Miss Timmins' School for Girls (17 page)

Everyone agreed that it was the hand of Merch. It was Merch who sat with Mr. Blind Irani at the corner table and read him the newspapers and the correspondence of like-minded letter writers. It was Merch who wrote out the letters that he dictated for the
Poona Herald
. It had to be Merch who had pulled Mr. Blind Irani to the other side of the tracks.

Mr. Dubash's rebuttal appeared promptly two days later.

If the man, Shankar, was falsely accused, let him bring forth the evidence. Let him come out and confess what he was doing at the bottom of the cliff, bending over the body of the dead girl in the middle of a rainy night. The arrested man is known in these environs for his nefarious activities and has been a corrupting influence on the schools. Further, his dealing in narcotics has attracted young men of dubious character to our town. The law-abiding citizens of Panchgani have been at their wits' end. It is time he was brought to justice.

The core of the Panchgani Stores gang, which had the benefit of Taruben's brilliant tea as they sat around on folding metal chairs in the back room, consisted of the owner of El Cid Hotel, a red-faced man named Rohington, the Dubashes of Dalwich House, and of course the Sheths themselves. Inspector Wagle was very busy collecting evidence, but he did drop by on his way home in the evening. Since the Sheths did not partake in spirits, he could not take his evening beer with them, and so he soon went home to his strange household: a wife whose former lover he had just sent towards the gallows, and a son who had his enemy's blood in his veins.

Everyone stared and moved away when the inspector's wife walked into town. No one knew what she thought and no one dared to ask. She had withdrawn from the town after the affair. She had made not a single friend in Panchgani all those years. Instead, she spent her days at home, cultivating fragrant roses and jasmine and pink and white bougainvillea that crept along the arched garden gate of the Nest, so that everyone stopped to gaze at her garden before they turned towards the Muslim cemetery on their way up to table-land. You could see her garden from the left tip of table-land, hanging like an embroidered handkerchief halfway in the sky. As she walked down to the bazaar with a flower in her bun, the women thought of how she must remember those hot afternoons of pleasure, and felt a pang of sorrow for their own wasted lives. Some of the more charitable older women blamed the water. We have seen it before, they said wisely. When young women first come to Panchgani, desire explodes in their loins. But it dies soon and then the water turns bitter in their stomachs.

Mr. Blind Irani found himself aligned with the mochi who owned Vidya Shoes and Slippers for Every Occasion, a small narrow shop across the street from the Irani Café; fat Kaka, the buddha behind the cash counter of Kaka's Bakery and Eatery; and Hafeez, the Muslim contractor who painted the red roofs of Timmins School every two years. And of course, Merch. But Merch was considered to be a fringe person and did not count.

“The first three sentences of Mr. Blind Irani's letter, right up till ‘
It would be a crime to consider the case closed
,' are from the hand of Merch,” I informed the girls. “After that, the old man starts his ranting. You can see the difference.”

“Wait, wait,” said Akhila, bouncing up and down, her new breasts jiggling happily in her blue-checked dress. “You know, it could have been the inspector. He might have pushed the Prince and then put the blame on Shankar. He finally found a way of getting rid of his enemy. Think how he must have hated him all these years. His house is right there, he must have seen Prince walking up, followed her . . .” She petered out as the many holes in the theory became evident to us all. How on earth could the inspector have known that Shankar would be caught bending over her? And why should he have to murder a white girl to get at his enemy, after fifteen long years?

“We should write it down in our book anyway,” said Shobha. “After all, there was a motive.”

Stranger things had happened, especially in detective novels. But I could see that the tale was too hollow to hold any truth. “No,” I said. “He was handed an opportunity and he took it. Simple as that.”

We were sitting on the long green bench outside the senior classrooms, facing the abandoned throwball court that was overrun with electric green grass. Small fine clouds were passing through us as they moved over the mountain. We were chewing on stalks of khatta mittha bhaji, a juicy weed that flourished in the rains under the eaves of the sloping roofs. We were always looking for things to eat. In the summer we sucked the honey from the stems of the shoe-flowers.

“The stakes are higher now,” said Shobha. “We have to find actual evidence.” We realized that we could not just go in now and tell the inspector what we saw, and what we thought about it. The inspector was not after the truth. He did not want to solve the case. He was planning to put Shankar away for life. So if we wanted him to take us seriously, we would have to present real evidence.

Ramona, Shobha, and I sat in a row, chewing like sober little cows. Akhila paced excitedly up and down in front of us, bobbing and fidgeting. She took out her bottle of Vaseline from her pocket and applied large amounts to her lips to make them glossy. She had two large, pussy pimples at the edge of her nose, and kept trying to squeeze them out.

