Miss Timmins' School for Girls (22 page)

“But how did you find me?” I asked, because that was what I had been thinking all evening and waiting to ask.

Maybe he was relieved to talk trivia, or maybe he sensed that I needed to nibble around it. He launched into a lengthy story.

“I knew you were in Kolhapur, so we went to the Chitnis Transport office in the old city first and told the gatekeeper that we were looking for Miss Charulata Apte. A khaki peon came to the car and said Senior Sir wants to see you. The others waited in the car, and I went up these narrow stairs to this small air-conditioned office. This regal sort of Dalmatian was slouching beside the desk, but sat up straight as soon as I walked in.

“Your grandfather ordered tea for me. He looked me up and down while I drank, then he said, so you want to see Charu? I was kind of hypnotized. I just nodded. He told the peon to get into the car and take us to the house. The Dalmatian got up and trotted behind us all the way to the car, wagged his tail twice, and went back. As if the old man had sent his deputy to say good-bye.”

Merch was talking, and I had broken up into a hot and seething mass.

“But why Miss Nelson? Did someone see her on table-land?” I asked in a squeaky voice verging on hysteria.

Merch looked at me thoughtfully. He seemed to be about to say something. But he lit a cigarette, instead, and practiced smoke rings. I realized I had not made the most appropriate of responses so far.

I lit a cigarette too. Someone had seen Nelson and Pin on table-land. Whoever saw her could very well have seen me. But it seemed as if they had not. I could have told Merch then of how my role was threaded through that night. But I was used to being a secretive soul. I rubbed my blot instead.

“She told me she considered jumping from that very spot,” I said.

“But Woggle insisted it was murder. Too many signs of struggle, clothes torn, and all that stuff.”

“It's all so bizarre. Arrested Nelson. Didn't she deny it or something?” I asked, aghast. “She must at least have denied the murder charge. She'll get a lawyer, she'll deny it. Why should she push a girl off a cliff?” I knew she could not have done it. I had seen her walk down with her purse dangling jauntily in the crook of her arm.

“But wait,” said Merch. “It gets better—or worse. I suppose one should say worse. The girls found this letter that proves that Nelson was her biological mother.”

This time my response was appropriate to the enormity of the news. I clapped my hand to my mouth in disbelief, I ran my hand through my hair, I broke into a sweat, I let out a high-pitched sound. Who would have imagined that her hated Nelson was the one who gave birth to her?

“And what about the parents who died in the bus accident?” I stuttered, still unbelieving.

“It seems the Princes had adopted her and did not tell her. They never told her she was adopted. That's why she hated them all so much. The whole time she was growing up they did not tell her anything. She found out she was adopted just this year, and that too in a roundabout way. She felt they betrayed her. All three of them. Made her live this lie. ‘If I was adopted, so what? Why not tell me?' she said, and of course she was right. She was bitter about it. She said she felt somehow dirty, like a hidden wart or something.”

“You mean she knew that Nelson was her mother and you knew that too?” I asked, astonished.

“No, no. Pin did not know that Nelson was her mother. Not then. A few months ago she had told me she was adopted. She found out after her parents died,” said Merch. The Princes had made Nelson the executor of their wills, and it was Nelson who was responsible for sorting through their papers so Pin knew nothing except what she got as her inheritance. Apparently they had left her a cottage in England and some money, and she was always dreaming of going there.

“Then some old greeting card that was sent long ago and lost in a circuitous sea route or something came for the Princes to Nasik, and was finally redirected to Pin. It was from her mother's sister's family in London. Pin told me she had been completely stunned to see a photograph of this young man and woman and their blond child fall out of the card. There was a chatty letter from a man called Jonathan Birkett addressing her mother as Aunt Martha, saying he hoped they would keep in touch, though his mother had died. Pin figured this must be her mother's sister's family. She had heard childhood stories of her mother growing up—in Dartmouth or some town with a D, she said, I can't remember—with her younger sister, but that was all. No adult stories of this sister or her family were ever told. Pin said it blew her away. She told me that when she first got in touch with the family after receiving the card, they thought her story was a hoax. They insisted the Princes had never had a child. So she went to London last winter. Her cousin, this Jonathan, told her none of the relatives had heard of her. Can you imagine, they had kept her a secret from their own families? She told me she spent sleepless nights wondering why they had done this.”

“And so, how did it unravel?”

