Miss Timmins' School for Girls (23 page)

Students at the school have recently revealed that on the night of the murder, Moira Prince had gone into the principal's room, from whence loud arguments and shouts were said to ensue. Subsequently, both Prince and Nelson were spotted on the top of the table-land cliffs by a group of three students.

“Once we knew that she had been at the scene of the crime, our suspicions became more pronounced,” said Inspector Dhananjay Wagle, head of the Panchgani police. Nelson has now been detained for questioning. Because of her position and nationality, she is being held in Vai Hospital. “It would not seem right to put her in lockup with the common criminal elements,” said Inspector Wagle.

“Santosh called me from the office. I picked up the evening paper on the way back from the children's school. Look, my hands are still cold. I am in shock,” Padmaja was in a state of barely controlled hysteria. “And anyway, who was this Moira Prince? Did you know her?”

And so I began to dole out the truth. I was stingy at first, clutching at the facts, hoarding my nuggets of information like the Timmins girls hoarded their tuck. I still thought of it as my own private truth.

Majli Bhabhi was making up fruit plates for the children and guests. She placed an expertly sliced apple in a steel plate between us. I bit into a sliver, tart and crisp. I still saw the truth as round and finite, something I could cut into discrete little slices with a sharp knife.

“Yes,” I told Padmaja tersely, “I knew her. She lived in Sunbeam. But I did not know she was Nelson's daughter. No one knew. Not even Hendy.” And then I made a dramatic exit. I ran out of the kitchen with tears clutching at my throat.

“What's the matter with
her
?” I heard Padmaja's voice floating up from behind me. I wanted to run to my bed. But I ran into the bathroom and pretended to throw up instead.

Last night and this morning I had been thinking only of Pin. Of her longing face when she said,
Only your very own people
. I had picked what pertained most to me in the story—the gap between her running out of Sunbeam with the letter in her pocket and the flinging of the letter at Nelson. The hole in the evening that belonged to me. I thought only of how I had betrayed her while she sat in my room with the letter in the pocket of the jeans lying crumpled near my desk. I had sent her to her death.

Reading the newspaper report with Padmaja that afternoon was when the ghastly, ghastly truth came crashing down upon my head and nearly never left.

Nelson was in for murder, and I alone knew she was innocent. I might have to jump into the fire myself to save her.

Twenty-three

Park Benches

T
he next morning, I decided to go to Panchgani. I told Baba, who was staying in the spare bed in Ayi's hospital room. We sat on the park bench outside the hospital. The sky was purple. Baba and I were eating bananas that we had taken from the shelf in the metal nightstand in Ayi's hospital room. The bananas had gone too ripe, you could smell them as you entered the room, and so we took them out to the park to eat. We sat on a gray granite bench that had been donated by Babubhai Sanghvi to the memory of his loving wife Parvati.

This is the rule of park benches and drinking fountains at train stations, hospitals, and nursing homes across the country. They must be dedicated
to
the memory of a loving wife and mother, or they must be
in
loving memory of a husband and father. The good wife is loving, the good husband loved. No respectable park bench could dare be dedicated to the memory of a loving husband. What would we say for Ayi? Loving wife, mother, daughter, sister. Everyone wanted her love. The bench would be effusive. But at least it would be respectable. Unlike mine.

I had a copy of the previous day's
Evening News
. Of course, Baba had read it. Everyone had. But I read it out to him again. I told Baba for the first time on the bench that evening that the dead girl had been my friend. I started sobbing as I told him how she was my first real friend, and now she was dead. Baba put his arm around me. He pulled out the big white handkerchief he kept always in his back pocket and dried my eyes. Blow your nose, he said, holding the handkerchief to my nose just like he used to when I was young and had a cold. And so I started crying again. It felt good, to be sobbing my heart out.

We sat silently, staring at distant mountains. Baba plucked a leaf and rolled it around absently. Then he held it to his right eye and squinted into it. Suddenly, I saw him in his uniform looking out at foam-flecked seas. I forgot so often that my father was once a sailor and had a sea bobbing inside him.

“I am sorry,” he said, still looking at the mountains through his leaf telescope. “I am sorry I have led you to a life seen through a tunnel.”

He passed the leaf to me. “See,” he said, “how little you can see of the mountains like this? This is the world I have shown you.”