“Only we can do it,” she said, rallying us to battle. I imagined her on a white steed, her breasts bouncing. “Only we can save Shankar.”

“It is the hand of Merch. The whole thing. And now we cannot even go to the Woggle and tell him, because he will never release Shankar,” said Ramona, shaking her head.

“Ramona, you have it wrong, don't you see?” I said. “It is actually because of Merch's letter that we
can
go to the Woggle. Now he knows he has to listen to us, because we could go to Mr. Blind and he might write another letter. Merch is trying to save Shankar, same as us. That makes him on the same side as us.”

“But then why is he stirring things up? What is his motive?” she asked, getting belligerent.

“Are you some sort of specter of doom, or what?” I asked, and she looked chastised.

“No, but I just want you to be cautious. I feel we are getting into deep waters here.”

“I think we need to drop her from the investigation,” said Shobha as soon as Ramona had left. “She'll get us into trouble.”

“So you mean we pretend nothing more is happening?” I asked.

“Or we could make up some stuff to feed her,” said Shobha.

Akhila looked at me. I nodded but said nothing. It was a good idea. It should have come from me.

Seventeen

The Scream

A
t the end of the monsoon term, there was a blight of lice in Pearsall, where I was dorm prefect. The first five cases were discovered on a Saturday morning during a routine and cursory nails and hair inspection. Mrs. Wong called in the ayahs. Grumpy ayahs wielding lice combs pulled angrily at our hair. Girls with long and curly hair screamed in pain. Those with lice were flung like dirty socks to the left of the room. Soon the lice-line became longer than the non-lice-line. Mrs. Wong paced up and down the row of liced girls ranting and raving.

“Never seen so much lice. Never in all my years. Even my head is scratching. The floors will be crawling with boochies.” She took big steps, her hands behind her back. We did not dare to speak. We tried not to scratch our heads.

The next morning she emerged from her room with a solution. “DDT powder,” she announced merrily, her eyes twinkling. “That will put an end to it. Sister says they used it in the war.”

Mrs. Wong ordered a sack of DDT. It was two days after the funeral. After dinner, we lined up in our pajamas with towels draped across our shoulders. Each girl was to put DDT on the hair of the girl in front. Pillowcases filled with white powder were passed around. We threw handfuls of it in each other's hair. We began to look like old ladies in Hindi movies and school plays. The air was white. Soon we took the pillowcases filled with powder and started pillow fights. “Snow, it must be like snow,” we were shouting in delight, skidding on the DDT powder strewn across the stone floor.

Mrs. Wong popped her head out of her room, her powdered hair tied deftly in a red scarf knotted at the forehead. “Nandita,” she called. “Lights out. I want everyone in bed now.”

We turned off the lights, but it was not a night for sleep. We all felt strangely elated. “Please, please, can we stay up and tell ghost stories? Please Nandita, tell us a ghost story,” the girls said, clustering around me with white powder drizzling from their hair. I relented, even though I was trying to be the perfect prefect.

We spread blankets on the damp floor and sat in a tight circle between two beds, leaning against each other. We lit our torches and laid them face down in the center of the circle.

Farida Naturewalla's father had just sent her an extra-large bottle of Phosfomin syrup that she generously offered to share. No food was allowed in the dorms, but we could keep tonics in our cupboards. It was easy to get parents to send tonics, and tonic parties were one of the pleasures of our lives. Phosfomin was a bright green tonic that smelled like alcohol and tasted like peppermint. Farida measured three large capfuls into each glass.

The first story was always the Pearsall Story. Miss Pearsall had been the only teacher to die in the school. Now of course, there was the Prince. But her bashed head on the rocks was too raw, not yet a midnight-feast ghost story. So I decided to stick to Miss Pearsall's ghost.

Miss Pearsall was a missionary. According to the golden plaque in the prayer room, Miss Pearsall had been the principal from 1910 to 1917. The plaque did not mention how she died. But the midnight-feast version had all the details.

Miss Pearsall was a cripple. She had polio as a child, and she wore a huge polio leg brace. The shoe of the brace had a thick platform, and she often had to use crutches. One rainy night, Miss Pearsall's crutch had slid on the stone steps outside the dining room. She had lost her balance and tumbled all the way down. Her body landed on the sharp stones around the flower beds. The fall had broken her head.