“Pin and her British cousin finally pieced it together and realized the Princes must have adopted her as a baby while they were living in Little Snoring during or just after the war. Jonathan was not even sure they were missionaries at that time. But he was five or six, he said, when his mother's sister and her husband left suddenly for India. Since his mother was dead, there was no way to verify anything.

“Poor Pin,” I said. “In a strange country, all alone. She must have felt terrible.”

“She said she was glad. The usual Pin hard-shell talk, I suppose, but she said when she found out she was not their biological child she was actually relieved. She said she had always felt she had no connection to them.”

“But do you think she even suspected that Nelson was her mother? If she felt so different from the Princes, do you think she felt some connection to Nelson? Her anger makes so much sense then,” I said. Is that what she was thinking, I wondered, as she played with my hair and seemed so lost in thought, and would rise abruptly and say, let's go.

Merch shook his head, said nothing.

“But who saw the two of them on table-land in the middle of the night?” I asked.

“The schoolgirls, you know, Nandita and some others.” I had not seen the schoolgirls, so I supposed they had not seen me.

I am glad I was so stoned that night. It sort of cushioned the news.

But why had Nelson been arrested? Had she confessed? Why should she confess? How could she have done it? It was hard for me to keep all these parallel and intersecting events in place. I began to feel breathless and dizzy. “Did Nelson confess to the killings?”

“Well, I mean, what's there to confess? All the pieces fit together. She was seen every step of the way: Pin got a letter from her cousin revealing that Nelson was her mother. She rushed out into the night, she went to Nelson's room, one of the girls heard the two of them fighting from her dorm. She heard Pin sobbing and storming out. Nelson followed her to table-land, where other girls saw her sitting on the rocks behind Pin. They did not know if Pin even realized that Nelson was there. Pin was found dead with signs of a struggle.”

There are some steps that are still dark, Mr. Much, I wanted to say, but kept quiet.

“So you mean she found out on the day of her death that Nelson was her mother?” I asked. Hold me safe and tight, she had said, but I had not. Her world had turned more cruel that very night, and she had come to me. I had sent her to her mother empty and wounded.

I thought of her face when she walked into my room and put her hand inside my blouse on that last night. She must have just found out. Must have walked straight to me. I had betrayed Pin twice that night. In my room, and again on table-land. A third time the same night, and I could well be St. Peter of the Bible, I thought bitterly.

I was sweating. Soon I was out of the car, head over the side of the road, vomiting. I threw up everything I had ever eaten, and then some more, and was retching and hiccoughing and sobbing for long afterwards.

It was Shabir who efficiently pulled off my vomit-stained dupatta and held my hair back from my face while I bent over puking my heart out into the ditch. He stood over me, pointing in awe at things I had eaten.

“Psychedelic. This tomato haldi combination, you should see it,” he called over to Samar. Samar declined. This was more intimate than I wanted it to be and I was embarrassed at first. But he was so kind and casual and matter-of-fact that I began to feel quite calm, and allowed him to comfort me.

“Your vomit has a Brahmin smell,” said Shabir.

When at last I could hold my head up, he went to the car and came back with a thin checked napkin and a bottle of water. After I was done washing and wiping, he fished around in his front pocket and produced a packet of supari to suck on.

“Too much,” he said. “Much too much. Want some acid? I have this great stuff. It's very mild.”

If it would help, if it could take the world off my shoulders, I would do it. I looked at Merch. He shook his head. “Sit and have a joint,” he said.

“But acid is the king of drugs,” said Shabir, indignantly.

“Just let her chill,” said Samar.

The ground was shifting under us. Now it was two of us in the backseat, and everyone was talking to me. I was no longer peeping at them from behind the Prince, and the man by my side was Mr. Immature Much.

We sat in the car, listening mostly to Shabir hold forth about the benefits of hallucinogenic drugs. In Kolhapur, the monsoons were less intense, and we were in a patch of cool, cloudy days. Shabir seemed somewhat petulant that Merch had prevented me from having acid.

How did she feel, falling so fast, hurtling towards the sharp rocks that broke her skull?

And then I saw her. I saw her eyes as she flew down the cliff. Her face was upside down right in front of me, her hair hanging around her face. I felt the dark rocks around, and the wind rushing past. Her face was transformed with glee, her arms outstretched to embrace the rocks, her raincoat like a cape that Superman might wear. She was happy then, and I knew this was true. She had been dreaming of this, perhaps since the days she had swooped and swirled on her skates in the evening light, playing with the thought of falling.