You wait for something all your life, but when you know it is coming, you feel almost nothing. I knew I must be quiet. I knew the story was coming now, unasked.

“Your ayi and I used to wonder when you should be told. We always meant to tell you. But of course it became harder as more time passed. Now is as good a time as any, I suppose. Now there is no purpose in keeping my past hanging over your head. It should have been upon my head alone. That is what I thought at the time, when I bowed out.”

His voice was detached, as though he had practiced this many times on sleepless nights.

“I do not excuse myself, you must understand that. But in my defense, I will say this. I had reasoned that I retreated to protect you both.”

My mind was as still as a pond, waiting.

“But it was a mistake,” he said. “I did not even know, Charu. I did not even know that your ayi was as unhappy as I was. I was afraid of losing her. And you. That was the bottom line.”

He talked in a quiet, even voice, every syllable of every word pronounced in full. It was how he always talked. He had taught himself English from reading books, he told us often. “I am an autodidactic,” he said proudly. He had learned his accent by listening to the officers talk when he first joined the navy, a boy from a small town along the Konkan coast. His relatives were landowning farmers. We did not meet them very often.

His tone was the same, the way he talked was the same, but the sound inside the words was different. I heard a trickle of feeling bubbling up at the bottom of a drying well. We did not look at each other. We did not talk to each other. He was talking to the mountains, and the mountains were echoing his words back to me.

“You see, I rose so fast up the ladder, I became ADC to the Admiral at a young age. He became like a father to me. When I was married and your ayi and I went to the navy parties, everyone would look at me. They envied me, and why shouldn't they? I was a favorite, and your ayi was the most beautiful woman in the world. We were such a handsome couple in those days. Sometimes I would feel that the entire room held its breath when we walked in.

“You know what I loved first about her? Her eyes, her fair skin, her dimples, everyone admired those. But I loved the way she carried herself. Your grandfather had invited me to dinner in Bombay, and we were having a drink when she walked in. She had perfect aplomb. I knew she would always walk upright. I could not believe my luck.”

The image popped out, unbidden, of Ayi stooped over, being led to the bathroom.

“I know it is not a charitable thought, Charu, but I can't help thinking it was her revenge. Now the whole world will say how unhappy she must have been with me. All these years, not a word of recrimination, and then, suicide, just like that. She should have nagged and wept like other disappointed wives. I could have lived with that. But this—this slap in the face.”

Baba's voice became uneven, as did his breathing. This was not part of what he had practiced telling me. His chest heaved.

Don't cry, Baba, please, please don't cry, I thought, digging my nails into my palms. That will be the last straw. Mothers cry, lovers can cry, but fathers don't cry, except perhaps during death in the family. That is just how it is, and I don't care what they say in women's lib.

Thankfully, Baba regained control.

“I suppose I am to blame,” he said. “I was busy containing my bitterness. I left her to take care of the happiness department. And no family can survive without that.” A small yellow butterfly fluttered around us with gay abandon.

Baba, I wanted to say, cut it to the bone. Tell me what horrible crime you committed. I was impatient, dismissive even, as I had been all my life with Baba. But then I felt the stab of my own sins and betrayals, and realized how hard it would be to tell them to my parents.

Finally, Baba took up the thread. “I was on top of the world,” he said. “I used to go to the Admiral's flat every so often. It was such a beautiful flat, Charu. I used to think, my family will live in a flat just like this when I am admiral. But there was a lot of jealousy in those days. They poisoned the Admiral's mind. He turned against me and helped to frame me.”

“But he loved you,” I said, remembering how much our lives had been lived in the glow of the Admiral's lamp.
Even the Admiral thought so
, or
What would the Admiral say
, or
Today the Admiral said
—these were the words of our household. Everytime we went to meet him, I was dressed and admonished, and my mother carried a steel box carefully tied with a snow-white cloth containing her homemade amti, which the great man professed to love.

He always pinched my cheek, smiled at my mother, and said, “Ah, my favorite dish from my favorite navy wife.” He was tall and fat and had a mustache. His name was Bajaj. I was instructed to call him uncle, though I never actually spoke to him.

After we went to Indore, the admiralisms died away, but that was no surprise to me, since our whole past life had been cast out. I had no inkling that the Admiral himself had played a role in my father's fall.

“But how could he, Baba, suddenly? I mean, how could he turn against you just like that?”