She was buried in the graveyard behind the church, beside Mary, Minnie, and Emma, the three daughters of the unfortunate pastor, surrounded by headstones of women and children of missionaries and civil servants who had wilted and withered. Miss Pearsall was unhappy because she did not die in England. Her body was trapped forever in the dirt of the wretched colony she had come to improve, dreaming always of steak-and-kidney pie by the fire at home. And so her soul could not move on. She haunted our school.

We had put our torches in the center of the circle, their red plastic hoods face down. The scene is trapped in my mind in red plastic light—fluorescent green Phosfomin, white-haired girls in tight pajamas with missing buttons, white poison dust clouds colliding over our heads.

“You know the sounds you hear at night on the stairs? Thud, thud—one light, one heavy? That is Miss Pearsall limping down the stairs,” I said, draining my glass. It burnt an arc down my throat to the center of my stomach.

On cue, the stairs creaked, thud, thud, bad foot, good foot, and then as an extra measure a gust of wind blew the window above the stairs open into the dorm. Girls hugged each other and screamed.

“Wait till I come and catch you. Get back into your beds you little monkeys,” Mrs. Wong shouted.

“All right, girls, quiet now,” I said, loud enough for Mrs. Wong to hear.

“Now, girls, no need to get so afraid,” I said. “In fact, Miss Nelson says that that old wooden stairs always creak. Expansion and contraction. Everyone knows that.”

“But it does sound like a crutch and then a foot. Shh, listen.”

“I think she is a good ghost. She guards our school. Especially our dorm, since we have her name,” said Maya Desai.

“And no one has ever heard anything but the steps.”

But the wind started rattling the doors and windows, and even I felt a chill creep up my spine. Not from the Pearsall story. From the Prince story.

“And imagine, they both died of broken heads, they were both British, and the best of it is that both their names begin with
P
,” said some squeaky voice on my right.

The noise level was rising again. “Into bed every one of you,” shouted Miss Wong, and so we dispersed.

Even if you believed in ghosts, Miss Pearsall was quite harmless. She had been with us for many years, and she was but a thud on the stairs. No one had heard a peep out of her. I was fifteen years old, and in spite of eight years of ghoulish stories at midnight feasts, I did not really believe in fate or ghosts. Until that night.

I do not know if I woke up because of the scream, or just before it. In my dreams, I think I awoke in the hushed split second before the scream.

It was deep into the night. It was a low scream, with a growl in it. It could only be described as chilling or bloodcurdling, or both. It was the most frightening scream that I have heard ever before or ever since. Everyone who heard it says so. Little Supriya Chatterjee was found shivering in the rainbow room, and Bindu Mathais and Neela Khanna had locked themselves in the last bathroom. A lot of girls just slept through it, and I felt they were the lucky ones. They would not be haunted by it. Those of us who had woken up could not go back to sleep, and we spent the night clustered two and three to a bed, whispering. The wind came up in sudden gusts, swishing the trees. We were shivery with fright, holding clammy hands under the blankets, waiting with dread for the next scream. The long, single howl that hung in the air, perhaps a banshee scream sounded like that.

We had been left on the hilltop to be broken by demented women with foreign customs, and we had formed together into a lumpy clay pot. Although the scream sank into the dark waters of childhood terror and became a seamless part of the morning dread of our adult lives, it was Ramona who was most affected by it. The scream, and the haunted night that followed, marked the turning point in Ramona's life.

We discovered at breakfast that the scream had also been heard in Upper Willoughby, Lower Willoughby, and Harley Street.

The Lower Willoughby girls said it was Miss Raswani.

Miss Raswani's room was above Lower Willoughby.

“It was her. Falguni saw her standing at her window just after lights out. She had her white stringy hair down, and—can you imagine?—wore a long flannel nightie,” said Pooja Patel.

“What color was it?” asked Akhila. But Pooja said there was not enough light to see the actual garment.

“She always paces and mutters in the night. We are all used to it. But since the death, since the rain has stopped, we hear her talking loudly and sobbing, even. After the episode in the gym yesterday, she must have cracked completely. We heard the scream coming from her room. It sounded like her voice, gruff,” she said. “It was like a howl. It was horrible. As though she were howling at the moon. Almost the whole dorm heard it. Zareen started sobbing. She said she wanted to go home. Then even Dhanvini and Meena started crying. We could not wait for it to be morning.”

But the girls of Upper Willoughby swore just as surely that the scream had come from Miss Nelson's room. “We heard it come out of her bathroom,” said Shobha, proud keeper of the next-to-Nelly bed. “We stayed up all night, the three of us on Lopa's bed, gossiping. We were so scared we could not sleep. We held hands.”

It was hard to imagine Nelly screaming. She never raised her voice.