Merch reached out and held my hand. He held it shyly, tentatively. His hand was trembling.

They deposited me on my doorstep deep in the night and sped off to Panchgani, where they said it had started to rain again. “It will be great to drive in over the mountain at dawn,” said Samar.

“Much love,” Shabir shouted as the car screeched down the road.

I stumbled into my bed in the corner of the last room. Everything will be clearer tomorrow morning, I thought, as I tucked in the mosquito net around me. Jalgaon Masi was snoring softly in the bed next to mine.

Twenty-two

Outcaste Bhabhi

T
he wondrous vision of the night before had vanished when I awoke the next morning with a head like lead. The light was loud, the bed beside me was made, the counterpane down, the mosquito net bunched and tucked. I knew with dread that it must be at least past ten. No one ever slept past eight in the Kolhapur house.

I crossed the chowk and stole into the bathroom. I heard Bhabhi bangles clanking busily in the kitchen, but I did not look in. I had never been one of the sunny children, the ones who were petted and pinched and scolded. I was a slinker, and so the family left me alone unless they had something to say.

The light bounced angrily off the open courtyard, poking sharp knives into my eyes. I kept my head down. In the bathroom, clothes were soaking in green and orange plastic buckets. The white towels and kitchen cloth bucket were still steaming. In the small, chipped mirror, my face was bloated, my blot livid, my hair dry and disordered. Why I had felt beautiful last night I could not imagine. I could not imagine ever having been beautiful. I could not imagine ever being beautiful again.

“Jalgaon Masi has gone to the hospital this morning, so we did not wake you,” called majli Bhabhi as I was sneaking back past the chowk. Although the sisters ruled the house, the two older daughters-in-law, whom everyone including the servants called Bhabhi, ran it. The guests, the servants, intricate car schedules, the beds, the meals, the pickles, the clothes, the matching ribbons and socks in the right rooms. They were united in their disapproval and dislike for the youngest daughter-in-law of the house, the outcaste Bhabhi.

Badi Bhabhi, the eldest, walked into the house trailed by Ramu, who was loaded with bulging bags and baskets of fruits and vegetables. She had a fresh jasmine gajra around her bun.

“You look very white, Charu,” she said.

“I threw up last night,” I said. “And again just now,” I added for good measure.

“Where did you have dinner last night?”

“Ideal Idli House,” I muttered, too weak to think of anything but the truth.

“Chi, chi. We'll call the doctor.”

“No, I'll feel better if I sleep,” I muttered.

I pulled the sheet over my head and slipped into a dope-drenched dream. The happy Pin I had seen last night was gone. Her face was dark and narrow now. She was more than midway down the cliff, the sharp jaw of the rocks was close. “Putrid, paltry life,” she said, and sighed, a long deep sigh that echoed through the cliffs. She sees it all now. In this vast falling moment, she has a second lifetime. She knows that if she can pop back up and walk back down the row of silver oaks, she will have a glowing life. She starts grabbing at rocks and bushes, bruised and desperate.

I stand at the edge of the cliff, where she had stood before she fell. I look down, down. I see her face, bruised and bleeding, filling up the dark cradle of the hills like a cloud,
.
“I could be with you, Charu,” she calls. “I would be good and lovely.” Her voice is sad, bouncing around the hills, and then she starts pleading: “Come down, come, Charu. Chaaaruuuu, Charu.” I do not know what I am about to do. I do not know what I
can
do. I think I have the power to pull her back again.

And then the dream twists, and it is not Pin at all but my ayi floating through the great black cliffs. Not my ayi with the graying hair and cotton sari, but a cloud of dark air that I somehow know is her. The mist turns gray and smoky, closing around her. But of course her body can't be falling from the cliff. Her body is still in the hospital bed, my dream voice reminds me sharply.
Be back again.
Please, please, please, Ayi, be back again.

“But I must fold the clothes first,” I was muttering aloud as I tossed awake, drooling, to find Veena, the outcaste Bhabhi, standing by my bed.

“I heard you were sick,” Veena said as she pulled up a chair and sat beside the bed. She had become decidedly more friendly towards me since the Episode.

