Miss Timmins' School for Girls (12 page)

I turned and walked back.

I have lived with that turning ever since. Like Lady Macbeth, I have begged the spirits to thicken my blood, to stop up the access and passage to remorse.

But not that night. That night, I felt light and free. I ran down though the mist, all the way down the winding path. As I passed the Woggles' garden, I smelt the fragrance of jasmine.

Jasmine, the memory of my first kiss, of my first love.

BOOK TWO

The Rule Breakers'
Club

Nandita

This Place
Panchgani

Is so nice and
Sunny

Except when it
Rains

It gives us
Pains

—
MR. JOSHUA
JOHN

The St. Paul's
School Chronicle, 1969

Thirteen

On Table-Land

I
n standard ten we formed the Rule Breakers' Club. We knew that once we got to standard eleven we would have to be responsible and take our board exams, and so if we wanted to make school history and break all the rules, it would have to be in standard ten. The Rule Breakers' Club of 1974 consisted of our entire class, except for Neeta and Kareena, best friends, both grave and serious and very Christian. There were thirteen of us, which some considered unlucky.

The first few meetings of the Rule Breakers' Club turned out to be a disaster, because although there were at least a thousand and one rules in Timmins, there was no rule book.

The timid ones wanted to break inane rules such as stripping off their name tapes from all their black ribbons, the bold ones wanted to run away into the valley and live off the land, and the crazy ones wanted to meet the boys behind Sydney Point at night. Finally, it was decided by us, the wise ones, that it would be right to have a list of breakable rules.

It was decided to term all housekeeping rules and eating-in-the-dining-room rules as too trivial to break, and the “sin” rules involving contact with members of the opposite sex—which could get us thrown out—as too grave. They would have to be middle-ground rules. But the breaking of these rules would have to contain acts of courage and daring.

By the end of standard nine, we had agreed upon the final version of the list of breakable rules.

Rule Number Nine was skinging. Skinging meant leaving the school premises by day or night. This was the gravest of the breakable rules. We Timmins girls were allowed out of school only in a formal formation of twos—a docile crocodile—and always in school uniform. One could get expelled for leaving the school without a teacher. But no serious list aiming at a place in Timmins history could be complete without skinging. It was also the most fun rule to break. There was so much that could be done in the world outside the iron gates of Miss Timmins' School. Hot kheema-pau could be had for two rupees at Kaka's Bakery and Eatery, a movie under the tent near Sandy Banks, a cigarette behind the haunted house. No respectable Rule Breakers' list could be complete without a decent skinge.

Akhila, Ramona, and I, Nandita, decided to skinge together. All three of us had joined the school too young and had been scarred together by evil matrons with large curvy whips. We were not really best friends at that time, but we knew each other like sisters. We were all fifteen that year.

The decision to break the skinge rule together was purely circumstantial. We were all prefects at Pearsall, the lower middles dorm that year, and we collectively had been entrusted with the key to the back door—to be used to let the girls out in case of fire. It would be easy for us to sneak out together.

We decided to skinge in the monsoon term, under cover of the rain. We had planned our night on many delicious Sunday evenings, sitting after dinner on the steps outside the hospital. We were going to go to the pan shop at the corner, buy a packet of Wills cigarettes, smoke, and come back through the hedge in the upper netball field.

The monsoon had settled in, and it had been raining for a month. Everything was wet. Our clothes came back damp from the wash smelling of sigri smoke. There were squishy black snails in our dorms and fungus on all our shoes. In the evenings we were taken on long walks in the rain. With water sloshing in our gum boots, with rain pouring down in a stream to our noses over the hoods of our rubber raincoats, herded in formations of twos through the drenched streets, we discussed our great escape.

When shall we three meet again?

In thunder, lightning, or in rain?

When the hurlyburly's done,

When the battle's lost and won.

We would chant maniacally, feeling as powerful and diabolical as
Macbeth
's witches almost every time we parted.

Our chosen day was August 27, just before the end of the term, which was September 9. It was the second day of exams. The desks were all lined up in the gym, as usual. End-of-term excitement filled the damp halls and dorms with high-pitched laughter.

Our estimated time of departure had been set for 10 p.m. My dorm was closest to the matron's room. At 10, making sure that all sounds from Mrs. Wong's room had stopped, I was to walk to the back, shining my torch briefly as I passed each of the other two dorms. We were to convene with our raincoats on at the back door.

