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Soon, everybody was talking and crying and yelling
all at once.

Mother Ignatius took in the situation. ‘Okay,
everybody back to your classroom,' she said crisply. ‘I
still have no idea what's going on but will settle that later.'

But Mother Ignatius had made a wrong calculation.
Being left alone and unsupervised in our classroom only gave room for
the hysteria to grow. For a moment I thought I was the only dry-eyed
girl left but then I caught Patty's eye and she gave me a
quick, bemused look as if to say, What the hell is going on here? I
shrugged in reply.

‘We have to do something. We cannot let
ourselves be treated like this by those senior girls,' Barbara
was saying and now I was convinced that the sun has risen in the
South today. Barbara was Mrs Pinto's daughter, an obedient,
goody-two-shoes type, who spoke so softly it sounded as if she always
had laryngitis.

But Barbara's little speech had an effect on
me and gave flight to all my fantasies about youth power and student
revolution. Seize the moment, seize the hour, I said to myself.

‘Okay,' I yelled decisively. ‘Here's
what we will do. Let me quickly draw up a signature petition and
we'll personally deliver it to Mother Ignatius.'

All forty of us signed the petition. All forty of
us moved like a dark cloud of angry bees from our classroom, made a
left turn and walked the short distance to Mother Ignatius'
office.

I knocked on the door. She looked up and smiled,
as if she was happy to see me. I felt a sudden rush of affection for
her, which I tried to suppress. I remembered the many conversations
Mother Superior had had with us, conversations where she had shared
parts of her life both before and after she became a nun, talks which
had removed some of the mystique that surrounded the nunnery and made
us look at the white-clad figures less as space aliens and more as
flesh-and-blood human beings.

‘You girls can ask me anything,' she
had once said to us in one of her informal talks.

A dozen hands went up at once.

‘Why did you become a nun, Mother?'

‘Is it true that all nuns were jilted by
their boyfriends and so they joined the convent?'

‘Do you miss not seeing your mummy-daddy?'

‘How old are you?'

‘Is it true you are bald?'

‘Have you ever been in love?'

Mother Superior had raised her hand, laughing.
‘Girls, girls.

One at a time.'

And she told us about how long and thick her hair
had once been, how it had been her pride and joy, an object of
vanity, really. How her boyfriend—yes, she had had a
boyfriend—used to compliment her on her hair. And no, she
wasn't quite bald now but yes, she'd cut off her hair
after she'd joined the convent because it was easier to manage
under the habit and all and also, because it had been a source of
pride and vanity and God did not like pride. ‘So off it came,
chop-chop,' she smiled.

I had felt an inexpressible sadness when she told
us about her hair. I couldn't decide if what she had done was
foolish or admirable.

But now, standing outside her office, I casted
these sentimental memories out of my head. ‘May we come in?'
I asked.

‘Of course, of course,' she replied
but then jumped up from her chair with a start as all of us walked
into her small office, crowding her.

‘What is this?' she said, and I was
surprised to hear a tremor in her voice. Her body stiffened and her
eyes darted around the room. ‘How dare all you girls march into
my office like this.'

The day was getting away from me like a tumbling
roll of yarn. ‘But, Mother, I just asked you if we could come
in,' I replied in confusion. Mother Ignatius looked more angry
than I have ever seen her. What's worse, she looked—
scared
. And then it dawned on me: Mother thought this was a sit-in. She
thought we were here to surround her in her office and not let her
leave.

I was about to explain when Anu came to my rescue.
‘It's not fair, it's not fair, it's not
fair,' she wailed and despite the charged atmosphere, I wanted
to giggle. But then I heard it from behind me, a wall of sound that
was pushing forward.

It started low and deep like a growl and then got
high-pitched.

Everybody was talking all at once and what was
really astounding was that girls like Anita Khalsa, who had made a
reputation for themselves for being as tough as nails, were sobbing
as if they were at a funeral.

‘You slapped Mary,' Barbara cried and
Mother Ignatius flinched and took a step back as if to escape the
accusation in Barbara's tone.