It was Veena the outcaste Bhabhi who had found Ayi that fateful morning, unconscious on her bed. Veena was the youngest daughter-in-law of the house. She was married to Anil the cross-eyed photographer, the only brother who was not in the family business. It had been a love marriage. The women, in a body, disapproved of her. She was bold, she was disrespectful, she was not from our caste, she refused to cover her head when she saw Dada, she had a brother in America who was married to a fat white woman, she wore pants when she went out with her husband at night. Even the servants said mean things about her.

The outcaste Bhabhi had no children. She did not crowd around the kitchen like the other women, but kept to her room, doing “God knows what.” She came and went as she liked, without telling anyone.

“As though this is a hotel,” said badi Bhabhi bitterly.

But she had saved my mother. It was eleven in the morning: the children in school, the men at work. The office lunch was cooked and packed and sent out with the drivers, the women were bathed. Nani was in the prayer room, enfolded in flowers and incense. The house was quiet except for the rhythmic thud of the dhoka as Ramu washed the clothes in the last bathroom.

Jivibai, who lived in a hut outside the compound, took some of the credit. “I told Veena tai to go inside and check,” she would say, hovering around to interject her moment of glory every time the story was being freshly told. “Doors are always open at this time, I told her.”

Jivibai had been working for the family since Ayi and the aunts were young. Her youngest son, Ratan, had taught me to bicycle, running behind me as I wobbled round and round the house. Jivibai came in the morning to mop and sweep the house. When she found Ayi's door closed that day, she asked Veena to go in and check if Ayi wanted the room cleaned.

Veena found my ayi lying on her back, her breathing shallow and labored. Veena first called to her, and when she did not stir, went up to the bed and touched her, and then tried to shake her awake. She said nothing to Jivibai waiting outside. She did not call majli Bhabhi, who was in the kitchen; she did not call Nani, who was praying. She marched straight to the phone in the front room and called her mother, a lady doctor with a thriving dispensary at Makani Manor, who instructed her assistant to call for an ambulance and then came charging into the house, her stethoscope around her neck.

“You should at least have told us,” chided badi Bhabhi later when Veena was being lauded as a heroine.

“She was unconscious. I knew there was not time to waste,” she retorted dismissively. She became, if anything, more arrogant. The women now began to talk incessantly about her.

“As though we would have wasted any time,” complained badi Bhabhi to each sister in turn. “We could have called Dr. Dhandekar. He is right here, and he is, after all, our family doctor. Why get her mother involved? You know she will gossip.”

Everyone tutted and tsked. Except for Tai. “She saved my sister's life,” she said firmly to them. “Both she and her mother.”

Tai marched into Veena's room and hugged her. “Dada and I are going to meet your mother this evening. To thank her also,” she said with tears in her eyes.

I looked wanly up at Veena's long, pale face in front of me. I felt as if there were a steel band around my head. I realized that I had smoked too much dope last night. I did not want to talk or listen to Veena. But then I felt a rush of gratitude. She had saved Ayi's life, that was for sure. Ayi had gotten her hands on a stash of sleeping pills, no one knew from where, and then taken them all that morning. The dose was large enough to kill her. It had been a question of timing. I could imagine how the two bumbling Bhabis would have skittered around and called all the servants, and then perhaps their husbands in the office, and then the incompetent family doctor. They could have wasted hours.

“I am so glad it was you who found her,” I said.

“They wanted me to call that old doddering doctor of theirs. He gives saline injections to the servants for everything and then charges them 20 rupees for a shot. They are so backward,” she said.

Veena had been married for five years. She had recognized me as a fellow outsider from the beginning and would call me to her room sometimes to talk. “Why do you wear only these chudidars? You should wear pants to college,” she would say. “After you get married, you won't get a chance.” She had even offered me her pants. In those days, I had been withdrawn from her, afraid that I would be seen as being in her camp if I was observed chatting with her.

“It was the best thing you did, calling your mother,” I said. She took that as a sign that she could now unburden herself to me.

She launched into a litany of hurts and backward thoughts and deeds committed against her by my family. Everything started with an emphatic “they.”

“
They
think that I am defective because I have no children,” she said. “As though I am a toy or something. But wait, I'm going to show them.”

Jivibai came in to inform me that khichdi had been made especially for me, and the Bhabhis had asked if I wanted to come to the kitchen to eat.