As planned, we walked out the back door and out of the school through the gap in the hedge near the netball field. It was only then that we realized, quite suddenly, that the rain had stopped.

First the rain died to a drizzle. Then the drizzle became a fine mist. The sounds of the night changed. With the drumming rain turned off, it was the gushing water in the open drains, the wind in the silver oaks that became loud and clear. We had counted on the rain as our ally. But now, suddenly freed of it, our high spirits turned into a fountain of hysteria. We burst into streams of stomach-bending giggles at every little detail of every little adventure on the way out, and came staggering into the bazaar in our green and yellow raincoats. The bazaar was dark and deserted. The mist surrounding the dim bulb above the pan and bidi stall cast a yellow pall over the leering face of the paanwala.

“Babalok run away, ha?” he said, but was quite happy to sell us three completely damp and stale Wills cigarettes. We also bought a matchbox. But there was nowhere to smoke. It had been so easy so far, like a knife cutting butter. No one had expected the rain to stop, no one was out, and we felt so safe in the surrounding mist that we decided to walk out of the bazaar a little and “have a nice, relaxed smoke,” though only one of us had ever smoked a cigarette before.

Soon we found ourselves, cigarettes unsmoked, walking up the road that led to table-land. The mist began to shine with the light of the moon, and opened and closed around us as we walked up the winding road leading to the plateau. There was a lake on the right where we had skipped stones since we were seven. We saw the full yellow moon reflecting in the lake through the mist. It went to our heads like a drug. We could not sit. Let's walk around the whole table-land, we cried, though we knew its sharp, sudden drops were dangerous in the mist. We won't go to the edge, we promised each other. We'll walk around the middle, around our hockey field and the boys' football field.

The moon disappeared again, but its white glow remained on the clouds that lay on the flat, hollow surface of table-land like a pillowcase. We spread out our raincoats in the middle of the hockey field and lay on our backs, holding hands and watching the sky, feeling the empty darkness beneath us. No falling asleep, girls, we told each other, and finally sat up to smoke our cigarettes. There was a very fine wet spray in the tired air, from all the days of rain. Our matches were damp and would not strike, our cigarettes were wet and would not light, and our hands were wild and shaking from adventure and cold.

Soon, the entire matchbox was finished, but for one match. Let's save this for later, girls, we said, and put our cigarettes away in our pockets and walked on. We decided to leave our raincoats there and collect them later. It was such a pain to lug them around, and we felt so light and free without them. A fine, flirting wind played with our hair and dresses, and we made an elbow chain and went around singing loudly in the empty air. We all knew the same songs from cold countries to which we had never been. We sang songs of love and longing. I remember we sang “Shenandoah” and “If you miss the train I'm on,” and were soulfully belting out “Those Were the Days” for perhaps the third time when we saw a figure in the sudden moonlight.

When we saw the great black rocks, we realized we were closer to the steep cliff edge of the plateau than we supposed. Miss Prince was leaning against the large cone-shaped rock everyone called the witch's needle.

She shone a torch at us. “On a night like this,” she said, “what made you all come along?” Something in the way she said it, butter-smooth, with a clipped smile, and I knew she would not tell. If we had to have the bad luck to meet a teacher, I was glad it was Prince. With her, you could play and perhaps get away with it. Miss Prince kept smoking her rumpled cigarette, eyeing us quizzically. “Miss, can we please have a light,” said Akhila, always the quickest to rush in. Miss Prince silently held her lighter up for Akhila.

“Now scat,” she said, “before I am forced to officially see you.” And so we thanked her and ran away.

“You know, girls, she was smoking pot,” said Ramona, in high-pitched horror, as soon as we were out of range. Ramona knew the most about everything because she had three older brothers. One of them was in college in Bombay. In the May holidays she had even been to the movies and sat in the back row with his friends.

It was close to midnight. We decided it was time to go back. We had brought one bar of Cadbury's chocolate for the outing. We divided it into three, and were eating and walking along when we got the shock of our lives. In all the years that have followed, I have never felt the blood draining from my body as at the moment I saw Nelly sitting on another rock in the distance. We looked at each other in horror and despair. There was nowhere to run, and nowhere to hide. We stood frozen, awaiting the worst. Then we realized there was something very odd. In all the years in Timmins, we had always seen our principal in her belted frocks. But tonight she was wearing long white pants. She was sitting with her head cradled in her hands. She did not turn her head to look at us.

