverpool.

We were to have performed this song at a special
assembly being held at a nearby Catholic school but everything was
running behind schedule on that day and Sister Ignatius instead gave
up our block of time to the graduating tenth-graders and we returned
to school without having sung our song.

What happened next took me by surprise: A strange
brew of hurt pride, teenage angst, mass hysteria and bubbling
hor-mones erupted in spontaneous combustion, so that the entire class
was shedding tears of indignation by the time we returned to school.
As the song's creator, I was initially flattered by the outrage
its non-performance had provoked and then I was shocked by the
hysterical outpourings of forty very emotional girls. I had never
seen my friends like this. Most of the time, we tried to outdo each
other by being cool, unemotional and devil-may-care. At first I tried
to reason with them but when I noticed that I was the only one who
did not believe that we had suffered a great injury, a terrible
insult, and that we were continually being oppressed, patronized and
humiliated by the graduating seniors, I, too, got swept up in the
tidal wave of emotion.

Two hours later, an unsuspecting Mother Ignatius
asked us to gather in our assembly hall to practice the song for next
day's performance. Since we had not had an opportunity to sing
today, she declared, we would perform the song during tomorrow's
school assembly.

Boycott. The word spread quickly throughout our
ranks.

We would not participate in today's practice
and we would not perform tomorrow. It did not occur to any of us to
communicate our hurt or our new decision to Mother Ignatius. We took
our places in the stands as usual and when Mother Ignatius asked Mary
to come take her place at the piano, she complied.

Mary was older than most of us because she had
repeated several grades. She was a tall, athletic, Anglo-Indian girl
with straight brown hair and beautiful grey eyes. It was well known
that Mary was one of the school's handful of charity cases and
it was rumoured that the family has fallen onto hard times because
her father was a drunk. But what Mary lacked in scholarly abilities
she made up in her cheery willingness to help and she was a favourite
with many of the nuns.

Mother Ignatius raised her baton. ‘Ready?'
she said. ‘All right, Mary, give us the opening chord.'

We remained motionless. Mary sat perched on the
piano stool, her head bowed.

Mother Ignatius looked surprised. ‘C'mon
girls, let's get to it. Let's try again. Ready?'

The big room was silent. Mother Ignatius turned
toward Mary. We could tell she was struggling to hold on to her
patience. ‘Okay, Mary. Let's hear that chord.'

But Mary bowed her head even further, so that her
chin was resting on her chest. Mother Ignatius looked from her to us.
It was obvious that she had no idea what was going on and it occurred
to me that one of us should fill her in but the atmosphere in the
room was suddenly so charged, we were all so caught up in that web of
defiant silence, that I was afraid to move.

Mother Ignatius was not afraid to move. With a few
deft steps, she was standing before the piano. ‘Play, Mary,'
she said softly, and when Mary did not move, she repeated, ‘Play,
my child. Play the piano.'

Mary sat with her head down. Mother Ignatius
stared at her for a few moments. ‘Get up,' she said
suddenly.

Mary stood but her eyes were averted. The rest of
us looked on helplessly, holding our breaths. ‘Look at me,'
Mother Ignatius said…‘Talk to me. Tell me what is going
on.'

Her words fell on deaf ears. ‘Look at me,'
Mother Ignatius repeated, her words precise as bullets this time. And
the next minute, a bullet landed, as her right hand flew over Mary's
face in a slap.

We gasped. Mary and Mother Ignatius both flinched
and looked stricken. And then, all hell broke loose. ‘It's
not fair, it's not fair, it's not fair,' Anu began
to wail, sounding like a police siren. Anu was a short, homely girl
from a conservative Hindu family and most of us avoided her because
it was well known that Anu was a snitch and a tattletale. Anu's
uncharacteristic outburst had a mesmerizing effect on the rest of us.