‘Will somebody please tell me what on earth
is going on?'

she said…But most of us were too hysterical
to talk. Mother looked around the room helplessly. Her eyes finally
fell on me, one of the few remaining dry-eyed girls in the room.
‘Thrity? Can you tell me what this is about?'

In response, I handed her the petition. She read
it, once, twice, but when she looked up she seemed as confused as
ever.

‘That's what all this is about?
Because your class was not allowed to sing?'

I heard the incredulity in her voice and felt
embarrassed by the theatrics of my classmates. Our cause suddenly
seemed puny and silly to me. But I banished these treacherous
thoughts and when I spoke, my voice was calm and steady. ‘It's
not just that, Mother. There are so many other problems. The seniors
always seemed to end up with the best of everything and we are made
to feel like…'

Then I lost my train of thought because just then
I had glanced sideways to look at Patty for support and to my
amazement I noticed that her shoulders were shaking. She was standing
with her head bowed and her hands crossed in front of her and for a
moment I thought that she was laughing and then I realized that
Patty—unsentimental, tough-assed Patty—was also crying. I
lost it then. I tried to go on and list our grievances but now I was
caught in the sea of adolescent grief and resentments that were
swirling around me and I felt myself going down. To my mortification,
I realized that there were tears streaming down my cheeks.

Mother Ignatius did me the favour of looking away.
‘All right, I think I've heard enough to know what the
problem is,' she said. ‘Now all of you have to trust me
to fix it. I will place a phone call to the principal at St Agnes and
invite her students to a return visit and you can sing your song
then. Now, go back to your class and compose yourselves.'

But there was still one unfinished business.
Minutes after we returned to our classroom, Mother Ignatius followed
us in.

‘Come here, Mary,' she said and Mary
got up from her seat in the last row and walked to the front of the
class. ‘I'm sorry for hitting you, my child,'
Mother Ignatius said. ‘I just lost my temper and I was wrong.'
Then, she did a classy thing. First, she kissed Mary on the forehead.
Then, she made a small sign of the cross on her forehead.

A thrill ran through all of us. Mary beamed.

But Mother Ignatius was not yet done. Her eyes
fixed on me and narrowed slightly. ‘The next time you decide to
bring forty girls into my tiny office, please ask permission first,'
she said icily.

‘But Mother,' I protested. ‘I
did ask…'

But she was walking away and did not hear me.
Shit, I thought to myself. How do I end up in these situations?

‘That's absolutely not fair, yaar,'
said Zarina, the girl who sat in front of me. ‘I'm solid
sure you asked her permission.

These adults are half-deaf, I tell you.'

I smiled weakly at Zarina. But I couldn't
help but feel that I was suddenly on Mother Ignatius' blacklist
through no fault of mine.

Less than two weeks have gone by since the song
incident and now I am actively courting more trouble. We are close
enough to the teachers' lounge now that I suspect they can hear
us.

The crowd following me has shrunk to four intrepid
girls. But now that we are moments away from the glass doors, they
are wavering also.

‘Thrity, men, this is stupid,' Kajal
says. ‘Let's just forget about this.'

I am in two minds. Part of me is scared at seeing
this through but I am equally scared at the prospect of word getting
around that the Mad Parsi had chickened out from under a dare.

Reputations are like pets—you have to groom
them, feed them, and not abandon them. Besides, I notice that Anita
Khalsa, my main rival and the girl who started this whole thing, has
not spoken a word yet.

But the next moment, Anita speaks up. We are at
the door of the teachers' lounge and several of them are
peering at us curiously from the glass doors. ‘Okay, I
withdraw,' Anita says hastily. ‘Kajal is right. I don't
want to get you thrown out of school or something. These teachers are
so unsporting, you know?'

This is my chance to stage a graceful exit with no
loss of face.

In fact, I have stared Anita Khalsa down and she
has blinked first. I even have two witnesses to this moment of
supreme victory. And yet, I hesitate, my right hand beginning to
reach for the doorknob.

‘But what about my four albums?'