“She's wearing her pajamas,” whispered Akhila.

“She doesn't see us,” I hissed.

And without another word, with the kinetic understanding born of many scrapes and pranks together, we tiptoed past and walked as fast as we could to the road. We then made a dash for it, running down the dark and winding road to the bazaar. The bazaar was completely shuttered and deserted. We walked at a clip until we got to the gap in the hedge of the netball field and were safely inside our school. I shone my torch on my watch. It was 12:35.

“I think she's finally lost it,” I said. “Yes, completely cuckoo.” We thought with relish of the stories we could tell the rest of the girls the next morning. We imagined them bringing a van with bars from Poona to take her away. “Did you notice if she had her purse with her? Will they let her take it to Poona? We should have known she was bonkers, the way she always carries that purse and rubs her hands.”

We agreed. It had been the strangest night of our lives. First Miss Prince smoking pot, and then Miss Nelson praying in her pajamas, all on table-land in the middle of the monsoons in the middle of the night.

“It's the full moon,” said Akhila. “It makes people act crazy.”

Fourteen

The Dastardly Deed

W
e were sitting on the hospital steps the next morning, after prayers. It was the twenty-eighth of August, a Wednesday. The murder of Miss Moira Prince took place either on the twenty-seventh or the twenty-eighth of August, depending on whether it was just before or just after midnight.

For the second time in the collective memory of the school, there were no classes and the girls were left free to wander around in dazed groups and gossip. The first time had been five years ago, when there had been a big fire in the middles dorm, and the St. Paul's boys had been called in to throw buckets of water on the burning building.

Tomorrow there was going to be a special memorial service for Miss Prince in the church. Today was the postmortem to affirm time and cause of death.

That morning at breakfast, there had been no sense of impending doom whatsoever. The three of us were agog with our news. We had decided it would be dangerous to tell the younger girls that their principal was now mad. Only the standard tens and elevens were to be told. There was no rain, but the light was still gray. We had akoori that day for breakfast, the only egg—the only dish, most insisted—that the school kitchen made well, and I kept making signs to Zarine Zakharia across the table, telling her we were calling an emergency meeting of the tens and elevens after prayers.

As usual, we filed into the prayer hall after breakfast, to hymns on the piano played by Miss McCall. I fully expected Nelly to trot briskly in and say, “Hymn number 420,” as if nothing had happened. And then nobody would really believe us, and it would go down as one of those half-believed legends that are passed down during midnight feasts, to die out with the next generation.

But after we sat down, it was not Miss Nelson but Miss Wilson who came to the pulpit. She tried not to look flustered.

“Girls, I have a very, very tragic announcement to make,” she said, looking down at the pulpit. “Last night, our Miss Prince fell off the edge of table-land. The fall broke her head. She was found in the early hours of the morning. It appears that her death was instant, and she felt no pain.” Miss Wilson's face was red, and her voice was paper-thin.

There was a shocked silence in the room. Miss Wilson said, “Let us kneel,” and led us in the Lord's Prayer.

Our Father, who art in heaven,

Hallowed be Thy name;

Thy Kingdom come;

Thy will be done

On earth as it is in heaven.

It is a sepia movie in my head. Blue-checked dresses, blue blazers, a gray morning tired after the long rain, numb voices reciting the prayer.

Then she started up in a wavering voice, “Oh Lord, in Thy wisdom Thou hast seen wise to call Thy child Moira Prince into Thy sheltering arms before her time. We pray that she may find peace in Thee, oh Lord, and to Thy everlasting mercy we commend her soul. Amen.”

The whole entire prayer hall gave a collective gasp that could be heard above the scraping of benches as we sat down. It hung in the air like a comic-book balloon. Miss Wilson blew her nose and put her crumpled handkerchief back into the pocket of her orange flowered skirt.

“Miss Nelson is indisposed today. I will be in her office. If any one of you needs to talk, please come and see me. There will be no school today.” She did not look at us. She bowed her head and walked out. We filed out in a stumbling mass of imploding energy. I do not know what happened to the teachers, or the other girls, but the three of us found ourselves with legs of jelly on the hospital steps.

Nothing ever happened in the school. We lived on the highs of strawberry ice cream for Sunday dinner, and drew fodder from the daily battles and skirmishes of our closed circle. But could this be true, really true? We were laughing and crying at the same time, lurching from peak to valley and back. Could it really be true that we had been the last to see her? None of us had ever touched death before.

