Miss Timmins' School for Girls (21 page)

BOOK THREE

The Blot

Charu

Twenty-one

Mr. Much

S
ometimes I look at the women with their hands folded on their laps and wonder. I see them on Sunday evenings, sitting by the sea with their husbands, their children building castles in the sand. Packing school lunches in the morning, puja after bath, mother-in-law frowning, and sex without a sound. Yes, I could have done it, and my shell could have been my pillow.

I was in Kolhapur, and my mother was in hospital. I spent the days in her hospital room in an anesthetic state of mind, wondering idly about my life, as though it were happening to someone else. I ate heavily from tiffins full of delicious freshly cooked food sent to tempt Ayi, and then I slept for two hours in the extra bed.

At night, in the visiting daughters' room with random aunts lined up beside me, I could not sleep. A knife-thrust of desire would carve a big round hole in my stomach, so that I would have to turn over and stuff pillows under it. I wanted to make love to Pin again. Just once more. I wanted to kiss her for a long, long time. She would pull out, smile into my eyes, give my blot a nibble, and go back into my mouth again. I could feel her teeth on my face. I wanted to bite her and scratch her and twine my legs around her. I wanted to leave small marks on her white velvet body. Just once, just one candlelit night more I wanted. I wanted to love her with abandon. I would drift into a shallow sleep and wake up under the mosquito net with hot blood jumping in my veins so I could not lie down. I would creep out of the room and roam around the courtyard, studying the slate tiles in the moonlight.

Walking into the house from hospital one evening, I found Gopika, a middle aunt just arrived from Jalgaon, slurping tea with my grandmother in the kitchen. Gopika always maintained that everything was better in Jalgaon. Her sons were taller, her daughters were fairer, the milk was better in Jalgaon. Everyone called her Jalgaon Masi.

“They tell me Shalini is much better now,” said Jalgaon Masi, “but of course I haven't spoken to Tai yet.”

“Yes,” I said, “Ayi is better. She is in a stable condition.” Ayi was now out of intensive care, off all the machines, and out of danger. She was officially out of her coma, but was still very vague and distant. She was ensconced in a large private room on the top floor of the hospital, attended by a day nurse and a night nurse. But she wasn't connecting the dots yet. She wouldn't speak for days, and then, suddenly, would let out a torrent of dark jumbled fragments mainly about her childhood. We were not sure if she recognized us.

Dr. Tendulkar told us gravely that her brain could have been damaged, since it had been deprived of oxygen.

“But we will watch her for a while,” he said. And so we watched her. We took turns, Tai, Baba, and I. Baba slept the night with her, Tai did the evenings, and I sat with her through the day. I sat by the bed and held her hand, I combed her thinning hair, and tried to feed her tomato soup and toast, though she would have none of it. I looked into her eyes, and I was sure she was resting. One fine morning, when I came in, she would say, “Charu beta, get me my knitting, it is on the shelf. No, not there, over there.”

The official story was that she slipped into a coma as a result of a reaction to some new medicine for her thyroid problem. The suicide attempt was sealed into a tight family circle; even the younger generation was not to know. We called it the Episode. It had been a week, but we still did not let visitors into her room, for fear of what she might say.

The house went into emergency footing. One car was a hospital ferry. Streams of family members came and went, carrying meals and snacks and fruit and twice-boiled water, thermos flasks of tea, clean towels and sheets and freshly ironed saris and kaftans. The benches outside the hospital room were always filled with gossiping relatives. Dada came every afternoon at 3:30, dressed in his spotless white pants and shirt, on his way back home from his air-conditioned office at Chitnis Transport. The old man would sit outside her room on a straight-backed chair and glare into the distance for exactly ten minutes. And then he would get up and leave. The brothers came in the evening. The sisters began to gather.

“And oh, yes, Charu, there are some people here to see you. From Panchgani,” Jalgaon Masi said, blowing into a perfectly poised saucer as I walked out of the kitchen.

I had heard nothing since the day I left Panchgani. During the day I ached for Ayi, and at night I wept for Pin. I was thankful for the rhythm of the hospital. I decided never to go back to school.