“She is so controlled, but what if she finally let it all out? It might sound like that,” said Shobha.

“Specially if you had just killed someone and might be going crazy. I can see her in her white pajamas looking out of her window at table-land, hands to her ears, screaming,” said Akhila.

I said that we were all ignoring the obvious. “It was Miss Prince,” I said. “That scream did not sound human to me.”

If it were Raswani or Nelson, it would have sounded distant. Pearsall was in the junior section of the school, quite far from the Willoughbys and Harley Street, the senior dorms. We had never heard any senior sounds. “I think it was the Prince warning us,” said Ramona, backing me up, although I began to doubt my judgment as soon as Ramona voiced hers.

“Of course you heard it in Pearsall, you dimwits. Isn't that why a scream is called piercing? And anyway, Nandita, I thought you did not believe in ghosts,” said Shobha.

I did not. “Maybe you are right,” I said, although the scream had sounded like it came from just outside our dorm.

I asked Mrs. Wong about it after breakfast. It was a clouded, chilly day, and I had gone back to the dorm to get my blazer. It was dhobi day in Pearsall. Every bed had a towel spread under it, with clothes laid out in decreed piles. Three checked dresses, two play dresses, three checked knickers, two play knickers, one white blouse, one navy-blue sports skirt, one pair of navy-blue bloomers, three pairs of socks, one sheet, one pillowcase. Exactly that. No more and no less were allowed without a divine dispensation. Mrs. Wong was sitting on a stool, pencil and notebook in hand. The dhobhi's wife was squatting on her haunches, sorting the dirty clothes.

I walked past her, hesitating, but then went back, stood near her stool, and cleared my throat.

“Mrs. Wong, did you hear the scream last night?”

“Civet cats,” said Mrs. Wong after a moment of silence. “Awful noise they make. Could be baby, or maybe giving birth.”

Wild civet cats had overrun our school and maybe even the whole of Panchgani during my early years in school. They made a racket at night, mewing, screeching, spitting, and scampering on the sloping tin roofs. They ate baby monkeys, and they left a stench of urine in the open corridor below the big steps. Their kittens wailed like babies being tortured.

Mrs. Wong went back to her dhobi log, drawing lines with a ruler for the week's table. I knew she was lying about the scream. The scream last night was not a wild cat scream. Civet cats wailed for a long time, and since they traveled in groups, there were always other cat sounds around the scream. And besides, those wild cats had not been seen around our school for years.

“Mrs. Wong heard the scream, but she is pretending it is cats,” I informed my co-detectives as the prayer bell rang. We had begun to call ourselves the Famous Four.

“Can I see you for a minute, Nandita?” called Miss Wilson as we lined up for prayers. “Can you please do the Bible reading today? St. Matthew, chapter seven. Go into the staff room and look over it, while I start.”

It was too sudden. I had no time to feel nervous. I am going to be the head girl, I thought. I am a leader. I liked to be calm and composed. That was the only way I felt good inside. “Nandita will be the steady one in the family. She will look after her sisters,” my father often said. “Not like her mother,” he would usually add, especially when my mother was just within earshot.

And so I walked calmly and slowly into the prayer hall, and read in a loud unwavering voice, though I do not recall a single word.

Miss Wilson went up to the pulpit when I was finished.

“Let us bow our heads in prayer,” she said.

“Oh Lord, we beseech Thee today to cast Thine light upon us, and give us strength. Thou knowest our weaknesses, and in Thine infinite mercy, Thou knowest also our strengths. We pray that You give each of us in this school, every girl and every member of our staff, the courage and strength to face the trials and tribulations that may lie ahead. And to Thy safekeeping we commend our souls. Amen.”

There were sniffs and sobs from around the room. The teachers' seats at the back of the hall were half empty. Neither Miss Raswani nor the Sunbeamers were present, and for yet another day, Miss Nelson had not emerged from her room. The teachers' faces looked ashen in the sullen light. The scream crouched above the prayer hall, snarling, its fangs bared over our frightened faces.

After prayers Miss Wilson cleared her throat and, mustering a firm voice, made the announcement slowly, with weighty pauses in between.

“We have decided to close the school early this term,” she said. “Exams are to be postponed until next term. Today, Miss Manson, Miss Henderson, and I are going to try and contact all your parents, by telephone, where possible, or by telegram. Parents will be encouraged to come and pick up their children. Of course, for those of you whose parents are far away or cannot come, and for the girls from abroad who were going to spend the holiday in school, the school will remain open. I, as well as some of the staff, will be present. Standards four through eleven will be expected to take their books home and study for the exams, which will be held in the second week of the winter term.