“It was Nelly who pushed her,” said Akhila with complete conviction.

The motive, she said, was clear. Pratima Patil's cousin was in Queen Mary School in Bombay, and she had brought the news that Miss Prince was a lesbo. She had been thrown out of Queen Mary because of an affair with Mohini Kapur, an athletic Punjabi girl with short curly hair. At the end of the last term, Mohini had run away from her parents' house in Colaba and was found in Sunbeam with Miss Prince. It had been a horrible scandal, and Miss Nelson, whose pride and joy was her good god-fearing school, was brokenhearted. It seemed quite logical to both Akhila and Ramona that she had done it in a fit of insanity, brought along by the sudden stopping of the rain on a full-moon night.

I just could not believe that Nelly was a murderer. “Maybe she slipped and fell,” I suggested. “You know, slippery earth, and she was drugged.”

I was a teacher lover. Secretly, of course; I would have scorn heaped upon my head if I admitted it. I was more at ease with some of the teachers than with the girls. I found most of the girls, and even half the teachers, to be too naïve and immature.

I remember this clearly, the first time I realized that not only the girls but many of the teachers were more naïve than I. I was seven. I had been in boarding school for maybe two months, and was still in a state of shock and lockdown. Miss Barnabas was the matron of Little House. I cannot imagine how an Indian woman got such an outlandish name, and cannot now ascertain her age or her place of origin, because she was thrown out when Miss Manson walked in one morning and caught her whipping some poor child's ankles. I remember her small bony face and intense eyes, and have an impression of her wearing blue-bordered white saris and a long black plait. She used to walk around the dorms with a hooked whip. I escaped deep emotional scarring by being a part of the small band of favorites. She used to gather us around her in the veranda in the evenings and tell us her thoughts on life. She looked down on most castes and communities. “Now, look at the Parsis,” she said one day. “God gave them such a good color. But what have they done? They have wasted it.” For a few days, I thought I had learned one new mystery of life; god must assign colors to every community. I was wondering why he gave Parsis a good color, and what a good color might be, and what color we Bengalis had. Finally, I plucked up the courage to ask.

“What color did god give the Parsis, Miss?”

“White, my girl, he made them white. So fair the Parsis are, don't you see around you? Look at that Zarine, how fair she is.” That was when it struck me that I was possibly more intelligent than some of the teachers.

But Nelly was a superior being. I looked up to Nelly, I respected her. “Can you imagine Nelly actually physically pushing Pin? Her purse would have got in the way, that's for sure,” I told them dismissively. It sounded ridiculous to me.

“Stop being so bloody wishy-washy all the time, Nandita,” said Ramona, “You know there is something fishy. Why did Willy say anyone who needs to talk, come to me?”

“And why has Nelly not come for prayers? Pray tell me that, Miss Nandita the know-it-all,” said Ramona. “And why was Nelly there, crouching on the rocks? Come on, you can't tell me that is normal. You think she was sitting there and watching, and the Prince suddenly walked from the needle to the edge and slipped away? And then Nelly went quietly back down?”

“OK, I admit it was strange. Maybe there was a scuffle,” I said. “Or maybe it happened after she left.”

Nelly had always been good to me. I knew she had a soft spot for me. She had put her arm around me and said “Nandita, if that is what you say, then I believe you” that day I had been blamed for putting a strange lock on the science lab and getting our test canceled. I was close to tears, not because I cared about the punishment, but because I had been wrongly accused, and because I was humiliated that Miss Mathews would not believe me when I said I had not done it. Miss Nelson knew the good part of me, and I felt strong and calm with her, more so than with my mother, who was as capricious as a queen. I just could not imagine Nelly, always so straight and true, as a murderer. Akhila and Ramona had no such qualms. This was high drama, after all.

“Fine, so there was no premeditation,” conceded Akhila. “Whichever way you look at it, Nelly still killed her. You'll see.”

“I think there was premeditation. She followed her up, didn't she?” interrupted Ramona. Ramona was our wild card. You could never tell what she would say or do next.

We knew we had more knowledge than everyone else. But we did not know whom to tell. How could we admit that we were up on table-land that night without being instantly expelled? This we could not risk. We all swore to take our secret to the grave, the pyre, and the well of vultures as per the death rituals of our various religions. We realized that we were the key to the case. Only we could have seen Nelly there, so mad. We felt cold and breathless. We were a whisper away from death.