“Who?” I asked, my voice high, my heart throbbing in my temples.

“I don't know. They are sitting in the drawing room,” she said, pointing with her chin, and I thought she wrinkled her nose in disapproval.

I went in to find Merch, Samar, and Shabir sitting stiffly on the triangle of plastic sofas. They looked very uncomfortable and very stoned. They had been sitting there for at least an hour, they said, and had consumed several cups of tea.

Tai poked her head into the room just then. She was on her way to the hospital. The driver was waiting on the doorstep with the hospital tiffin. She beckoned me out of the room.

“Who is that black boy?” she demanded, her face screwed in disgust. She pronounced it as “buoy.” She did not bother to lower her voice. She wore a purple nylon sari with swirling yellow patterns.

I looked at the three of them with Kolhapur eyes. In Panchgani, they were unconventional. But here, in my strict middle-class household where the women all wore saris and covered their heads in front of their father-in-law, they looked absolutely scandalous.

The black buoy was surely Shabir, who was the most outrageous of them all. He was very thin, very dark, and very tall, and dressed in deep-orange pajamas and a hand-dyed vest with a front pocket like the ones the servants wore. His curly hair was loose and strewn untidily across his face. He was nodding his head and smiling at his own private joke. He was smoking a bidi.

“He is a sadhu, Tai,” I babbled hastily, trying to walk her towards the door. “See, he is wearing orange clothes. He is a Rajneesh sadhu. You know Ishwar kaka from across the street? Even he is a Rajneesh sadhu.” In truth, we had all been a bit shocked when our conventional neighbor with three grown daughters had one day turned up in orange robes and declared that he had become a devotee of Rajneesh, the controversial guru who condoned free love and was rumored to have sex orgies at his ashram in Poona. I imagined that clubbing Shabir together with a fat and balding neighbor might give him a measure of respectability. But Tai was not impressed. Her scowl remained intact.

Samar was sporting a stained white kurta with jeans and thick village slippers. He had a small gold ring in his right ear. Merch was being manful. He was wearing a checked shirt, and had a pen clipped to his pocket. In spite of his glassy eyes, he was the most respectable and introducible of them all, and so I pointed to him. “This is Merch, Tai. He has come to give me some Panchgani news,” I said.

Merch stood up straight and took one brave step towards us.

“Oh, yes, Mr. Much,” said Tai, looking him up and down sternly.

“So what do you do in Panchgani, Mr. Much?” she asked, her pitted face set in a thunderous scowl. Any young man who dared visit a Chitnis girl must be prepared to produce his credentials. And since no young men of this kind had ever visited a Chitnis girl, Tai was stacking the ramparts with hot oil.

“Photography,” said Merch faintly, scratching his head.

“A photographer?” she looked at me, taken aback. Her youngest brother, my uncle Anil, was a professional photographer. She was very proud of him.

But she soon took it in her stride. “Ah, immature,” she said dismissively. “He must be an immature.”

She waddled out, wiping her face with the polka-dotted napkin. I had no idea what she meant. Merch kept a very straight face. I watched my two worlds collide, not in fire and brimstone, as I had feared, but in comic relief.

“Welcome to Kolhapur, Mr. Immature Much,” I said, smiling, happy to see them.

We left the house immediately. I called to Ramu the servant not to keep dinner for me. Shabir had dropped acid, and he could feel it coming on. He needed a safe space. “Give me a good small-town spot,” he said. “I've been doing acid so long in the green meadows and rain. I'm looking forward to this.” We went to an idli house in the bazaar, but before our order came, Shabir announced that the lights were making him nervous. “Too intense, man,” he said. “And that yellow rice that villager was eating, it exploded in my face like a volcano. I think I could even be hallucinating.”

We drove around the outskirts of the town and finally found a street with only three little bungalows bunched together on one side. One flickering streetlight stood guard in the middle of them. I sat in the backseat with Merch. Samar parked the car and lit a joint. I took three deep drags and passed the joint to Merch. My arm stretched across a lifetime before it reached him. We had always been three in the backseat, and today, I could not even see her face clearly in my mind. But I knew that her thigh would have been pressed against mine so that my breath came short and fast.