Baba did not explain. He repeated himself, as though that would make it clear.

“There was a lot of jealousy,” he said. “They saw me rise too fast to the front. My contemporaries felt threatened, and so they decided to frame me. There was a large smuggling ring operating within the navy at that time. A lot of top officers were involved. This had just surfaced, and we had a sting operation under way. Only the Admiral and a few of us officers knew about it.

“Captain Puri posed as a whistle-blower. He gave testimony that I was the officer behind the whole ring. They cooked up all sorts of evidence. They had people come in and swear that we sent signals from our flat in Walkeshwar. They stated that I had used my position with the Admiral to jockey this posh flat—everyone called it the posh flat, though no one had even seen it—directly overlooking the water. And at nights, I turned lights on and off as a signal to the smuggling boats. They said we landed the goods on Governor's Beach, which was just below our building. For this, they had hard evidence. The goods were landed on that beach, you see, and so in this way they took truths only they knew and wove in untruths along the way to keep their story strong.

“It was hard to prove, because some of my colleagues came out and said that the allegations were untrue and the charges were trumped up.

“The Admiral stayed above it all. He was a smart man. Then, on Independence Day, he gave this famous address on All India Radio. It was a very patriotic speech, which was the fashion in those days. Full of duty and sacrifice. It was clever, I remember, a sort of echo of Nehru's Tryst with Destiny speech. He spoke about how proud he was of our navy, how honored he was that the people of India had given him this sacred trust of protecting our beloved country.

“Remember, we are still in 1959. A young country still determined to stay on high moral ground. The legacy of Gandhi and all that sort of thing.

“Anyway, after building up the patriotism with a theatrical cadence, the Admiral dropped his voice to a serious register. ‘My heart breaks,' he said, ‘to have to say this, but within the very institution that you have placed your lives for safe keeping, within our navy itself, among the men who hold the honor of our nation, the men entrusted with guarding our women and children, there is a ring of evildoers. Their crime is not a crime against a fellow human. It is a crime against the nation, and that is the greatest crime of all.' He made an oath to the people of India that he would find these criminals and purge them. ‘Bhayon aur behno,' he said. ‘Brothers and sisters, if I cannot purge these traitors from our navy, I will resign my post. I will lay down my arms and resign because I am not worthy of the sacred trust of my nation.' I seem to know it by heart, because snatches of it played all the time during news of my trial. He must have used the word sacred at least ten times.

“He was politically astute, of course. He didn't get to where he was for nothing. He stopped short of calling for a witch hunt. He refused to name any names. ‘The matter is still under investigation,' he told the press sternly. ‘And I will not obstruct the path of justice. You must remember that we are a democracy.'

“So from being a mid-level naval corruption matter—you know, smuggling of shampoos and cassette players—it turned into a morally charged national issue. “Everyone was watching. Overnight, my photograph was on the front page. “Is He the Traitor?” That was the headline in the
Blitz.”

I cringed for my poor parents. “But did he really believe that you were doing this? How could he?”

Baba shook his head sadly, but did not look at me.

“Captain Puri and the Admiral went to great lengths,” he continued. “They even resorted to planting foreign goods in a Chitnis Transport truck, you know. Said we used my father-in-law's trucks. Dada batted it all down, of course, probably paid off all sorts of people and called in some of his favors. Saw to it that the name Chitnis Transport did not appear again in the papers, though the dispute continued about the planted goods.

“In the end, they did not have enough conclusive evidence. I was found not guilty by the court-martial. But it had all gotten murky and emotionally charged. And then your mother lost the child. We knew you were all we had. We decided to take you away and start again.”

I turned and faced him. He was fifty-seven years old, but he looked older, he had a shriveled air. I could not imagine him as an admiral. I recoiled from him. I decided to tell him nothing of my guest appearance—for that was how I now saw it—on the fateful night of Pin's death. Many times in my life I have put myself on that spot on the park bench and wondered why I did not even hint to Baba that I had a hand in there. It was a snap decision, composed in equal parts of cowardice, caution, and concern, I suppose. Or a deceitful nature, inherited no doubt, from the father.

“I need to go to Panchgani for one or two days Baba,” I said. “I need to meet friends and teachers after this tragedy.”

“It is a difficult time for you, beta,” he said. “Go ahead. We will hold the fort down.”