“Can't you see she is sick? Bring it here on a tray,” said Veena, imperiously. I cringed. She was always exceedingly short and rude with servants. Jivibai walked away muttering loudly. “Ordering this and ordering that all the time. And who is going to clean up after? They need to get a special maid just for that memsaab . . .” until her voice faded away.

“Want a cigarette?” she asked with a conspiratorial wink.

I had heard rumors that she often smelled of cigarettes. I eyed her tentatively. Perhaps she had even smoked dope. Should I hint at it?

Good thing I didn't. “Your friends last night, be careful. They looked like druggists,” she said, leaning towards the bed. “
They
don't know about these things. But I have been around. I can see the signs.”

“I don't think I can smoke now,” I said. “I feel too sick. But another time.”

“Come anytime. I always have some in my room,” she said, and left.

I felt sorry for her. Unless she produced some golden sons quite soon, she would remain on the bottom layer of the food chain forever. This was a part of the Hindu Joint Family law, unwritten but sacrosanct. At its center was the great divide between being a daughter and a daughter-in-law.

Daughters were raised on malai and rosewater, loved and nurtured and trained to be sweet and soft and pliant. They were to be led tenderly to the great crossing before they turned twenty. On the other side, as daughters-in-law, they must eat dirt for the first ten years. They must be prepared for a life of criticism and scrutiny and acts of random cruelty.

It was one of the mysteries of womanly life: how at least 88.8 percent of women forgot the bitter dirt they were fed in a household of strangers and started feeding it once again to the wives of their young sons. Perhaps it's a Darwinian thing, I thought once, when I was stoned. Survival of the fittest. Break those lumps of clay when they first enter the house; only then can they become matriarchs. Keep your son in your hand, and only then will he be good to you when you are an old widow. No matter if his wife will hate you for life, just as you hate your husband's mother. Like an intricate group dance, I saw them all, the women of the house doing Scottish dancing in the chowk. In saris, of course. It was almost impossible to imagine all their immense lumpy bodies in kilts.

A woman could rise to the top in her forties. But only if all the “ifs” fell into place. If she had a good marriage with a strong man, if she had borne a good son, she could be forceful by forty. And if she was clever and political, she could become a matriarch at fifty.

I didn't see how poor Veena could get there. I could not see how I could ever get there. For me, there was even less hope. I could end up like the spinster aunts with polio and the impoverished widows in white saris living frugally on the outer edge of the family, peeling potatoes and minding the red chilies drying on the roof. Either timid or bitter. There was nothing else. No Pin, maybe no Ayi, even. No children, no good man by my side.

I sobbed into my pillow with self-pity for the entire afternoon.

I wobbled to the bathroom at three, while the house was in its afternoon coma. The Bhabhis were resting in their bedrooms behind closed doors, the servants were snoring on their pallets in the corridor behind the kitchen. I had a long bath, and creamed and composed my face to a modicum of acceptability, though my eyelids were like powder puffs from all the weeping. I tied my hair in a tight, high knot. My face felt like an open sore. “Back in the days of the blot,” I said to the mirror, my heart lying broken at my feet.

Padmaja, my perfectly superior Timmins cousin, bustled in at four brandishing the
Evening News.
I was playing carom with majli Bhabhi's daughter.

“Charu, Charu, did you know all this?” Padmaja called as soon as she had removed her slippers. Her children scrambled out of the car with their schoolbags. She ordered her daughter to take my place at the carom board and beckoned me into the kitchen. The house was bustling again, the children coming back from school, the Bhabhis having their evening tea.

It was on the front page, bottom left.

FOUL PLAY IN GIRLS' BOARDING SCHOOL

The body of Miss Moira Prince, a teacher at Miss Timmins' School for Girls in Panchgani, was discovered at the bottom of table-land cliffs on the 28th of August. The principal of the school, Miss Shirley Nelson, is being held for her murder.

Foul play was suspected when the 27-year-old British woman was found under the cliffs with a broken neck. The local police initially arrested Shankar Tamde, a servant from the school who was at the scene of the crime. He was being held without bail.

Events have now taken a more shocking turn, in the light of recently unearthed facts. The young woman died shortly after she received a letter which revealed that the school's longtime principal, Miss Shirley Nelson, 46, a British citizen and a member of the Scottish Presbyterian Mission, was in fact her mother. As an unwed mother, she had given the young girl up for adoption at birth. It appears that no one in the school, not even the deceased, had been aware of this relationship.