No one said anything. Samar turned the Rolling Stones louder. Shabir got out of the car and walked around the empty street. “I'm seeing the light now,” he said sagely as he passed the car, his long, lean face lit in a beatific smile.

“Your pupils are dilated,” said Merch.

LSD was something you read about, or heard the Beatles sing about. I did not think it was something that anyone I knew had actually experienced. Maybe they had all done it. Maybe they had even done it on a night when I was with them and not told me. I had imagined that a person on acid would look somewhat like a street drunk, staggering and stuttering. But Shabir was quite calm and coherent. It was as if he were watching a good movie.

Suddenly he climbed back into the car, convulsed with laughter. His springy black hair bounced around his head as he went up and down, slapping his thighs. We could not get a word out of him for some time.

“Amateur,” he uttered as he gasped for his last breath. “She meant amateur. You could see her brain turning. That black bouy Much could not possibly be a professional photographer.”

“But black buoy was not Much. It was
you
,” I said. Shabir laughed harder.

“Too Much,” said Samar, snorting. “Too Much. Mr. I. Much. Nice name.”

“He could be a minor poet,” I said.

It came to mind because he had said it to me once. In his room, I had found a book titled
Minor Romantic Poets of the Nineteenth Century
. The rain was splashing merrily on the roof, the light in his room was sweet and yellow. Shabir and his girlfriend, Raisa, were on the bed, kissing. Samar, his wife, and the Prince were playing Scrabble. The Prince was stooped and restless. She had a bad mood sign on her head, and so no one spoke to her. Samar seemed to be winning, but everyone was waiting for Pin to do a triple word using
J
or
X
. And then she would probably produce a small, shy smile. Merch was rolling a joint, changing the music, and making tea. I picked the book off the shelf and was leafing through it. I knew Merch loved poetry; he said it was the purest of the fictions. Distilled. But still, who would actually buy and read a book that held only minor poets? I was thinking, astonished, when I heard him behind me.

“Minor poets are special. I would be quite content to be a minor poet,” he said, his brown eyes shining with pleasure in the dim light.

To be included in scholarly and obscure anthologies, I thought, and found that I had said it out loud in the car. I was used to keeping my thoughts to myself.

We decided to call him Much forever after. Much and the Black Buoy. We began to laugh. And every time there was a lull, one of us would start again. We laughed feverishly, bent over, holding our stomachs, lurching in and out of the car, which stood with doors all wide open like wings, just outside the circle of lamplight. A light went on in a bedroom of one of the bungalows. A curtain was held back for a minute and then dropped again.

Friends could die, family could fall apart, but we could sit in the night on a dead-end road and fill out with laughter. Perhaps I could live through anything, I thought then.

We stopped laughing as suddenly as we had started. And the gravity and gloom that we had held above the laughter settled upon our heads. Samar stepped out of the car. The air closed in around him and became a solid mass of sadness. Merch and I turned and faced each other. The Stones should have been playing “Ruby Tuesday,” but they were not. Merch had leaned over to the front seat and turned the volume down. It was too dark to see his face, but the whites of his eyes gleamed. He lit a cigarette and passed it to me. Then he lit one for himself and took a deep drag. His movements were slow and deliberate.

“Do you want to know?” he asked, his voice hoarse, intimate.

No, I did not want to know. I had an affair with a woman, and now she was dead. She was an intense woman, perhaps she was a mad woman. Perhaps I had loved her. But now she was dead. She fell off a cliff on a rainy night. She must have jumped just after I left. But I could not have her back, not for all the perfumes of Arabia. I could still have my mother back, though, if I hoped and dreamt and prayed and cared.

“Yes, I want to know,” I said.

All that time with Pin, I had been desperate to get her deep dark secrets out of Merch and jealous that she did not see fit to confide in me. But now, I was afraid.

“Miss Nelson was arrested for Pin's murder,” said Merch, slowly, pausing before every word, like a man jumping stones across a gushing stream. “They went to the school and arrested her today, I wanted to tell you before you read it in the papers.”

I always remember what I said in the face of this earthshaking news.