Anita looks exasperated. She knows she has given
me an out that I am too obstinate to take. ‘Screw the albums,'
she says. Then, seeing the determined look on my face, she blinks
some more. ‘Okay, tell you what. We will give you a free album
just for not doing anything.'

I think fast, trying to size up the situation.
‘No, yaar, that's not good enough. Tell you what, let's
compromise on two albums and I'll give up right now.'

They hesitate, reluctant to shell out all those
bucks for nothing. For a moment I think I have aimed too high and
that Anita will call my bluff. I tighten my grip on the golden door
handle. Seeing this, Anita folds completely. ‘Okay, you bloody
Shylock, you damn bloodsucker,' she says. ‘We will give
you two albums if you stop right now.'

And so, the following Saturday, a bunch of them
take me to Rhythm House and watch silently as I pick out Elton John's
Greatest Hits
and Neil Diamond's
Hot August Night
. I pay the difference in price because the second is a double album.

For the next few weeks, I listen everyday to
Candle in theWind
and
Song Sung Blue
. When Elton John
sings, ‘Daniel my brother, you are older than me/Do you still
feel the pain of the scars that won't heal,' I invariably
think of my cousin Roshan and my complicated relationship with her
and my eyes fill with tears. At the next school social, I carry the
album to school and Mother Ignatius teaches some of us how to tango
to
Crocodile Rock
.

And Mrs D'Mello sleeps well at night,
undisturbed by nightmares of vengeful students breaking into the
teachers' lounge with knives hidden in newspaper, who expect
her to smile even while she is being told that they are about to kill
her.

B
Y BUYING ALCOHOL AND CIGARETTES while
underage, I break the law many times during my high school years. I
also commit at least two sins during my junior year.

The first sin is winning first prize at a
government-sponsored essay-writing contest extolling the virtues of
family planning during Indira Gandhi's draconian Emergency. Of
course, this was in the still-innocent period of early 1976, when
news that the government's birth control campaign had run amok,
had not yet reached us in Bombay. We didn't know about the
roving vans that cruised the streets of New Delhi, looking for
men—and boys as young as fourteen—to forcibly sterilize
them. I had grown up watching adults screw up their noses when they
talked about how the lower-classes repeated their endless cycles of
poverty by reproducing like rabbits, had read textbooks blaming
overpopulation for all of India's ills. So when a group of
bureaucrats show up at school one day and the nuns fawn over them and
then hastily organize the essay-writing contest, I write a
composition that would've gladdened the hearts of the
snip-snipping thugs who were prowling the streets of Delhi even as I
wrote.

But that was a sin born of ignorance and therefore
pardon-able. What I do to Jaya is deliberately cruel.

Jaya is the only classmate I ever have who scores
higher than me in composition class. That alone is enough to make me
notice her and to fear her as a competitor. She is a tall,
pencil-thin Catholic girl with bad skin and long, skinny legs.

She is also bitingly witty, though she is so shy
and mousy-looking, that it takes me months to appreciate her caustic
humour although she sits at the desk next to mine. I have an uneasy,
complicated friendship with Jaya—on the one hand, I am
attracted to her obvious intelligence and political awareness. On the
other, I know that she thinks I am wasting my time hanging out with
Jenny and the others and this unspoken judgment makes me prickly and
awkward around her. It also doesn't help matters that she dotes
on me and talks to me in a manner that assumes we share similar
values and sensibilities. There is an air of intellectual superiority
to her that makes me bristle, even while I understand that the circle
of superiority is large enough to include me. I know that my other
friends feel patronized by her and that is enough to make me align
myself with them. But I also take in the thin lips that tremble with
emotion when she recites a Shakespearean sonnet, I know that Jaya's
thick, Catwoman glasses hide eyes that are kind and that the
sarcastic wit makes up for a deeply sensitive nature. The truth is
that Jaya and I are alike in that we are both thin-skinned and
hypersensitive and we both have a secret desire to be writers. She
knows this and assumes a friendship based on that unspoken knowledge.
But I do not want to align myself with someone who is so vulnerable
and shy because I am exposing myself. After all, I have a reputation
to uphold and my personality is larger and more extroverted than
hers.