We now remembered that we had left our raincoats on table-land. And as per Timmins regulations, each raincoat had full names in black ink written on the inside, just below the hood. In the monsoon term we had to take raincoats and wear gum boots every time we left the school, which was always in uniforms, and always in a line of twos.

We would not last long. We would be caught on the way to church tomorrow evening.

“Let's just get new raincoats,” we thought for one mad moment, and ran to find Shankar, to ask him please to take money from Ramona's brother in St. Paul's and buy us three raincoats from the bazaar.

Shankar was usually to be found in the tool room behind the pantry. But when we got there, we found his wife, crying. She was an elegant, giraffe-like woman who only wore pink and red nine-yard saris, always with a green blouse. Her big moon tika was smudged, and she was weeping with drama. Devibai, our Pearsall ayah, who was witness and comfort, informed us that Shankar been arrested by Inspector Wagle. He was suspected of murdering Miss Prince.

That was the second shock. Even the police knew it was a murder. We became quite unhinged, and considering going to Miss Henderson as a compact, sobbing group, baring all. “She'll take us to the Woggle, and he will believe us,” we told each other.

But as soon as we began to pull ourselves together, it occurred to us that they might think we killed her. Who would you rather believe, we reasoned with growing panic, a calm and saintly principal who has been in Panchgani without a blemish forever, or three hysterical fifteen-year-olds?

I cannot say what we would have done next had we not heard the new buzz in the lower dorm.

Shobha Rajbans knew something. She had gone in to see Willy in Nelson's office after prayers. Willy had shut the office door. Such a thing had never happened. But she would not tell anyone about it. She had “promised Willy to remain quiet about it, until things pass over,” she said with an important air to the cluster of girls around her.

We knew we had to talk to her. “It is a matter of life and death for us,” we told each other solemnly, having convinced ourselves by now that we would soon be led out of school in handcuffs.

“Look, we know more than anyone else could know about this,” we told her after we had pulled her out of her dorm. Shobha was one of the types you could not pull rank on. She was not afraid of anything. We had to convince her that we had a bigger secret. We took her down to the hockey pitch. The stone benches were still wet and the ground was slushy as we stood around her in a huddle. We swore each other to secrecy, and told our story first. She listened to our tale with growing excitement, and then she told us hers.

She said she was reading
Lolita
with a torch under her bed, after lights out.

“You know, my bed is so close to Nelly's bathroom, I'm tuned to listening for her movements even in my sleep,” she began, drawing it out. She was as cool as a cucumber.

I knew that bed in Upper Willoughby. I had it in standard nine. You could hear Nelly's movements and bathroom noises booming through the pipes. Sometimes, we all put our ears against the wall, waiting to hear her fart.

We hardly ever heard voices. She had tea with the missionaries, “special talks,” and prayer meetings in her private drawing room, which faced the lower garden and was not close enough for the voices to reach us.

“But last night, after lights out,” said Shobha, “I heard murmurs, so of course I put my ear against that exact spot in the wall, and one voice became louder. It was Prince. I know it was. I only heard a few words, but what I heard is etched like the Ten Commandments in my mind. Word for word.”

“She said, ‘Couldn't you tell me? Just one sign, even? Do you know what it would have meant to me?' She was sobbing, those shuddering kinds of sobs people make when someone dies or something. The wind came up and the rain was spluttering and splattering on the roof, and all I could hear for some time were hisses and murmurs. But I am sure it was Nelly talking and pleading. Then, suddenly, above the rain, clear and sharp, Prince screeched, ‘You bloody hypocrite. You bloody bitch. Keeping me here like your pet monkey. So saintly.' I thought the whole of Lower Willoughby would have heard.”

And then, Shobha heard Nelly say, “Let us pray. Our Lord will show you His mercy, my child, as He did to me.”

Ramona was crying. Shobha, who had not been in the belly of the beast, was very excited. “Let's not tell anyone anything anymore,” she said. “Let's solve the whole thing ourselves, then you will be free. And we have so many clues. We'll get poor Shankar out of jail.”

We began to feel better. Yes, we saw ourselves as heroines, on the front page of the
Poona Herald
. But first we'd have to solve the problem of the raincoats.

“
That is a step we must overleap, for in our way it lies
,” we chanted, and the reassuring rhythm of
Macbeth
calmed us down.